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[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes, January 16, 2006

Mayor's Accent Deserts Boston for New York
By SAM ROBERTS

You can take the boy out of Boston, Michael R. Bloomberg affirmed 40 years
ago when he emigrated to New York. After only four years as mayor, Mr.
Bloomberg has demonstrated that you can also take Boston out of the boy.
The mayor, it appears, has been shedding his Boston accent while running
New York City. Linguists enlisted by The New York Times to compare
recordings of the mayor's first and second inaugural addresses detected
several telltale signs of the change, suggesting that four years spent
commanding the corridors of City Hall and navigating the five boroughs had
taken its toll on Mr. Bloomberg's once-pronounced New England accent.

"The 2002 speech has a measurably higher incidence of words containing the
'signature sounds' of Boston," said Paul Meier, a University of Kansas
professor and director of the International Dialects of English Archive
there. William Labov, a linguistics professor at the University of
Pennsylvania and co-author of "The Atlas of North American English," said:
"He's been interacting more closely with New Yorkers and has unconsciously
shifted. He is not becoming a linguistic carpetbagger, but he's becoming a
little bit more a New Yorker as time goes on." The linguists said Mr.
Bloomberg's pronunciation of several words - "father," "last," "because"
and "our," for example - gave him away. He has been dropping his "r's"
less than he once did, Professor Labov added. Dr.  Labov said that while
the mayor is "very careful to pronounce his 'r' all the time in New York,"
- in other words, no "Noo Yawk" - his "aw" instead of "ah" in words like
"because" or "lost" was the most obvious cue to his distinctly New York
shift.

A Bostonian's fathah might have lahst an election becahse of how he said
something. In New York, his father would have lawst becawse of what he
said. It might be political calculation or better elocution in formal
speech, or it could just reflect the linguistic rigors of his job. During
his re-election campaign, Mr. Bloomberg soaked up the city's diverse
communities by hopscotching across its ethnic neighborhoods, and he even
studied Spanish. He recorded campaign commercials in two Chinese dialects,
Russian, Urdu and Korean, among other languages.

Barry Popik, an administrative law judge with the city's Parking
Violations Bureau and a member of the American Dialect Society, said: "It
appears to me that Bloomberg's been studying two new languages - Spanish
and New York Jewish. He's not sounding like Fran Drescher's 'The Nanny'
yet, but it appears to me that he's picked some of that up." Mr.
Bloomberg, who hails from Medford, Mass., just six miles outside Boston,
is hardly the first New York mayor to have been born or raised elsewhere
(among others, Abraham D. Beame was born in London, David N.  Dinkins in
Trenton). But when Mr. Bloomberg first ran in 2001, he was a political
novice, and his name, much less his voice, was barely known to the public.

Even after four decades of living and working in New York, he spoke with
an accent that fairly or not distinguished him not merely as an
out-of-towner, but, worse still, as having the nasal twang of what the
writer Ford Madox Ford dubbed a "brick-throated bullfrog," which
identified him as a Red Sox fan. New Yorkers, especially statewide, tend
to be tolerant of candidates who come from someplace else, and Mr.
Bloomberg, perhaps with the public's ear already accustomed to the twang
of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, a Boston import, in the 1990's,
managed to overcome his potential handicap (as did Robert F. Kennedy,
another Massachusetts transplant, when he ran for the United States Senate
from New York in 1964). This year, William F.  Weld, who was elected
governor of Massachusetts in 1990 by defeating a native Texan, is mulling
a race for governor of New York.

New Yorkers and Bostonians nevertheless have several linguistic traits in
common, and by 2002 Mr. Bloomberg had already shed some of his accent
anyway. But all of the half-dozen linguists consulted by The Times agreed
after listening to the recordings of the two inaugural addresses that the
mayor sounded less like a Bostonian in 2006 than in 2002. "He is sounding
quantitatively more like a New Yorker," said George Jochnowitz, a
professor emeritus of linguistics at the College of Staten Island.

Joan Houston (pronounced HOWston, the New York way) Hall, a University of
Wisconsin professor who is president of the American Dialect Society and
editor of the "Dictionary of American Regional English," agreed. "His
pronunciation of 'last,' which I heard three times in each speech, was
very much more Boston-like in 2002 than in 2006," she said. In the earlier
speech, she said in an e-mail message, "in unstressed syllables, as in
'together,' 'governor,' 'senator,' 'leaders,' 'transportation' (in the
second syllable), 'energy,' and 'father,'" the 'r' was vocalized as an
"ah," (as in "togethah" or "fathah").

In 2006, she said, Mr. Bloomberg used a lot more of what linguists call a
post-vocalic 'r', the sound directly after a vowel in unstressed syllables
(as in Harvard rather than Hahvaahd). She said he also emphasized his r's
in words like 'our city' (which occurred very frequently, along with 'our
schools,' 'our efforts,' 'our country'), Ms. Hall said, "which I suspect
resulted from both conscious articulation and conscious political intent."
William A. Kretzschmar Jr., a humanities professor at the University of
Georgia, said that in 2002 Mr. Bloomberg very often left out the "r" in
unstressed syllables in words like "legislature" and frequently in
stressed syllables in words like like "firefighters."

"For some time this loss of r's has been relatively stigmatized among
educated speakers in New York, especially by younger speakers, and that is
less true of educated speakers in Boston," Professor Kretzschmar said,
adding that Mr. Bloomberg deleted his r's less in 2006. "Mayor Bloomberg
may now be a little less Boston and a little more New York in his
'lang-widge' " (his interesting pronunciation of 'language' - not a Boston
feature)," Professor Kretzschmar said. "This would be most noticeable to
local New Yorkers who are very sensitive to every nuance and inflection.
And of course it is in the mayor's interest to sound more like his
constituency."

For his part, the mayor was silent about his change in inflections. But
Stu Loeser, the mayor's press secretary, said that any change in accent
was because of his immersion in the city, not the result of cold political
calculation or a vocal coach. "Four years ago the mayor was new to
politics and new to public speaking, and since then he's had a lot of
practice," Mr. Loeser said. Professor Kretzschmar said: "Sounding more
like your neighbors is actually a very natural thing to do, not some arch
political act. It might be best to consider that Mayor Bloomberg is
sounding a bit more like his New York neighbors and constituents as, over
the past four years, he has paid close attention to what they say."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/nyregion/16accent.html