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Lived on LI most of my life and my accent is pure Nassau/Suffolk, not resembling my mother's pure Brooklynese accent all that much.
Where I live now, among the cowboys and Indians, I sound a little funny. I asked my plumber for his opinion, but Carlos was too polite to confirm this.
For example, the word "sure." Like the rest of you, I pronounce it like "shore," while people here say "shir." It took a bit of getting used to. I cannot pronounce LongIsland as two words.
Those of you down South: have you picked up a drawl?
The Downstate NY accents are hard to shake if you grew up with them and didn't shed them by early adulthood. My parents were from New England, and badgered their kids away from adopting those accents. It helped that our school system required foreign language instruction to start at age 9, which gives you a huge advantage in listening and adapting your speech. Within two years of going to college in central Virginia, I had shed the NY traces of my accent and picked up a Piedmont accent (so well that locals I worked with thought I was from NC's Piedmont region), then moved back to the region of my ancestors. I do tend to fall back into that Piedmont accent when I am immersed with my college-era friends, though. I never revert to NY accents as such, just words/usages like stoop, when I am with NY family. I have a certain fondness for those accents now that I never had growing up.
People who study such things have written that there is no real difference amongst accents in the NYC regions. Bronx, Brooklyn, NJ, LI, northern suburbs. It's all the same. For instance, your pronunciation of "sure" is the same as every where else in metro NYC.
People who study such things have written that there is no real difference amongst accents in the NYC regions. Bronx, Brooklyn, NJ, LI, northern suburbs. It's all the same. For instance, your pronunciation of "sure" is the same as every where else in metro NYC.
My mother pronounced "44" as fawdy faw." This is Brooklynese. I can and do pronounce the letter "R."
People who study such things have written that there is no real difference amongst accents in the NYC regions. Bronx, Brooklyn, NJ, LI, northern suburbs. It's all the same. For instance, your pronunciation of "sure" is the same as every where else in metro NYC.
Joey from Massapequa and Joey from Bensonhurst sounds the same to me.
I've been living in NC for fourteen years and still sound entirely NYC. I once met a linguistics major who explained that micro sounds form for us in infancy and permanently shape how we form sounds, words, etc. She said that you can alter an accent but have to work at doing so, it won't change naturally simply from exposure to something different.
I wear it as a badge of honor and work it into my rhetoric when presenting to an audience.
Have not picked up a drawl....but Raleigh is not an area with an overwhelming number of thick southern accents even among the natives. My boss is a Johnston County native (more rural area next to Wake County) and has no accent whatsoever.
I have picked up some southern-isms, as have my kids. I will say y'all on occasion, I've been known to say "ink pen" because southerners pronounce "pen" as "pin" so they need the qualifier LOL. I can't think of stuff my kids say but it's different than words I would use. Most people that I talk to on the phone think I'm from Pennsylvania, which is odd to say the least. But when I get a Goomba former LIer on the phone (there's a lot of them in Charlotte), I let it loose full force. My dad grew up in NYC but his dad was from Ireland so didn't have a heavy NY accent. Mom is from NH. So our accents were not that heavy to start. No one ever says anything here - there's people from all over the country and world so accents are just a "thing" here.
My co worker from upstate NY thinks I have a terrible NY accent LOL. Funny thing is she doesn't have that southern tier accent that's so damn grating.
For scholarly analysis of regional dialects, go to the lower right hand corner blowup of the NY metro region: American English Dialects
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