Tawk to a young New Yawkuh dese days and de foist ting you may notice is dat he aw she don't tawk like dis no maw.
Although New Yorkers' emphatic, finger-in-the-chest style of talking is alive and well, the oi of Toidy-Toid Street, the er of Erster Bar and the dises, dems and doses of legend have gone the way of Automats, Ebbets Field and American-born taxi drivers.
New Yawk Tawk at its purest persists in the city's few white ethnic enclaves, among older New Yorkers, and in movies about the mob and television shows about detectives. But on the playgrounds and in the offices of daily New York life, the pungent dialect that brands New Yorkers in the popular American imagination seems to be fading into history.
In fact, just as California claimed the Dodgers, the Giants and the "Tonight" show, it has also grabbed the tongues of many middle-class New Yorkers. Across the country, the regional dialects of many other educated Americans, in this increasingly mobile and television-saturated society, are also becoming muted. Creeping Gumbelism
"We all sound like TV announcers," said William Stewart, a sociolinguist who teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. "West Coast norms have taken over the whole country."
But no city's identity cleaves so closely to its dialect as that of New York. And as the accent fades, the question of what is replacing it -- if anything beyond a group of ethnically Balkanized dialects -- goes to the heart of New York City's changing persona.
As New York City increasingly becomes a multiracial city, with large numbers of new immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia, it is only natural that a language shaped for decades by Irish, Italian and Eastern European settlers should change. The changes are evolving and difficult to define. But an immigrant child looking for linguistic role models at a public school is more likely to meet American-born children speaking variations of black or Puerto Rican English than the New Yawkese of yore, or yaw.
"Certainly, the Yiddishisms that were part of my dialect as a child have disappeared among the Puerto Ricans on the East Harlem block I'm studying," said Ana Celia Zentella, a linguist at Hunter College. "They all say, 'Yo!' and 'What's up?' but they wouldn't know words like shmatte and shiksa and oy gevalt and oy vay."
Christopher Lockner, 26, a counterman at the Pastrami King in Kew Gardens, Queens, prides himself on being a speaker of genuine New Yorkese. "I'll put it to you this way -- we are a dying breed," he said. "I got a 7-year-old brothuh who has no accent whatsoevuh. The kid's great, there's nothing wrong with him, but it's like he talks more laid-back, like his mouth is easier on the words."
Certainly traces of the dialect spoken by Mr. Lockner can still be found in every neighborhood of the city and among all ethnic and racial groups. In some instances, the purest New Yawk tawk has just moved to the suburbs, to Long Island and the Oranges in New Jersey. But linguists say it is unlikely to find a stable home there: once a New Yorker becomes upwardly mobile, his accent tends to fade with time, self-consciousness and outside influences.
Some, however, believe that police officers will keep the language alive. They seem to wear the tawk as a badge of identity.
The New York accent, variously called Bowery Dialect, Brooklynese and New Yorkese, has always been a point of both pride and shame. On the one hand, it was considered unrefined, something to be erased through education. On the other, it was gloried in, a code that linked New Yorkers in colorful communication that was both common and exclusive. Barrier to Advancement
But many older New Yorkers, including such expressive types as Henny Youngman and Edward I. Koch, assert that they do not speak the dialect or that it has never existed outside Jimmy Durante movies.
At the Friar's Club in Manhattan recently, Mr. Youngman declared of the New York dialect: "There was never such a thing." (A nearby diner joked, "Take his accent, puhleez!")
