Philadelphia accent
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The Philadelphia accent is the accent of English spoken in Philadelphia and extending into Philadelphia's suburbs in the Delaware Valley and southern New Jersey. It is one of the best-studied dialects of American English due to the fact that Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania is the home institution of William Labov, one of the most productive American sociolinguists. Unlike the dialects found in much of the rest of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia accent shares several unusual features with the New York accent, although it is a distinct dialect region. The Philadelphia accent is, however, in most respects the same as the accents of Wilmington, Delaware and Baltimore, constituting what Labov describes as the Mid-Atlantic dialect region.
Actual Philadelphia accents are seldom heard nationally (Philadelphia natives who attain national prominence usually make an effort to tone down or eliminate distinctive pronunciations that would sound dissonant to non-natives). Movies and television shows set in the Philadelphia region generally make the mistake of imbuing the characters with a working class New York accent (specifically heard in Philly-set movies such as the Rocky series and A History of Violence) that is unlike how Philadelphians actually speak. A contrary example is the character of Lynn Sear (played by Toni Collette) in The Sixth Sense, who speaks with an accurate Philadelphia accent.
The use of geographically inaccurate accents is also true in movies and television programs set in Atlantic City (or any other region of South Jersey), where the characters are often imbued with a supposed "Joisey" accent, when in reality the New York-influenced dialect for New Jersey natives is almost always exclusive to the extreme northeastern region of the state nearest New York City. The dialect and accent for speakers in South Jersey is vastly similar to that of Philadelphians.
The precise realizations of features of the Philadelphia accent vary to some degree among different ethnic groups, social classes, and parts of the Philadelphia region. The general phonological features of the accent, however, are as follows:
- Philadelphia is resistant to the cot-caught merger because the vowel phoneme of words like caught, cloth, and dawn is raised to a high [ɔ], increasing its distance from the [ɑ] of cot. Philadelphia shares this feature with New York and southern New England.
- On is pronounced /ɔn/, so that, as in the South and Midland varieties of American English (and unlike New York and the northern U.S.) it rhymes with dawn rather than don.[citation needed]
- The /oʊ/ of goat and boat is fronted, so it is pronounced [ɞʊ], as in the Midland and South. /aʊ/ as in house and loud is fronted as well—sometimes even more extremely, reaching as far as [ɛɔ] for some speakers. (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 144, 237).
- As in New York English and Australian English, the phoneme /æ/ has split into two phonemes, so that Philadelphians have different vowels for example in mad and sad. Fewer words have the "tense" phoneme, /eə/ in Philadelphia than in New York City; for more details on both the Philadelphia and New York systems see phonemic æ-tensing in the Mid-Atlantic region.
- As in New York, Boston, and most accents of English outside North America, there is a three-way distinction between Mary, marry, and merry. However in Philadelphia some speakers have a merger of /ɛ/ and /ʌ/ before /r/ (the furry-ferry merger), so that merry is merged instead with Murray. Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006: 54) report that about one third of Philadelphia speakers have this merger, one third have a near-merger, and one third keep the two distinct.
- Unlike many of the urban areas of the eastern seaboard (Boston, Providence, New York, Richmond, Charleston), Philadelphia has never had non-rhoticity as a widespread feature among white speakers; however, there is some sporadic non-rhoticity found especially in South Philadelphia.
- Canadian raising occurs for /aɪ/ (as in price) but not for /aʊ/ (as in mouth) (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 114-15, 237-38).
- There is a (non-phonemic) split of /eɪ/ (face) so at the end of a word (for example, day) it has an open starting point and is similar to the [æɪ] found in Australian and New Zealand English, while in any other position (for example, date) it is pronounced more like [i] (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 237). Pairs of words which may be confused as a result of this development include eight and eat, snake and sneak, slave and sleeve.
- Back vowels preceding /r/ are raised: /ɔr/ as in tore is raised to the vicinity of [ur] and merges or comes close to merging with /ur/ as in tour. Behind it, /ɑr/ as in tar is raised to [ɔr].
- The word water is commonly pronounced /wʊdər/ (with the first syllable identical to the word wood).[citation needed]
- The interjection "yo," although in usage in the English language since the 19th Century, was popularized and possibly originated in Philadelphia dialect among Italian American and African American Philadelphians. Philadelphia natives are known to commonly use the interjection.
[edit] References
- Labov, Wiliam, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-016746-8.
