New York accent
The sound system of New York City English is popularly known as a New York accent. The New York metropolitan accent is one of the most recognizable accents of the United States, largely due to its popular stereotypes and portrayal in radio, film, and television. Several other common names exist for the accent based on specific location, such as a Bronx accent, Long Island accent, or Brooklyn accent, despite linguistic research failing to support such fine-grained designations. The following is an overview of the phonological structures and variations within the accent. Consonants. While the following consonantal  features are central to the common stereotype of a "New York City accent", they are not entirely ubiquitous in New York City. By contrast, the vocalic (vowel) variations in pronunciation as described above are far more typical of New York City area speakers than the consonantal features listed below, which carry a much greater stigma than do the dialect's vocalic variations: Variability. Social and geographic variation. Despite common references to a "Bronx accent", "Brooklyn accent", "Long Island accent", etc. no published study has pinpointed any specific features that vary internally within the dialect due to any specific geographic differences . Impressions that the dialect varies geographically are likely a byproduct of class or ethnic variation, and even some of these assumptions are losing credibility in light of accent convergences among the current younger generations of various ethnic backgrounds. Speakers from Queens born in the 1990s and later are showing a cot–caught merger more than in other boroughs, though this too is likely class- or ethnic-based (or perhaps even part of a larger trend in the whole city) rather than location-based. Increasing levels of the cot–caught merger among these Queens natives also appeared correlated with the fact  of their majority foreign parentage. A lowering of New York City's traditionally raised "caught" vowel is similarly taking place among younger residents of Manhattan's Lower East Side. This is seen most intensely among Western European (and Jewish) New Yorkers, fairly intensely among Latino and Asian New Yorkers, but not among African-American New Yorkers. Therefore, this reverses a trend documented amongst Western European Lower East Siders in the 20th century. Ethnic variation. The classic New York City dialect is centered on middle- and working-class European Americans, and this ethnic cluster now accounts for less than half of  the city's population, within which there are degrees of ethnic variation. The variations of New York City English are a result of the waves of immigrants that settled in the city, from the earliest settlement by the Dutch and English, followed in the 19th century by the Irish and western Europeans (typically of French, German, and Scandinavian descent). Over time these collective influences combined to give New York City its distinctive accent. Up until the immigration acts of 1920 and 1924 that restricted Asian as well as, Southern and Eastern European immigration, many Eastern European Jewish and Italian immigrants , as well as some later immigrants, arrived and further affected the region's speech. Sociolinguistic research, which is ongoing, suggests that some differentiation between these last groups' speech may exist. For example, William Labov found that Jewish-American Metro New Yorkers were more likely than other groups to use the closest variants of (meaning towards ) and perhaps fully released final stops (for example, pronunciation of "sent" as rather than the more General American or ), while Italian-American Metro New Yorkers were more likely than other groups to use the closest variants of (meaning towards ). Labov also discusses Irish originating features  being the most stigmatized. Still, Labov argues that these differences are relatively minor, more of degree than kind. All noted Euro-American groups share the relevant features. One area likely to reveal robust patterns is New York City English among Orthodox Jews, overlapping with Yeshiva English, which can exist outside of the New York City metropolitan area as well. Such features include certain Yiddish grammatical contact features, such as topicalizations of direct objects (e.g., constructions such as "Esther, she saw!" or "A dozen knishes, you bought!") or the general replacement of with , as stereotyped in the eye-dialect phrase "Lawn  Guyland" for "Long Island" ( rather than General American's ), strongly used among Lubavitcher Jews, but a stereotype for the New York City accent in general. There is also substantial use of Yiddish and particularly Hebrew words. African American Metro New Yorkers typically speak a New York variant of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), sharing the New York City accent's raised vowel. Many Latino New Yorkers speak a distinctly local ethnolect, New York Latino English, characterized by a varying mix of New York City English and AAVE features, along with some Spanish contact features. Asian American New Yorkers are not  shown by studies to have any phonetic features that are overwhelmingly distinct. Anglo-American or Euro-American New Yorkers alone have been traditionally documented as using a phonetic split of as follows: before voiceless consonants but elsewhere.