Buffalo English
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Buffalo English, sometimes colloquially referred to as Buffalonian, is the unique variety of English occasionally used in and around the U.S. city of Buffalo, New York. The distinctively Buffalonian accent is usually only strongly present in lower class speakers and is diminishing rapidly (as are most other city dialects, such as Baltimorese). The most commonly heard speech style and cadence nowadays heard in Buffalo is indistinguishable to most listeners from that spoken in any of the large cities along the Great Lakes. Most speakers of Buffalonian English perceive Standard American English as unaccented, though the reverse may not be true. The zone in which Buffalonian English is found is a region extending to Buffalo on the west, Rochester on the east, Lake Ontario to the north, and Bradford, Pennsylvania to the south and roughly corresponds to the radio and television broadcast market of Buffalo.
Technically, the variety is part of the Inland North dialect of American English, which spreads from Utica, New York to Wisconsin, and is therefore more like the local speech of Chicago and Michigan than New York City. However, as Buffalo and Buffalonians are in some respects tied geographically and culturally to Southern Ontario (taste in sports, the presence of no less than three Canadian television stations as "local" stations, and the fact of sharing a city boundary with Canada itself), there is a very slight tendency towards a Canadian-flavored English amongst Buffalonians of all classes. While outright Canadian raising is not strongly present in Buffalonian speech, the speaker of Buffalonian English tends to be predisposed to it and may switch to it effortlessly and unintentionally when traveling in Canada. Other minor Canadianisms, such as ending sentences with the interrogative "eh?" are present (occasionally as "hey?" in Buffalo). For example: "He was there, hey?"
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[edit] Key traits
The key phonological feature of Buffalo English is the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. The low back merger does not occur in Buffalo, so words like cot and caught remain distinct in pronunciation.
Speakers of stronger Buffalonian variants often employ "possessification", where an ad hoc genitive case is applied to business names. For example, speakers of thick Buffalonian will say they shop at "Kmart's," "Target's" or "Home Depot's;" have drug prescriptions filled at "Rite-Aid's" or "Eckerd's"; rent DVDs at "Blockbuster's" or "Hollywood's" (Hollywood Video); and eat lunch at "Burger King's," "Mighty Taco's," or "Outback's" (Outback Steakhouse).[1]
In contrast to New York City English, Buffalonian English is very strongly rhotic and not closely related to non-rhotic varieties.[1]
Another notable feature is the addition of the definite article to road and place names at what are perceived to be unnatural times by speakers of standard American English; this most often occurs with expressways. "The" precedes all expressways and main thoroughfares in the Buffalo area; e.g., "the 90," "the 290," "the 33," "the 190," "the 400." One would never hear "take 90 east" from a native Buffalonian. Instead, one would hear "take the 90 east."[1]
Buffalo is one of the easternmost cities that uses the word pop to refer to soft drinks: the isogloss between pop and soda is to the east of Rochester.
There are some well defined characteristics of Buffalo English that seem to be widespread across Western New York. They extend from Buffalo down to the southern parts of Cattaraugus, Allegany, and Chautauqua counties. They are also prominent in the Rochester area. These subtle differences in pronunciation are often easily recognizable by residents of New York state outside the Western New York area.
Frequently, "yous" and "yous guys" as an informal second person plural pronoun is used in Buffalonian.[1]
If a Buffalonian asks a question, and is unsure about the answer, he or she will often make a statement in the form of a question by emphasizing the last word and adding the sound "er" ("or", a truncated version of "or what?") at the end, drawing out the "r" sound and trailing off; e.g., "Did you wanna do that'errrr...?" or "Did you wanna' go'errrr...?"[citation needed]
Occasionally present, like in many Great Lakes cities, is the partial or complete devoicing of terminal 's' in many words. That is to say, terminal 's' is usually pronounced 'z' in American English; in Buffalonian, in fact, terminal 's' is occasionally pronounced 's'.[citation needed]
Another aspect of classical Buffalonian is the retention of the distinction between "wh" and "w" (as in which and witch or where and wear), with "wh" retaining some slight aspiration as /hw/.[citation needed] In most American dialects, this distinction has been eliminated.
Speakers unfamiliar with the specific Buffalo accent often perceive a speaker of Buffalonian English to be speaking Canadian English or the same Northern U.S. accent lampooned somewhat by the movie Fargo. Native Buffalonians, and in particular those in whom the Buffalonian accent was weaker, tend to rapidly lose their Buffalonian pronunciation, grammar, and cadence, when moving to a new region, allowing it to morph into standard American English, regardless of the local dialect.[citation needed]
A feature believed to have originated with Polish immigrants and then spreading to the region as a whole is "there" interjected after a noun or pronoun for emphasis, sometimes more than once in a sentence — "Go out and get us some crullers at Tim Hortons there"; "My sister there lives down in Hamburg there." The extreme example is the sort of stereotypical resident who supposedly describes the city's football team as "dem dere Bills dere."[1]
[edit] Speakers
Like most regional American accents, it becomes more pronounced in working-class speakers, and is rarely present except in a weak sense in middle- and upper-class speakers. For this reason, Buffalonian English is more densely present in the City of Buffalo, South Buffalo and in its once-industrial suburbs, such as Lackawanna and Cheektowaga. Buffalonian English is almost unknown in the historically white collar suburbs such as Amherst and the areas adjacent to the extremely large University at Buffalo. There are, perhaps, approximately 500,000 speakers of audibly Buffalonian English in the western counties of New York.
The area's large Polish-American population also has an impact on some speakers of that ethnic group, who in older generations spoke with at least a slight Polish accent even if they were native-born Americans and first-language English speakers. The phenomenon was once widespread enough that even today residents sometimes jocularly refer to Cheektowaga, a large suburb just east of the city with many Polish-Americans, as "Chickatavagus," a usage that even made an SCTV sketch.
