Hello First off I m going to say you are a sociolinguist and I am not I have respect for what you do Hell I m thinking about going in that direction myself Feel free to challenge any of my edits Just keep in mind that I might argue with you I have a tendency to do that if you haven t noticed Sometimes I just get pissed off I m still having a difficult time grasping the importance of reliable sources on wikipedia You could write something like Pizza Hut serves breadsticks and if you couldn t find a source for that information it can be removed Real life isn t like that That s why I have trouble when people ask me to find sources that say the sky is blue Enough digressing I like the dialect articles on wikipedia to include as much information as possible As you probably know as time goes on the New York dialect is becoming more mild Many young whites don t even have non rhoticity in their speech The near monophthongal o and u thing I was referring to was probably inaccurate A better way of describing it would probably be that the nuclei of o and u are significantly less fronted than in many American accents like in the Boston accent You know like when a Mafia member with a stereotypical New York accent says How ya doin or I got ta go But unfortunately you know doesn t cut it on wikipedia I imagine and I m sure you ll agree that this is more of a conservative trait I highly doubt any young white speakers would pronounce those vowel sounds in that way unless it were in a jocular manner however you might here it in the speech of older whites That whole Vowels and Diphthongs thing was just a stupid mistake I wasn t thinking when I did that I am well aware that diphthongs are made up of vowels but I just tend to think of them as separate