Jewish Dialect and New York Dialect

Mosaic identity and style: Phonological variation among Reform American Jews1

“…Anecdotal evidence, in the form of folk commentary and media representations of certain Jewish characters, seems to suggest that word‐final /t/‐release is ideologically associated with an American Jewish style of speech. In fact, Thomas (1932) claims that the pronunciation of /t/ among the American Jews he studied is ‘overplosive and slightly higher in pitch’(1932: 323). More recently, Benor (2001, 2004) has identified word‐final /t/‐release as a salient sociolinguistic variable in two different Orthodox American Jewish communities.…”

“…In other words, I am not examining whether final /t/‐release can be said to be a feature of some Reform Jewish speech, as in Thomas (1932). Rather, I am investigating two individuals’ variable pronunciations of word‐final /t/ as a function of topic and context, and suggesting that any systematic variation of this feature may in fact be related to the speakers’ and the contexts’ differing levels of affiliation with Reform Judaism.…”

Ethnic divergence in Montreal English

“…For example, Labov (1966) reports on Italians and Jews in New York City; Laferriere (1979) examines Irish, Italians, and Jews in Boston; and Carlock and Wolck (1981) study Germans, Italians, and Poles in Buffalo, New York. Jewish English has been particularly well studied in the United States (e.g., Thomas 1932;Gold 1985;Benor 2001Benor , 2009Benor , 2010Benor and Cohen 2011), though other varieties, like Italian-American English, have received much less scholarly attention. Ethnicity in Canadian English has also received comparatively little notice in sociolinguistic research; for example, ethnicity is not included among the social factors studied in major urban surveys by Gregg (1992) in Vancouver or Woods (1999) in Ottawa, though a program of research on ethnic variation in Toronto English has now begun (Hoffman and Walker 2010; Nagy, Chociej, and Hoffman 2013; Baxter and Peters 2014).…”

The Sociolinguistics of Ethnicity in New York City

“…Labov found that young Lower East Side Jews were raising the caught vowel higher than other whites, which he attributed to a desire to avoid Jewish stereotypes (1966: 217). In fact, the stereotype of the New York Jew is so strong that even sociolinguists have conflated the categories ‘New Yorker’ and ‘Jewish New Yorker’ (Thomas 1932), as Tannen does when describing what she calls ‘New York Jewish Conversational Style’, which includes abrupt topic shifts, fast speech rate, and overlap (1981: 137). She even refers to her speakers as just ‘New Yorkers’, removing the category ‘Jewish’ as a redundant descriptor, saying that ‘my impression is that New Yorkers of non‐Jewish background .…”

“…Fader's ethnographic study of one Hasidic community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, found evidence of stable bi‐ and trilingualism (2001, 2006). Other Jewish New Yorkers also maintain both Yiddish and Hebrew as heritage languages (Hudson‐Edwards 1980; Steinmetz 1981), while others retain a distinctively Yiddish flavor to their English (Thomas 1932; Steinmetz 1981). Similarly, Chinese communities in New York City have been successful in language maintenance, particularly in Chinatowns across the city (in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn), which continually absorb large influxes of immigrants post‐1965.…”