Consonants

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 568.

Vowels

· /a:/ in father and /ar/ in car are backed, diphthongised, and sometimes rounded to /aə/ or /ɒə/.

· There is a class of words, with a historical “short a” vowel, including plan, class, and bad, where the historical /æ/ is сhanged to an ingliding diphthong of the type /eə/ or even /ɪə/. Other words, such as plaque, clatter, and bat, retain a low-front /æ/, with the result that bad and bat have different vowels.

· /oʊ/ as in goat does not undergo fronting; instead, it remains /oʊ/. Similarly, /u:/ as in goose is not fronted and remains a back vowel /u:/ or /ʊu/. Some speakers have a separate phoneme /ɪu/ in words such as tune, news, duke. Thus, dew is always /dɪu/ and never /du:/.

· New York accent lacks most of the mergers before medial /r/ that many other modern American accents possess:

§ the vowels in furry /fɜri/ and hurry /hʌri/ are distinct;

§ words like orange, horrible, Florida and forest are pronounced /ɑrəndʒ/ and /fɑrəst/ with the same stressed vowel as pot, not with the same vowel as port as in much of the rest of the United States.

· One of the stereotypes of New York speech is the use of a front-rising diphthong in words with /ɜr/ (e.g., nurse). This stereotype is popularly represented in stock phrases like "toity toid" for thirty third. Items with /ɔɪ/ may on the contrary occur with /ɜr/ (e.g., /tɜrlət/ toilet). Younger New Yorkers (born since about 1950) are likely to use a rhotic /ɜr/ in bird even if they use non-rhotic pronunciations of beard, bared, bard, board, boor, and butter.

· The traditional New York accent is non-rhotic; in other words, the sound /ɹ/ does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. Thus, there is no /ɹ/ in words like park /pɒək/, or here /hɪə/. Non-rhotic speakers usually exhibit an intrusive or linking /r/, similar to other non-rhotic dialect speakers, e.g. Asia /ɹ/ and Africa or the idea /ɹ/ of it.

· /l/ in New York may be vocalised when it does not appear before a vowel (e.g., /sɛo/ sell, /mɪok/ milk).

· Alveolar consonants /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/ may be articulated with the tongue blade rather than the tip. This articulation may, in some cases, also involve affrication, producing /ts/ and /dz/. Also /t/ and /d/ are often pronounced with the tongue touching the teeth rather than the alveolar ridge (just above the teeth), as is typical in most varieties of English. With /t/, glottalisation is more common in New York speech than in other American dialects, appearing, for example, before syllabic /l/ (e.g., bottle /bɑʔl̩/.

· The speech of some New Yorkers shows /ŋg/ as a variant of /ŋ/. This variant is another salient stereotype of the New York accent and is commonly mocked with Long Island being pronounced /lɔŋgaɪlənd/ popularly written, “Lawn Guyland” or “Lung Guylin”.

· New Yorkers typically do not allow /j/ to be preceded by /h/; this gives pronunciations like /jumən/ and /judʒ/ for human and huge.