The idea of “Brooklynese” has fairly deep roots in New York City lore, going back more than a century.
“Representative John J. Fitzgerald, of Brooklyn, uses that peculiar Brooklynese dialect which corrupts such words as ‘saw’ and ‘law,’ making them ‘sawr’ and ‘lawr’; which ignores the ‘g’s’ at the end of words, and otherwise maltreats the English language as it is spoken by those who think they know,” reads a 1914 issue of Metropolitan Magazine, edited at the time by Theodore Roosevelt.
The first known usage of “Brooklynese,” according to linguist Kara Becker, can be traced to 1893, when it appeared in the satirical magazine Town Topics.
“It should be mentioned here that the people of Brooklyn talk Brooklynese. Brooklynese is a language that is a mixture of Bowery, Pittsburgh, and Zulu,” reads the article.
In the years since, Brooklynese — as personified by Barbra Streisand, Vinnie Barbarino and Andrew Dice Clay, among others — has been joined by other borough variants, in the Bronx and Queens, each apparently distinct from the other.
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“Queens is a very residential place,” reasons Andrea Caban, a voice and speech coach in her video tutorial, ‘How to do a Queens Accent.’ “It might not feel as like hard- edged as some of the other New York accents so, give it a shot.”
Brooklyn, meanwhile, has “a very urban sound,” according to Caban.”It's got a lot of power to it. You use emphasis with volume, and less with pitch variety,” while the Bronx has “a very fast accent, you get some New York flavors, and you also get some Spanish as a first language flavor too.”
But Becker, an associate professor at Reed College, has closely studied borough accents, and she is unequivocal on the matter.
“There are no borough accents,” she said. “There really is no linguistic evidence for it.”
She even co-authored a paper last year, with Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz of the College of William and Mary, “The Myth of the New York City Borough Accent: Evidence from Perception.”
While linguists have long rejected the borough accent, Becker and Newlin-Lukowicz bring data to their argument. They proved that New Yorkers themselves can’t make out the difference between Brooklynese and the sounds of other boroughs.
To do this, they created an audio quiz at NewYorkCityAccents.com, and invited the public to participate. Participants hear a series of clips and have to pick which borough the speaker comes from. The speakers included a custodian engineer with a high school degree from the Bronx born in 1968, a theater director from Brooklyn born in 1954 and a college graduate from Queens who works in marketing and was born in 1984.
Thousands of listeners took the quiz, including more than 600 who opted in to the research, and if you’re someone who strongly adheres to the notion of the borough accent, the results aren’t encouraging.
After hearing one particular clip, listeners overwhelmingly decided the guy was from Manhattan. This included 72 percent of native New Yorkers who took the quiz and 77 percent of non-native New Yorkers. The speaker wa's actually from Staten Island. That's the case with other clips too -- different voices, same mistake.
“At least for these samples we're giving the listeners, they're not getting it right,” said Becker.
Her work has been validated by other scholars.
“Yes, Kara Becker is absolutely right,” said Gregory Guy, a linguist at NYU.
“She's done more close, detailed analysis of the speech of New Yorkers than just about anybody else I know.”
Guy said New Yorkers' perception is based on a vague sense of social differences.
“Brooklyn is basically more working class. And Queens is a more middle class perception.”
Manhattan is essentially perceived as less working class, less accented. More elite. As it turns out, the elites have spent decades running away from the speech patterns of New York, whether dropping their r’s — saying “feah” instead of “fear” — or giving an emphatic “aww” sound to certain words, like “bought” or “coffee.” Think of Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy: “I'm walkin here!”
“It's people of higher social status who are leading the way in dropping these characteristics,” said Guy. “And that's true whether they're from Yonkers or Carroll Gardens or any part of the city.”
Why run from this accent? Because historically, the New York accent was stigmatized. But why was that? Given that this is the nation's capital of finance, media and culture, you'd think it would be the defining sound of America. Guy says it's because for centuries, New York was filled with people from different places. Far more than other American cities.
“So people from elsewhere in the country see New York City English as the English of a bunch of foreigners.”
Namely white foreigners: German, Irish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Jewish. It's this swirl of ethnicities that congealed into the stereotypical sound of New York, as heard across the five boroughs and in some of the suburbs, too. And now, sure enough, it's fading away.
But it's still alive and well at the home of Marty Markowitz, who for years served as Borough President of Brooklyn and its chief propagandist, known for bellowing phrases like “Fuhgeddaboutit!” at every opportunity.
He grew up in Crown Heights, and he's extremely proud of his Brooklyn roots — and accent.
“I'd be less than honest if I said folks didn't poke fun at it. But I never felt where it belittled me. Or that I was ‘inferiah.’”
Markowitz admits that he can't tell the difference between someone who grew up in Bensonhurst versus Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Yet, he insists that Brooklynese is a thing, regardless of what the linguists say. And he has a theory: He thinks of Brooklynese as sort of a 'mother accent' of the city that was adopted by others across the boroughs.
“Either through intermarriage. Or through work. I think we definitely overwhelmed their probably-incorrect diction,” he said.
He argued that Brooklynese spread to Queens by land, and into Staten Island by the Verrazzano.
“And then, where did they go? Like my sisters? New Jersey. Or as we used to say, ‘New Joisey!’ Although I never said ‘Joisey.’”
It all sounds perfectly reasonable — and also, exactly what a Brooklynite would say. But Markowitz is hardly sentimental: the sound of Brooklyn is changing, and will forever be in flux, much like the city itself.
Arun Venugopal is a reporter who focuses on issues of race and immigration at WNYC. You can follow him on Twitter at @arunNYC.
