SECTION: Pg. 12
LENGTH: 1087 words
HEADLINE: SMALL TAWK
BYLINE: Mark Francis Cohen
HIGHLIGHT: New York Postcard
BODY:
Sitting in his cluttered Manhattan office, Sam Chwat, accent coach to the stars, is holding court with one of his not-so-famous clients in what amounts to a public flogging. The subject of the flogging is an upwardly mobile woman with short, chestnut-colored hair and a knit sweater wrapped around her shoulders, who has come here to eliminate her cumbersome Brooklyn accent. Every session costs $185, but it's worth it, she says, for a chance to learn from the man who once tutored--and cured--Tony Danza.
Chwat (whose name, he tells me, is pronounced Sh-wah but is usually mispronounced by New Yorkers as Sh-whaat?) implores the woman to begin chatting about her children just so he can pounce on every offensive sound she emits. Soon, in the middle of her sixth attempt to say "six-yeehs-huld" like a Midwesterner, Chwat erupts: "Wai, wai, wait! You're screwing it up. If you pucker, it's going to screw it up. A puckered 's' is going to give you a 'sh.' Like 'In the office she ...' try that--without puckering."
"In-thuh-aw-fish-she," she gurgles.
"I need an 's,'" he chimes.
"In the aw-fis-she."
"That's it! And--"
"Six-yeers-old."
"You got it, and she had a list of what?"
"She hadda lish ah...."
"Don't pucker!"
"She hadda lish ah quesh-chuns."
"You blew it!"
Slowly, she says: "She had a list of quest-chuns."
"You're right!" Later, Chwat declares: "It's important to note she doesn't have a lisp. This is just a local thing."
Of course, Brooklynese is more than a local thing. It is perhaps the most recognizable regionalism in the world, thanks mainly to movies and television, which have transformed it into an emblem of class as much as of place. Yet, in the borough of Brooklyn, of all places, Brooklynese is suddenly on the brink of extinction or at least some serious evolution--thanks to the old ethnic Brooklynites, who no longer want to speak it, and to the new ethnic Brooklynites, who are changing it beyond recognition.
Of course, it was ethnic groups that created Brooklynese in the first place. First it was the early Dutch and French settlers, trying to learn English after the British captured Brooklyn in 1664. These groups, which already had trouble pronouncing the King's "th"s, assumed the Cockney sounds around them-- and that meant eliminating the final "r" in many words, just like the colonists. And so the ancestors of Brooklyn's mudduhs were born.
In the 1840s, Irish immigrants added a muscularity to the dialect. The Irish tongue made "th"s into hard "t"s and "ir"s into "oi"s--thirty-third became "toity-tird." Turn-of-the-century Italian immigrants found the Brooklyn tone flat and flavorless, devoid of rhythm, and so they imbued the vowels with a sing-songy passion. Thus, "mayyn." But--whoops!--they robbed some words of their consonants. Ergo, "tawwk." Meanwhile, Jews speaking Yiddish were arriving in droves, striking new intonation riffs as well as word substitutions. Declarative sentences sounded like questions? Wordsrantogether, and "v"s replaced "w"s. Ultimately, on a steamy summer day, as kids played stickball and fire hydrants sprayed water on the streets below, it was not uncommon to hear an apartment dweller produce a hands-in-the-air wail of "Oh-pin-duh-vinda-awe-red-de!"
By 1950, Brooklynese had become nationally recognized--and derided. According to Margaret Mannix Flynn, a former professor of speech at Brooklyn College who is generally considered the doyenne of Brooklynese, the advent of radio, movies, and television would, oddly enough, diminish its real use. For one thing, whenever a movie character invoked the Brooklyn warble, Flynn observes, "he was always the poor schlump. And he spoke the language that the average guy and gal could identify with." Meanwhile, radio and television broadcasts were entering more homes. To the extent that news segments were suddenly being heard and seen all over, announcers had to be starkly accentless and regionally unspecific. With this need for crushing universality, a standard American English was born--the so-called newscaster's speech. Whereas Brooklynites once took pride in the fraternity of the accent, people now understood it to be a feature of the working class, an association that sticks to this day. As the borough's aspiring eggheads and social climbers became conscious of the accent's symbolism, they decided to rid themselves--and their children--of it. In the ensuing years, as the aspiring middle class fled to the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, a new wave of Southern blacks and Puerto Ricans took their place and made their own mark. Spanish, for example, has pushed the accent in a different direction--providing us with the quick, guttural sounds we have today.
Not that Brooklynese has lost all of its familiar features: it's still blind to things like final "r"s and, in some of the neighborhoods, still home to "youse," as in "youse guyz." Yet, given the dizzying variety of Brooklyn's new immigrants--remember, it's not just Hispanics, but Russians, Chinese, Dominicans, Jamaicans, and Haitians, too--most linguistic experts predict it's only a matter of time before traditional Brooklynese morphs into something wholly different. "It's dying," announces William Stewart, a linguist at the cuny Graduate Center. "Any place you have immigration, differences are created; and, as children interact, these differences get leveled off, and a new variety is formed."
A week has passed since the session in Sam Chwat's office. Alan Rodin, a speech pathologist who teaches accent elimination, is giving me a tour of Brighton Beach, which is now predominantly Russian. He's conducting an informal survey of how young people speak, and at one point near the boardwalk he approaches an eleven-year-old boy who has brown hair, deeply set blue eyes, and a down-to-his-knees black t-shirt. When the boy confirms his Russian origins, Rodin flashes a clipboard and asks, "Would you read these words for me?"
"Sure," the boy says in a formal-sounding English, as he glances up at the page and ticks off the answers. "Three. Dog. Soda. Water. Give me this."
"Have you ever heard someone say 'dis' instead of 'this?'" Rodin asks.
"Well, sure," he says. "You know--dis! Don't 'dis' me."
"Oh boy," Rodin says, shaking his head. "There's not going to be a Brooklynese for long."
(Copyright The New Republic)