You Talkin' to Me?

March 2, 2020
White, who teaches at Stony Brook University, debuts with an enjoyable work of popular linguistics. The book traces New York City’s phonetic history, including such trivia as how the “upgliding diphthong” that leads to “thirty” being pronounced as “toidy” was, at the beginning of the 20th century, a marker of upper-class speech (there are sound recordings of Teddy Roosevelt using that pronunciation), or how East Coast elites of a later period, such as that other famous Roosevelt, FDR, favored the nonrhotic, or “r-less,” pronunciation style originating in Southern England. Other chapters dig into different linguistic and cultural influences on city place names, and how it came to be that Midwestern speech replaced “New York English” as the “standard” American accent—White notes the oddity of a major cultural and financial center comparable to London, Paris, or Rome not defining standard speech for the rest of the country. White also covers gangster slang, the language of popular music, code switching between different language variants, and the relationship of accent to class. The result is a heartfelt tribute to, and insightful inquiry into, everyday speech in New York City.

Starred review from May 1, 2020

White (history of English, Stony Brook Univ.) has written an important book that reaches across the fields of sociolinguistics and cultural and ethnic history. In seeking to understand the unique way in which New Yawkers tawk, White investigates issues of class and social differences in language acquisition and usage. Through an overview investigation of the speech in New York City in relationship to Standard American accents to how speech is heard in films and broadcast news, White provides insights into how New Yorkers themselves see their speech. Discussions of slang and colloquialisms coined in New York City as well as underworld slang that emanated from there are particularly interesting. Finally, White tackles the complex topic of language change. As a city of immigration, New York has always been a polyglot of language-mixing and code-switching. In this well-documented, scholarly, albeit highly engaging text, he provides a depth of insight into the evolutionary importance of New York speech to the history of English. Given the organic and natural evolution of this history, it is no surprise that Robert De Niro's famous improvised line in the movie, Taxi Driver (from which the title of this book is derived) was as natural to him as it is for audiences to grasp immediately its many nuanced meanings. VERDICT There are many terrific examples of New York speech throughout this text and White contextualizes them all extremely well. Highly recommended.--Herbert E. Shapiro, Boca Raton, FL

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.