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I don't think shows about Guidos are very representative of NYC as a whole. And even the Jersey Shore cast doesn't really have that over the top Andrew Dice Clay style accent from whar I remember.
No, you're right about Guidos, but it still shows that the NYC accent is not totally fading out. I've been saying this entire thread that the accent is lessening. But accents change all over the world all the time in every language. The NYC accent is changing by not sounding like the 1950s anymore, but there are extremely obvious tell tale signs of a NYC accent that everyone is entirely discarding here such as the accent for the words "horrible" and "Florida."
Also, though, not everyone on every one of those shows is a guido. They're typical young people from the Tri-State. The girls on the Double Shot at Love show are just some random girls from LI and NJ. The girls on The Challenge on MTV are just random girls from SI and LI. And for like the millionth time I can say it, every single young person I've met from Bay Ridge/Dyker Heights/Bensonhurst has a heavy accent and every single young person I'm friends with from North Jersey has some varying degree of accent from sounding like a stereotype to just the slight difference in vowel pronunciations as mentioned above. Just because you aren't meeting people like that doesn't mean the accent is totally dying out. It's lessening and changing, but there's still an entire generation growing up in the Tri-State with some varying degree of the accent and I really don't see it fading away entirely. Especially considering so many of the teachers in this area still have accents, so they're teaching future generations in public schools with their own deeper accents.
Stayed right off Times Square and toured throughout the city from Thursday night to Sunday. Rockefeller for the sunset Thursday night, saw To Kill a Mockingbird at Shubert Theatre, toured Central Park and on Saturday went by the 9/11 Memorial and watched part of Cubs-Reds (I'm a Cubs fan) at the "official" Cubs bar on the Lower East Side. My first time in Manhattan since 1982, when I was four, and her first in seven years. She loves visiting NYC.
You went to everything that's not NYC. Staying in Times Square you'll never encounter a local unless they're in their office and escaping right after work. Same with Rockefeller some locals work in office buildings by there, but they GTFO after work and go to real neighborhoods. That theater is in Times Square/Theater District so again, all tourists. Central Park attracts tons of tourists. The 9/11 Memorial is all tourists. You went to watch a game at an official bar for a Chicago sports team while playing another Midwest sports team.
You really went nowhere that local people would actually go to. Maybe somewhere Midwest transplants would go (the Cubs bar). But whenever I go out, I inevitably hear a strong NYC accent. My friends have accents. I have a slight one even though I wasn't born here but my family is from the Northeast generally. I know when I go to gay bars it's rare to hear one because most of the gays seem to be Midwest and Southern transplants, especially in Hell's Kitchen.
OK, so you asked me what we did in your city specifically so you could try to prove I was wrong?
I highly doubt we went the entire weekend without encountering locals, including servers, cab drivers, etc. When I visit Chicago, Houston, etc., I encounter far more people with accents native to their region than I did this weekend.
OK, so you asked me what we did in your city specifically so you could try to prove I was wrong?
I highly doubt we went the entire weekend without encountering locals, including servers, cab drivers, etc. When I visit Chicago, Houston, etc., I encounter far more people with accents native to their region than I did this weekend.
I asked because I was going to be surprised actually if you had gone to more local neighborhoods. The way you said it, I was under the impression you visited local neighborhoods and explored the boroughs and still didn't hear accents. That's why I asked.
Chicago is a transplant city for a lot of other Midwesterners. The generic Midwest accent is prevalent throughout Chicago. Houston gets a lot of Southerners, but some general American accents also. NYC gets transplants from all over the world, including the US. Those neighborhoods are not neighborhoods that locals live in. They're not neighborhoods frequented by locals. The servers in the restaurants are often transplants trying to get into acting. Cab drivers are often international immigrants. Chicago and Houston also don't get as much tourism as NYC, so you're not running into a lot of local people anywhere in the places you went. In this way, it's not that the accent is "fading" as the OP asked, it's that in transplant/tourist hot spots of NYC, the accent is less prevalent. In areas where transplants and tourists don't often live or go, the accent is still prevalent.
It's similar to how a lot of tourists in SF hang out only in Union Square and Fisherman's Wharf. Then they have this impression that everyone in SF is so well dressed and there are just all these Europeans that call SF home. In reality, though, they just were surrounded by all the other tourists because they were in neighborhoods that locals don't frequent.
You went to everything that's not NYC. Staying in Times Square you'll never encounter a local unless they're in their office and escaping right after work. Same with Rockefeller some locals work in office buildings by there, but they GTFO after work and go to real neighborhoods. That theater is in Times Square/Theater District so again, all tourists. Central Park attracts tons of tourists. The 9/11 Memorial is all tourists. You went to watch a game at an official bar for a Chicago sports team while playing another Midwest sports team.
You really went nowhere that local people would actually go to. Maybe somewhere Midwest transplants would go (the Cubs bar). But whenever I go out, I inevitably hear a strong NYC accent. My friends have accents. I have a slight one even though I wasn't born here but my family is from the Northeast generally. I know when I go to gay bars it's rare to hear one because most of the gays seem to be Midwest and Southern transplants, especially in Hell's Kitchen.
That's not exactly true because there would be all sorts of Native New Yorkers working in that area. Who do you tjink is working in all those Duane Reades? Plus many of the commuters there are from NYC or the surrounding area.
And tbe LES is a popular neighborhood for New Yorkers to hang out. I don't think people necessarily focus on the specific theme of the bar but rather the drink prices/vibe. My friend who has lived in Brooklyn his whole life goes to a 49ers themed bar in the East Village.
You went to everything that's not NYC. Staying in Times Square you'll never encounter a local unless they're in their office and escaping right after work. Same with Rockefeller some locals work in office buildings by there, but they GTFO after work and go to real neighborhoods. That theater is in Times Square/Theater District so again, all tourists. Central Park attracts tons of tourists. The 9/11 Memorial is all tourists. You went to watch a game at an official bar for a Chicago sports team while playing another Midwest sports team.
You really went nowhere that local people would actually go to. Maybe somewhere Midwest transplants would go (the Cubs bar). But whenever I go out, I inevitably hear a strong NYC accent. My friends have accents. I have a slight one even though I wasn't born here but my family is from the Northeast generally. I know when I go to gay bars it's rare to hear one because most of the gays seem to be Midwest and Southern transplants, especially in Hell's Kitchen.
That's not exactly true because there would be all sorts of Native New Yorkers working in that area. Who do you tjink is working in all those Duane Reades? Plus many of the commuters there are from NYC or the surrounding area.
And tbe LES is a popular neighborhood for New Yorkers to hang out. I don't think people necessarily focus on the specific theme of the bar but rather the drink prices/vibe. My friend who has lived in Brooklyn his whole life goes to a 49ers themed bar in the East Village.
That's not exactly true because there would be all sorts of Native New Yorkers working in that area. Who do you tjink is working in all those Duane Reades? Plus many of the commuters there are from NYC or the surrounding area.
And tbe LES is a popular neighborhood for New Yorkers to hang out. I don't think people necessarily focus on the specific theme of the bar but rather the drink prices/vibe. My friend who has lived in Brooklyn his whole life goes to a 49ers themed bar in the East Village.
That poster said they remarked about how few people with NY accents they heard. That, to me, makes it sound like they did hear some people with accents in the Duane Reades and driving in the trains and a couple bartenders here and there and some people on the streets. Just, overall, the people they heard on the streets and the servers in the restaurants did not have accents.
The commuters in Midtown are likely not talking to anyone while walking to/from their office and trains. The tourists, OTOH, are talking to each other while taking a (Sunday) stroll through Midtown at 5:15pm covering the entire width of a sidewalk on a Thursday afternoon and wondering why the New Yorkers are speed walking past them rudely.
Yes everyone hangs out in the LES, but if someone went specifically for a watch party between 2 Midwest teams, chances are the majority were from the Midwest. I also know people who regularly hang out at bars that are a specific team's home bar, but they normally do it on nights where there isn't a watch party. On watch party nights, the bars are often full of people supporting those respective teams, and the locals are either the minority are nonexistent.
That poster said they remarked about how few people with NY accents they heard. That, to me, makes it sound like they did hear some people with accents in the Duane Reades and driving in the trains and a couple bartenders here and there and some people on the streets. Just, overall, the people they heard on the streets and the servers in the restaurants did not have accents.
The commuters in Midtown are likely not talking to anyone while walking to/from their office and trains. The tourists, OTOH, are talking to each other while taking a (Sunday) stroll through Midtown at 5:15pm covering the entire width of a sidewalk on a Thursday afternoon and wondering why the New Yorkers are speed walking past them rudely.
Yes everyone hangs out in the LES, but if someone went specifically for a watch party between 2 Midwest teams, chances are the majority were from the Midwest. I also know people who regularly hang out at bars that are a specific team's home bar, but they normally do it on nights where there isn't a watch party. On watch party nights, the bars are often full of people supporting those respective teams, and the locals are either the minority are nonexistent.
The people who are working at Duane Reade and other service jobs in that area are mostly black and Hispanic, and do not sound like Andrew Dice Clay whether or not they're native New Yorkers. He said based off his idea of a stereotypical New York accent, which is probably along the lines of Andrew Dice Clay.
I think you're exaggerating how little New Yorkers would be in that general area (after 5PM at least). Maybe in the immediate vicinity of Times Square it's all tourists (and bums), but further away it becomes less tourist trap-y.
But if you have to go to Tottenville, Staten Island to hear a stereotypical NY accent, then it proves my original point.
Where I grew up (small town, all-white New England), an accent was a clear marker of what class you and your family came from. If you had that horrible sounding nasally accent associated with rural New England, you almost always came from a working class or poor background. Anybody from the middle class or higher simply had the generic American accent. As kids, we referred to it as the "redneck" or "white trash" accent, because that was the kind of people it was (fairly or unfairly) associated with.
When I lived in Philly, that accent also largely confined to born and raised, working class types who hadn't been much farther than the Jersey Shore. Working class black people also had a distinctly Philly accent, although it was different from the one predominant among white people. It was basically non-existent among the college-educated people in white collar professions, no matter what race they were.
I think regional stereotypes will basically be dead among the college-educated in the not-to-distant future because of the negative social connotations they carry.
I noticed that to me at least, distinct accents in the US are not that much of a thing.
I'm a native New Yorker, and nobody here talks like Andrew Dice Clay besides older, white, non-immigrant blue collar people. Even my Irish-American grandfather who was a cab driver and born in the 40s, never spoke with a stereotypical sounding New York accent unless it was tongue in cheek. Most white people have a generic American accent and most black people have the black Northeastern accent that is shared with North Jersey and New England. There are some small differences (regarding the former), such as us pronouncing coffee like "coffee", but other than that I hardly think we sound much different from Midwesterners or West Coast people. I'll post a recording of my voice later if anyone is interested.
Whenever I meet white people from the South, they almost never have Southern sounding accents unless they're from rural areas. Every white person I meet from the urban South has more of a generic American sounding accent.
Black people do seem to have regional accents still (black people from the Northeast sound much different from the South), however that may be fading too.
They'll only get stronger. I read a blog post years back by a linguist who wrote that essentially the more history a particular area has, the more the language develops and forks into different accents. In 200 years there may be a variety of California accents and Montana accents, etc.
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