Aileen Marshall
Yo! Welcome to lesson five in our series on the New York City dialect. I hope you’ve been practicing. By now you should be able to hold a light conversation in New York-ese, and order a bagel with a schmear.
To review last month’s lesson, a number of words in the city dialect have an elongated A sound, sounding like “aw.” Our vocabulary words were tawk, thawt and dawg. Here are some more examples of them used in a sentence.
Don’t sit next to that guy tawkin’ to himself.
I thawt he was a tourist askin’ for directions, but he was a bum askin’ for change.
You can make money in your spare time as a dawg walker.
Other examples of the elongated A are walk, cough and taught. Here are some examples of these words used in a sentence.
If you want to get around in the city, don’t pay any attention to wawk signals.
Bus exhaust usually makes me cawf.
My mother tawt me never to touch the handrails in the subway.
This month’s lesson:
Native New Yorkers often drop the H in words that start with that letter. The two most common instances of this are huge and human.
Here are some examples of words using the dropped H words used in a sentence. Click on the links to hear the pronunciation.
Dat demonstration on 57th Street is really goin’ to be ‘uge.
It’s been good to see New Yorkers stand up for ‘uman rights.
Keep practicing by listening to locals conversing. Hang out at your neighborhood pizza joint. The two traditional establishments in this neighborhood are Sutton Pizza, on First Avenue and 63rd Street, and Pizza Park, also on First Avenue, at 66th Street. Tune in next month for a test of your newly acquired language skills.