hans I love you these are the highlight of my day
Can I just add in that while it is non-rhotic, the Brooklyn accent also adds an r to the end of a word that ends in an a.
My grandmother, a contemporary of Steve Rogers, would have said, “Here’s a soder for your friend Marther; she’s down in the front of the theatah.”
I can tell when my mother has been talking to New Yorkers based on those rs that creep in at the end of words.
Other fun fact, I was in middle school before I learned what I had was eczema and not egszimmer.
Yes!! Hah, actually when I was writing up this post I was trying to figure out an example sentence to capture the beauty, but the best I could come up with was something convoluted like,
“I wenna da bodega on Toity Toid Street t’ get a quadda wadda, but dey wuz out so I hadda wait on line fer a soder.”
Also if anyone reads the Fraction Hawkeye comics, the accent is why they call him Hawgguy.
Not that anyone asked but Chicago accent is similar, except with flatter ahs (not aws, ahs. Their are 2very different sounds. Cot and caught sound fucking different ok??) and ours Rs are there.Okay, this made me laugh so hard! My real life accent (not a Brooklyn accent) is vowel shifty as a motherfucker, so tbh I can’t even hear the difference between caught and cot, much less pronounce it. I think I was literally 25 before someone told me most of the country doesn’t pronounce those two words (and pen and pin, etc etc) like they’re homophones.
Oh man, how did you know to ask about two things so near and dear to my heart? Is it my birthday? Is this a gift?
God, I love accents, and the Brooklyn accent is one of my favorites, definitely the best American accent. I pay very close attention to the way people speak - I mean, in general yeah as a writer I make it a habit to absorb as much as possible from the world around me, but I also just like listening to people, and for some reason the Brooklyn accent in particular hits me right in the feels.
The Brooklyn accent is musical. It dips up and down, it’s rhythmic. It’s too fast to really be a drawl, but I can see why some fics refer to it as such. It’s quintessential American, and it’s also the best way to sound super fucking pissed at someone. New Yorkers are the nicest people ever, and I will fight people over that, but we will also fight people instantly, which I guess proves my point? I’m defending kindness and good manners here okay.
It’s got a couple different key distinctive features: it’s non-rhotic, meaning it drops R’s from the end of words. It blurs up T’s and Th’s, making T’s sound more like D’s, and Th’s more like T’s. There’s not really a lot of words that are allowed to end in G’s: -ing verb’s are gonna come out like you forgot the end off it. There’s a particularly lovely quality to A sounds - the difference between cwafee (like a Boston accent) and caaawfee (ahh, Brooklyn) - which for my ear is what differentiates it from the Long Island and Jersey accents, who all share common roots. There’s a looseness to the mouth, in Brooklyn.
The other part of the Brooklyn accent is the manner that people speak, not just how it sounds when the words come out. You know how New Yorkers have a reputation for being pushy? I mean, look, we got shit to do, so maybe - but actually that impression comes across in how to listen like a polite New Yorker: by constantly interrupting:
In a really good New York conversation, more than one person is talking a lot of the time. Throughout the conversations I have taped and analyzed, New York listeners punctuate a speaker’s talk with comments, reactions, questions (often asking for the very information that is obviously about to come). None of this makes the New York speaker stop. On the contrary, he talks even more—louder, faster—and has even more fun, because he doesn’t feel he’s in the conversation alone. When a non-New Yorker stops talking at the first sign of participation from the New Yorker, he’s the one who’s creating the interruption, making a conversational bully out of a perfectly well-intentioned cooperative overlapper.
That rapid fire questions; the “Yeah, uh huh”s to show we get you; a visible, audible reaction to whatever you’re telling us: New Yorkers are active listeners in a very literal sense.
I also want to direct you over to Jimmy Cagney, because I’ll bet you real money that Sebastian Stan watched Cagney’s entire oeuvre for the thirty seconds he was allowed to have a Brooklyn accent in the Cap films:
Haha my favorite part is listening to Cagney grimly cling to his R’s, that the scene that starts from 1:52. Come on buddy, you can do it, I believe in you.
If anyone knows a hosting site that can handle 900mgs, I have a copy of Angels with Dirty Faces I can upload, for anyone who’s interested. It’s got all the greatest hits that should be required viewing for your pre-war Brooklyn street urchin fics, especially if they’re mob boss AUs. It’s got scrappy street punks sassing priests and smoking cigarettes, there’s a neighborhood tough who made good, the settings are nice and tenement-y looking, the accents are out of fucking control, and Cagney even rents a room on motherfucking Dock Street. (Side note: Cagney was also fluent in Yiddish, having learned it while he was growing up in the Lower East Side.)
Here’s a fun website to listen to a bunch of New Yorkers talk. I like this guy, who was born in 1946 and has a nice, softer version of the shouty videos posted above.
So I’m gonna make a separate post to answer your question about the Dodgers, because this one’s getting long and baseball’s sort of a New York animal in itself. Also I uh might have a few feelings about baseball such as I FUCKING LOVE BASEBALL so.