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Regional dialect of American English

New York City English, or Metropolitan New York English, is a regional dialect of American English spoken primarily in New York City and some of its surrounding metropolitan area. It is described by sociolinguist William Labov as the most recognizable regional dialect in North America. The dialect is spoken in all five boroughs of the City and throughout Long Island's Nassau County; it is also heard to varying degrees in Suffolk County (Long Island), Westchester County, and Rockland County of New York State plus Hudson County, Bergen County, and the city of Newark (Essex County) in northeastern New Jersey.

The origins of many of New York City English's diverse features are probably not recoverable. New York City English, largely with the same major pronunciation system popularly recognized today, was first reproduced in literature and scientifically documented in the 1890s. It was then, and still mostly is, associated with ethnically diverse European American native English speakers. The entire Mid Atlantic United States, including both New York City and the Delaware Valley (whose own distinct dialect centers around Philadelphia and Baltimore) shares certain key features, including a high vowel with a glide (sometimes called the aww vowel) as well as a phonemic split of the short a vowel, (making gas and gap, for example, have different vowels sounds)—New York City's split not identical though to Philadelphia's. Linguist William Labov has pointed out that a similarly structured (though differently pronounced) split is found today even in the southern accents of England; thus, a single common origin of this split may trace back to colonial era England. New York City became an urban economic power in the eighteenth century, with the city's financial elites maintaining close ties with the British Empire even after the Revolutionary War. According to Labov, New York City speakers' loss of the r sound after vowels (incidentally, not found in the nearby Delaware Valley) began as a nineteenth century imitation of the prestigious British feature, consistently starting among the upper classes in New York City before spreading to other socioeconomic classes. After World War II, social perceptions reversed and r preserving (rhotic) pronunciations became the new American prestige standard, rejecting East Coast and British accent features, while postwar migrations transferred rhotic speakers directly to New York City from other regions of the country. The result is that non rhoticity, which was once a high status feature and later a city wide feature, has been diminishing and now, since the mid twentieth century onward, largely remains only among lower status New Yorkers. Today, New York City metropolitan accents are often rhotic or variably rhotic. Other features of the dialect, such as the dental pronunciations of d and t, and related th stopping, likely come from contact with foreign languages, particularly Italian and Yiddish, brought into New York City through its huge immigration waves of Europeans during the mid to late nineteenth century. Grammatical structures, such as the lack of inversion in indirect questions, similarly suggest contact with immigrant languages, plus several words common in the city are derived from such foreign languages.

Philadelphians born in the twentieth century exhibit a short a split system that some linguists regard as a simplification of the very similar New York City short a split. Younger Philadelphians, however, are retreating from many of the traditional features shared in common with New York City. Due to an influx of immigrants from New York City and neighboring New Jersey to southern Florida, some resident southern Floridians now speak with an accent reminiscent of a New York accent. Additionally, as a result of social and commercial contact between New Orleans, Louisiana and New York City, the traditional accent of New Orleans, known locally as "Yat", bears distinctive similarities with the New York accent, including the (moribund) coil–curl merger, raising of the vowel to , a similar split in the short a system, and th stopping. Similarly, dialectal similarities suggest that older New York City English also influenced Cincinnati, Ohio and Albany, New York, whose older speakers in particular may still exhibit a short a split system that linguists suggest is an expanded or generalized variant of the New York City short a system. Certain New York City dialect features also understandably appear in New York Latino English.

Though William Labov argued in 2010 that the New York City accent is basically stable at the moment, some recent studies have revealed a trend of recession in most features of the accent, especially among younger speakers from middle class or higher backgrounds. Documented loss of New York City accent features includes the loss of the coil–curl merger (now almost completely extinct), non rhoticity, and the extremely raised long vowel (as in talk, cough, or law). Researchers proposed that the motivation behind these recessive trends is the stigmatization of the typical New York City accent since the mid 1900s as being associated with a poorer or working class background, often also corresponding with particular ethnic identities. While earlier projects detected trends of emphasizing New York City accents as part of a process of social identification, recent research attributes the loss of typical accent features to in group ethnic distancing. In other words, many of the young generations of ethnic groups who formerly were the most representative speakers of the accent are currently avoiding its features to not stand out socially or ethnically.

The pronunciation of New York City English, most popularly acknowledged by the term New York accent, is readily noticed and stereotyped, garnering considerable attention in American culture. Some distinctive phonological features include its traditional dropping of r except before vowels, a short a split system (in which, for example, the a in gas is not assonant to the a in gap), a high gliding vowel (in words like talk, thought, all, etc. and thus an absence of the cot–caught merger),

New York City speakers have some unique conversational styles. Linguistics professor Deborah Tannen notes in a New York Times article it has "an emphasis to involve the other person, rather than being considerate. It would be asking questions as a show of interest in the other person, whereas in other parts of [the] country, people don't ask because it might put the person on the spot." Metro New Yorkers "stand closer, talk louder, and leave shorter pauses between exchanges," Tannen said. "I call it 'cooperative overlap'. It's a way of showing interest and enthusiasm, but it's often mistaken for interrupting by people from elsewhere in the country." On the other hand, linguist William Labov demurs, "there's nothing known to linguists about 'normal New York City conversation.

The accent is not spoken in the rest of New York State beyond the immediate New York City metropolitan area. Specifically, the upper Hudson Valley mixes New York City and Western New England accent features, while Central and Western New York belong to the same dialect region as Great Lakes cities such as Chicago and Detroit, a dialect region known as the Inland North.

New York City English is confined to a geographically small but densely populated area of New York State including all five boroughs of New York City as well as many parts of Long Island; the dialect region spans all of Nassau County and some of Suffolk County. Moreover, the English of the Hudson Valley forms a continuum of speakers who gather more features of New York City English the closer they are to the city itself; some of the dialect's features may be heard as far north as the state capital of Albany.

A small portion of southwestern Connecticut speaks a similar dialect, primarily speakers in Fairfield County and as far as New Haven County.

The northeastern quarter of New Jersey, prominently Hudson, Bergen, Union, and Essex Counties, including the municipalities of Weehawken, Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark, plus Middlesex and Monmouth Counties, are all within the New York metropolitan area and thus also home to the major features of New York City English. With the exception of New York City's immediate neighbors like Jersey City and Newark,