What are the main distinctions between New York and Los Angeles dialect?

looney_tunes

"Unlike Boston and other urban dialects, New York City stands by itself and bears little resemblence to the other dialects in this region. It is also the most disliked and parodied of any American dialect (even among New Yorkers), possibly because many Americans tend dislike large cities. When an R comes after a vowel, it is often dropped. IR becomes OI, but OI becomes IR, and TH becomes D as in "Dey sell tirlets on doity-doid street" and fugedaboudit (forget about it). This pronounciation is particularly associated with Brooklyn but exists to some extent throughout the city. The thickness of a speaker's dialect is directly related to their social class, but these features have been fading within all classes over recent decades. Famous speakers are Rosie Perez, Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinnie, Archie Bunker, Bugs Bunny, and (if you're old enough to remember) the Bowery Boys." Los Angeles is not shown on this dialect map as having a distinct dialect of its own, but is part of the Pacific Southwest dialectical region. "The first English speakers arrived here from New York, Ohio, Missouri, New England, and other parts of the Northeast and Midwest in the 1840s, bringing the Northern and North Midland dialects with them. Words originally used by the gold miners of this period are still used today: pay dirt (valuable discovery), pan out (to succeed), and goner (doomed person). The early twentieth century saw an influx of people from the South and other parts of the West. The people here are particularly fond of creating new slang and expressions, and, since Hollywood is located here, these quickly get spread to the rest of the country and the world (the influence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was examined in Verbatim : part one, part two). During the late 1970s and early 1980s, an extreme exaggeration of this dialect that came to be known as "Valley Girl" or "Surfer Dude" was popular among teenagers and much parodied in the media with phrases like "gag me with a spoon" and "barf me back to the stone age." Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Whoopie Goldberg in her one women show are two famous examples." http://www.geocities.com/yvain.geo/dialects.html Dec 13 08, 10:37 PM

author

Just a minor note here, quote: I know a Los Angeles accent exists, but I always thought it was present only in a minority of our residents. And I always thought it was represented not by an accent but by an overuse of "like" (as in, "I’m, like, uffended..."), "totally" (as in, "I’m, like, totally uffended..."), and "all" (as in, "He’s all, ‘You don’t have to be, like, totally uffended’"). http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/la_nuts/01279_this_how_talk_appearance_right.html Dec 13 08, 10:56 PM