Talk:New Jersey English

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New Jersey English is part of WikiProject New Jersey, an effort to create, expand, and improve New Jersey–related articles to Wikipedia feature-quality standard.

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[edit] Rationale

I have established this page, which moves the NJ related information from the previous New York-New Jersey English article, now renamed NY Dialect because it was an unnatural marriage, and NJ deserves its own article. I hope readers are satisfied with the change. mnewmanqc 02:33, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Joisey"

This article gives the pronunciation of the faux-New Jersey "Joisey" as [dʒɒɪzi], with a middle vowel of [ɒɪ]. However, I was under the belief that this middle vowel was actually supposed to be [ɜɪ], as in the old New York dialect pronunciation of "bird" or "oil". Was I mistaken in conflating these two, or is this merely a case of differing transcriptions of the same vowel? -Chinju 02:07, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Since the [ɜɪ] has largely dropped out of NY Dialect, it's production in "Joisey" is largely stylized. The more frequent and spontaneous production is would be the more frequent [ɒɪ]. However, either would do, and both could be incorporated in the article as far as I'm concerned.mnewmanqc 12:58, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Jersey"

Unless someone can provide a source verifying that many people from New Jersey are offended by the use of "Jersey" without the "New," I'm going to delete it. It's a pretty redicilous claim; no one in New Jersey would be offended. --Descendall 04:10, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, it says "the use of the bare term Jersey is common in New York City, although it may also be a mistaken attempt by non-New Jersey residents to use what they believe to be the local term." I'm from New Jersey born and raised and use the bare term from time to time. Does that make me any less Jersey?....sorry, New Jersey? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.149.236.86 (talk) 07:42, 4 February 2007 (UTC).
For what it's worth, I've been "corrected" for saying it a couple times. "You wouldn't say you are from York, would you?" and I've heard other people from "Jersey'" saying something like "they weren't offended by it," implying that it was understood that others were. Of course all this is anecdotal. On the other hand, someone once made an edit eliminating the some and leaving it as if it was generally understood to be offensive. Also, some, presumably annoyed Jerseyite put it in in the first place. Still, I know of no references to that fact, so it could be deleted. mnewmanqc 17:30, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
Don't you mean New Jerseyite? Out of curiosity, which part of NJ were these people who corrected you from? Kevin Smith, who seems to be overly in love with the fact that he's a Jersey boy, calls the state simply Jersey from time to time. And it is Jersey Boy, I've never heard New Jersey Boy. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.149.236.86 (talk) 09:00, 6 February 2007 (UTC).

One was from New Brunswick, another Ho-Ho-Kus. Of course, it is interesting in compounds that the New disappears, most famously in Jersey City. However, consistency is not a hallmark of getting offended.mnewmanqc 13:23, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't know where you're getting your information from, but this appears to be guesswork. My father's family comes from north-eastern New Jersey -- three generations were raised in Bayonne -- and none of them ever talked like that. Neither did any of their neighbors, once my grandparents moved into a neighborhood where some Italians lived. I'm an alumnus of Stevens, and I never heard anything NYC-like in Hoboken either, not even at Benny Tudino's. (The best pizza place in town.) The accent they did have was very distinct from anything heard in New York with the possible exception of Staten Island. I suppose one might come to this conclusion based on a general unfamiliarity with a Brooklyn accent, but I assure you they're not the same.
Nor have I ever heard "guido" being used as an ethnic slur for Italians, although I admit my familiarity with the region's slang is about 20 years out of date.
Accents heard from media originating in New York uses a neutral mid-American accent as does most media everywhere else in the country. You're not going to pick up an accent from it. Besides, if that had anything to do with it you'd have heard the same accent everywhere reached primarily by NYC media, and this is clearly not the case. Accents shift greatly when you travel just a few miles down the coast. My mother's family from Elizabeth spoke nothing like my father's family. TCC (talk) (contribs) 04:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
How about in Essex County alone? I grew up in Montclair and I have a negligible Jersey accent, but people in Clifton had a distinct Jersey accent that was different than the Jersey accent people had in Nutley...and these towns border each other. I agree that the inclusion of this sentence is ridiculous. I use "Jersey" all the time and I challenge anyone from Hohokus to challenge my "Jerseyness"...whatever the hell that means. I'm going to remove the phrase. JHMM13 05:41, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "New Jersey English" does not exist

I am afraid a serious mistake was made in splitting this article off from New York dialect. The "New York" does not refer to the state, but to the city and its metropolitan area, of which North Jersey is clearly a part. The state of New Jersey does not "deserve" its own article; the state of New York does not have one either. Our articles are about specific dialects, not geography. Some of the dialects of South Jersey may deserve their own articles elsewhere, but there is no coherent concept of "New Jersey English".--Pharos 03:50, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

That point is made in the article. The problem is that NY-NJ English invites people to write about all the various dialects spoken in NJ in the same article as the single dialect of NYC, which includes only a tiny portion of NJ. That left an incoherent article. Rather than simply eliminating the non-NYC dialect parts of the NJ English portion, I moved the NJ article to a different spot. Perhaps the name "Dialects of New Jersey" would be better, but as you point out the state is not a coherent dialect region and so perhaps it does not deserve its own article. I'm not sure what the solution is, but joining it back to NY certainly is not helpful. mnewmanqc 14:40, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
The thing is, we don't have any other "dialects by US state" articles and the existence of this article (included on Template:English dialects) is highly misleading to people not knowledgeable about the situation. I suggest we just put a statement on NY-NJ English that "This article describes the dialect of the New York metropolitan area in downstate New York and northern New Jersey. For dialects spoken in other parts of these states, see American English regional differences.", and then we can merge other info on other dialects in New Jersey there. Also I think the "North Jersey accent", though somewhat distinct, should be discussed at the NY-NJ English page because it's clearly part of something larger.--Pharos 02:35, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
I think this is a useful discussion. I want to separate out the arguments I see for not remerging the pages (then again, I'm the one who separated them in the first place):
First the name: No one calls the dialect NY-NJ English in the professional literature, as far as I'm aware. It's New York Dialect. Also, since the NY (in the name) is the city not state, if we include NJ, then there are no grounds for excluding Long Island, Westchester, Rockland, etc. And that would be a mouthful. We really would have to name the page, NY English (I'd prefer NY Dialect, but I'm not going to go around changing it). That excludes NJ completely, and we just have the page deleted.
Second the extent: NY dialect is related to all surrounding dialects, Eastern LI, Connecticut, Hudson Valley, and Northern NJ west of the NY dialect region is no exception. But I don't think that particular dialect (or set of dialects) is more closely related to NY than to Northeastern PA. I'd have to look at an atlas, but I don't think there are any solid grounds for joining it up to NY English. In particular, a number of highly salient features of NY English including /r/ dropping and the short a split seem to stop at the traditional border of the dialect area. Even the word "hero" drops out somewhere east of Wayne.
Third, what would happen to all the southern Jersey discussion? Following the same logic, it could be joined to the Philadelphia accent page, but last I'm not sure how far the Philadelphia dialect region extends there. How do the Pine Barrens relate?
Here's one possibility: Create a North Jersey English page, and merge the South Jersey part with Philadelphia. I'm not sure how accurate the Pine Barrens reference is in any case. I'm also not sure how Cape May fits in.
Another possibility: Keep as is, on the justification that many people believe that there is such a thing as NJ English. Then, the page would serve if nothing else to dispel that idea. mnewmanqc 03:09, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree with your first point about the name; but I don't see how there would be a problem with an article called "New York Dialect" also covering part of New Jersey– this would just be something to explain in the article.
Perhaps there is a "broad definition" of New York Dialect throughout the metro area as well as a narrow one. Because it would be impractical to develop an article on Hudson Valley speech for example, I suggest we might go with a broad definition of New York Dialect if that is applicable. Subjectively, I hear relatively little difference between Northern NJ and NYC speech; perhaps you could recheck your atlas.
I would say South Jersey accents that are broadly Philadelphian should be merged. I don't know much about the Pine Barrens accent; if it's an oddball and not closely related to larger dialects I suggest just describing it at American English regional differences.
If your search of academic sources (you probably have a better library than I do) does indeed show that North Jersey dialect is as distinct from NY dialect as it is from other regional dialects, then I would support a North Jersey page.--Pharos 04:13, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I need to get the Linguistic Atlas of North America for my class on Monday. It's on CD-ROM. I'll do a grab of NJ out of that and send it to you. I'd like to be able to put it in the article, but I have no desire to deal with the permissions. My suspicion is that either you're hearing transplants from the NY dialect region or that the people are still in the region. I don't think if you go west along Rt. 80, you need to get very far to start hearing those final /r/s. mnewmanqc 18:46, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I've looked at the Labov, Ash, and atlas. I'd like to post a cutout of the .tiff file here, but I don't know how to do it. Basically, it divides the state into four regions. One, is NYC, the other Phila. The Phila region doe not extend to the Atlantic coast. East of there, they had no informants, and it's just left blank. West of the NYC region, and north of the Phila region, again there are either no speakers, or one who shows Phila dialect features. However, this is where Labov is from, and they simply seem to have annexed it along with far Eastern PA to the broad Northern Dialect region. That includes Hudson Valley (north of the NYC region), Western New England, and the whole Northern Cities Shift region as well as an undefined area. The NJ-Eastern Penn area is included in this region. If someone can tell me the instructions for posting a picture, I'll do that. The upshot is that I can see no easy solution for any partition of NJ English among the various dialect regions that compose it. mnewmanqc 00:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I think this shows a workable approach for dealing with American English dialects. As I see it, there are a number of reasonably well-defined (and well-studied) dialects that deserve their own articles; these are usually centered in one place but have boundaries are ambiguous. There are also many areas that show some irregularity of pronunciation, or that have some otherwise ambiguous dialect status. These ambiguous areas should be touched on in the relevant "well-defined dialect" articles, and their geography should be discussed at American English regional differences (which ideally should have a detailed section for every state). What do you think of this approach?--Pharos 02:52, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
I suggest we refer this discussion to the language reference desk. I agree with Pharos that really goes to the heart of the issue of how to organize dialect pages, not even for the US but for all English dialects, which is one reason to do so.
I see two problems that I think can be overcome but only if there's a consensus and finally a policy.
One reason for the policy involves what might be called "enthusiasts." I suspect the NJ page was first joined or started with the NY Dialect page because people were interested in New Jersey not out of a desire to provide a coherent reference for a US English dialect but out of enthusiasm for New Jersey. Language is seen as an extension of local pride. We've seen a lot of contributions that reflect that motivation on this article and other dialect articles. Enthusiasts will resent and respond to any reorganization that they feel diminishes what they feel enthusiastic about, with a potential for edit wars.
Another issue involves the state of our knowledge. The most up-to-date overview of European American varieties of North American English is the Labov, Ash, and Boberg Atlas, just out. It is an excellent reference, but it is not as comprehensive as one might think. The authors had finite resources and time, and the data was obtained from telephone surveys to gather speech samples from 2+ participants in urban and suburban areas. Rural areas were not really examined. This doesn't really matter much in most of the country, but in the East, there are a number of dialects that get missed. If and only if that region was subject of detailed sociolinguistic study will anything much be known about it. So, for example, various Atlantic islands are well studied, as is much of southern Appalachia, but northern Appalachia is not, except Western New England which is not culturally Appalachia anyway. No one has studied those areas as far as I know. All this is to say that it might not be that northwestern New Jersey and the Jersey shore may not have ambiguous boundaries, but that no one knows where the isoglosses, that form the boundaries, should go. .
My suggestion t herefore is that we see if anyone at the language reference desk has anything to say about this, and if no one objects, I'll do that or someone else can tomorrow. mnewmanqc 14:54, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
OK, that seems reasonable. If we're going to develop a policy, it's probably going to have to be through a Wikipedia:WikiProject on American English dialects or maybe English dialects more broadly. Wikipedia:WikiProject United States regions I've noticed has brought some rationality to another subject that can be tainted by local boosterism.--Pharos 15:42, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I'm putting it in there. BTW, here's a page that's open and somewhat different from the atlas itself, but it's from Labov's site. [[1]]. Notice, that there's not a single informant in NJ outside Trenton, making it all speculative.mnewmanqc 22:27, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

This page is honestly as about wrong as it gets when it comes to the Northeast New Jersey accent. Where are the mentions of pronouncing coffee as "cawfee", or the shared expressions with New York City such as "how's it goin" as a rhetorical greeting?

mnewmanqc, you've really done a sloppy job here. Northeast New Jersey English (which is spoken in the entire New York metro area, which includes Passaic, Hudson, and Essex counties) shares a lot of the same lexicon and pronunciation with New York City, but with some very distinct differences (rhotic, etc., except amongst the older urban Italians, etc.). You cannot create an accent page for a single state when the state itself has many different distinct accents. No, I'm not a "state booster" - I'm a New York City resident, Brooklyn born, and I recognized that this page is really, really poorly done.

Either remove this page, or rewrite it to reflect how the dialects really are in full. and no, linguistics books from 1984 -do not count-. Please update your sources, I'm sure there are new versions - you can't even get away with sources that old in Freshman year of college.

Ad hominem attacks (particularly from anonymous unregistered users) are poor substitutes for constructive criticism. No, this is not "my page." I haven't even objected to earlier proposals for its removal. If you want to make a serious contribution, pls follow the procedures for its removal. As for comments here and in the NYC Dialect page on the similarities between Northern NJ and NYC, follow your own advice on sources, oh and sign your contributions to talk pages. This is my one and only response to any further anonymous comments on this thread. mnewmanqc 21:01, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

--- Where I live in northeast NJ there is no difference between a NY accent as it is described on its respective page and the way my family speaks or I speak. It is, in fact, non rhotic, and does have the short a split, which are mentioned as differences here. This article should be changed, or deleted, especially because the NY dialect mentions North Jersey in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.99.236.100 (talk) 02:53, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The Sopranos

An exaggerated version of this accent is spoken by many characters on the television series The Sopranos, the best example being mob boss Tony Soprano (who is played by New Jersey native James Gandolfini).

Didn't James Gandolfini, and most of the actors for that matter, speak with a New York accent on The Sopranos?