Native New Yorker and film-maker sets out to chronicle the many accents of New York
Hollywood taught the world what a New Yorker sounds like. The flattened vowels, the dropped r, the delivery that arrives slightly before you are ready for it: audiences in Manila and Manchester can do a passable imitation without ever having set foot in Queens. What most of them do not know is that the accent they are imitating is fading at home.
Heather Quinlan, a native New Yorker and film-maker, is trying to get it on tape before it goes. Her first documentary, If These Knishes Could Talk, is part comic banter and part serious inquiry, and it sets out to record the full variety of the city's speech while examining how that speech has changed as the city changed around it.
Two grandfathers, one film
The project began somewhere personal. "I have one grandfather who was a speech teacher and another grandfather who was a truck driver, and both are New Yorkers. And I feel like this film kind of bridges the gap between those two worlds a little bit," Quinlan explains.
That pairing is the whole argument of the film compressed into a sentence. One grandfather made his living correcting the way people spoke. The other made his living in a cab, speaking however he liked. Both were New York, and the city has been arguing about which of them to be for a century.
"It's a bit of a way of honouring them," she adds. "I miss hearing their accents. So it's sort of a way of preserving what I can of that speech before it goes away completely."
Labov, and the accent that came from London
Linguists spent decades stuck on the question of whether a city's accent could be defined at all, given how much it varies street by street and speaker by speaker. Professor William Labov, the leading sociolinguist working on New York dialects, went ahead and defined it.
His conclusion about its origins is the sort of fact that stops a conversation. According to Labov, the new york accent originates from London. The dropped r that sounds so unmistakably local is an English import, carried across the Atlantic and preserved in a city that never bothered to give it back.
Labov made his name with fieldwork that has become a standard exercise in sociolinguistics: he walked into department stores at different price points and asked staff a question whose answer forced them to say "fourth floor", then listened to whether they pronounced the r. The cheaper the store, the more r-less the speech. Class was audible.
What is actually disappearing
Accents do not vanish evenly. They erode in patterns, and the New York erosion follows a familiar shape:
- The strongest features survive longest in older speakers and in the outer boroughs
- Young professionals sand down the most marked features, keeping enough to signal where they are from
- The brooklyn accent of the popular imagination retreats as the neighbourhoods that carried it are priced out and replaced
- Newcomers bring their own speech, and the city's sound becomes an average of everywhere rather than a product of somewhere
Gentrification is a linguistic event as much as an economic one. When a working-class neighbourhood turns over, the accent that grew there does not move to the suburbs intact. It thins out across a dozen destinations and stops being reinforced by everyone else on the block.
There was never just one
The idea of a single New York voice is a Hollywood convenience. The city has always held several, and they mapped onto arrival and geography rather than onto the five boroughs as a block. Italian and Jewish immigrant speech shaped different corners of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. The Bronx developed its own rhythm. African American speech in Harlem carries a history that has nothing to do with London and everything to do with the Great Migration. Puerto Rican and Dominican New York added another layer entirely, and the young speakers of it move between languages inside a single sentence.
Any honest attempt to record the city's regional accents has to hold all of that at once, which is a much larger film than the one the phrase "New York accent" suggests.
The shame problem
There is another reason the accent is receding, and it is less comfortable. New Yorkers have been told for generations that they sound uneducated. Quinlan's speech-teacher grandfather was in the business of fixing exactly that impression. The market for accent reduction coaching exists because people believe, often correctly, that a strong regional accent will cost them a job, a client or a degree of respect.
So speakers file it down, and their children never acquire it. This is how english dialects die: not through prohibition, but through a million small acts of self-editing by people who would rather be taken seriously.
Why it matters to get it on tape
Documentary is a blunt instrument for this kind of work, but it has one advantage over the linguistics literature. It captures people talking rather than data about people talking, and it keeps the laugh, the pause and the aside that a phonetic transcription throws away.
Researchers doing the same job need the material in written form, which is why archives lean on transcription services to turn hours of recorded speech into something searchable. The transcript is where the analysis happens. The tape is where the person survives.
Quinlan is doing what oral historians have always done, applied to sound rather than story. The knishes in her title are a joke and also a thesis: the food, the neighbourhoods and the voices came from the same places, and they are leaving together.
What replaces them will be a New York that sounds like everywhere else, which is a strange fate for the loudest city in the world.