In the pilot episode of The West Wing, conservative activist Mary Marsh disparages Josh Lyman’s “New York sense of humor,” and Toby Ziegler interrupts in a moment to say, “She meant Jewish.”
The cultural values embedded in that exchange and the way they reflect the way Americans talk and think, come through plainly in E.J. White’s You Talkin’ to Me? The Unruly History of New York English (Oxford University Press, 288 pages, $19.95).
In many countries, the city at the center of commerce and culture sets the nation’s standard dialect, but in the United States the standard spoken English is the English of the Midwest, of the provinces, not of New York City.
It was not always so. For the first half of the twentieth century, New York “General American,” with Boston and London elements, also called the “New York Dainty,” was prestige speech. It was, as linguists say, non-rhotic, with the letter r not pronounced unless it is followed by a vowel. Think of Franklin Roosevelt telling the nation, “The only thing we have to feah, is feah itself.” (Southern English is also non-rhotic.)
How the rhotic speech of the Midwest and West came to be dominant in the twentieth century has a number of strands, many related to New York and how Americans think of New York.
For example, Mr. White explains that in the early part of the century the heads of the Ivy League schools in the Northeast became disturbed by the large number of Jewish students from the New York area qualifying for admission. They began actively recruiting in the Midwest, because there were to be found the “true Americans,” white and Protestant. In time those students numbered enough to influence how people spoke at the prestige schools, and one aim of prestige schools is the manufacture of alumni who speak the prestige dialect and are therefore identifiable as prestigious.
Broadcasters also recruited widely from the Midwest —“Murrow’s boys”— and their voices on radio and television influenced what we now think of as the genuine American accent.
The way New York is viewed has a lot to do with its having been a welcoming place for immigrants, people scorned by the rest of the country: the Irish, the Italians, Eastern European Jews, blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans. “Living in a city in which a majority of the population belongs to ethnic minority groups,” Mr. White writes, “has made New Yorkers more comfortable with ethnic diversity and ‘ethnic succession’ (that is, the rise of new ethnic minorities) than the inhabitants of many other American cities.”
That in turn gave rise to those “New York values” which Mr. White finds in the popular music that New York has contributed to the national songbook. “New York meant immigrants, outsiders, and entrepreneurs, and those figures not only observed the world of insiders as intimately as only an outsider can, but also endowed their songs with the consummate New York values: irony, cosmopolitanism, and the founding American value by which members of different communities—and different language, different faiths, different musical styles—come together to create a richer and more various whole. E pluribus unum.”
The suspicion and outright hostility that New York arouses reflects our national psyche, in which we have constructed an urban Hamiltonian commercial nation requiring corporations, international financial institutions, and an elaborate governmental apparatus, while pretending that we are all rural, small-government Jeffersonian farmers. Just simple white Protestant country people.
So if you grow up “tawking Noo Yawk,” life in the United States presents you with some interesting choices. The rest of the country, in film and television, typically sees New Yorkers (like Southerners) in two roles: criminals and buffoons. Depending on what you want to do and how you want to be seen, you may attempt to “clean up” your native speech by learning to do Standard Midwestern. (That would be code-switching.)
Or you may choose to retain your native speech defiantly, your local accent cementing your local identity, turning a stigmatized speech into “covert prestige.”
New York speech is like New York, is like America: it is what you can make of it.