Visualizing New York City English
Summary
Visualizing New York City English is an audiovisual celebration of the New York accent.
Sitting at the intersection of history, linguistics, and media studies, it uses motion design to explore the narratives told about and through New York City English, weaving together city and people in mirrors and contrasts.
Created For
Integrated Design & Media program, master’s thesis
Roles
Researcher
Project Manager
Writer
Sound Editor
Motion Designer
Background
As the culmination of my master’s program, my thesis project game me the opportunity — and requirement — to combine research and practice into a major media production project.
Knowing I’d be devoted to this for a full academic year, I picked New York City English (NYCE) as my topic, choosing to explore it through motion design. This intertwined many facets of my life — my experience with NYC as an immigrant, my relationships with native New Yorker friends, neighbors and family, and my passion for linguistics, history, and design.
With Visualizing New York City English, I first aimed to truly understand NYCE, and then to visually represent it. The project is a series of videos using kinetic typography to highlight unique linguistic features of NYCE: sounds, rhythms, style, and meaning.
My hope is that by learning more about NYCE, viewers can gain insights like I did — challenging preconceptions, uncovering hidden dynamics, and revealing more nuanced, intricate, and interesting versions of New York City itself.
New York City produced a community of speakers with a distinctive sound, and by maintaining that sound, speakers help to produce the idea that is New York City.
Research
Secondary Research
My reading list was split into two buckets: New York City and its English and Typography.
The former featured sources on NYC’s history (with particular attention to immigration patterns), media representations, and linguistics — topics I had deep interest in, but not much formal knowledge about. Some of the most helpful and influential works were Michael Newman’s New York City English (2014), Heather Quinlan’s If These Knishes Could Talk (2013), Tyler Anbinder’s City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016), and Miriam Greenberg’s Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World (2008).
On typography, I drew great stylistic inspiration from Mariana Rodrigues’s Tipografia Vernacular (2014) and Teal Triggs’s The Typographic Experiment: Radical Innovation in Contemporary Type (2003).
Primary Research
Interviews
Over Fall 2021, I conducted a series of recorded interviews with 10 born and raised New Yorkers — hoping these would produce the audio content for my project. The main threads we explored related to a sense of otherness attached to NYC(E); how perceptions of NYC(E) by outsiders had changed over time; and how being a New Yorker — and speaking like one — influenced identity.
Typography Survey
To investigate the ways broader audiences imagine New York City visually, I created a typographic survey, receiving a total of 48 responses. In it, I selected over 40 different typefaces — trying to display a variety of styles and anatomical features — and arranged samples of the words “New York City” for each. Participants rated each typeface on a 5-step Likert scale from “least NYC” to “most NYC.”
- NYCE is special among dialects — not only does it have many linguistic quirks, it also covers a notably small geographic area. Beyond particular sounds and slang, it’s characterized by a faster and more expressive conversational style, including the concept of cooperative overlap. This refers to a practice of interrupting by addition — a sign of engagement and enthusiasm for many speakers.
- NYCE as current generations know it became stigmatized as non-WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) groups became the majority (im)migrating into the city.
- This stigma mirrors the contentious image NYC holds in the American imagination: the most recognizable American city, but at the same time a profoundly un-American place, mythologized by its diversity. Many of the groups most closely associated with NYCE — Irish, Italian, Eastern European Jewish, and later Black and Latin Americans — have been, or continue to be, otherized in the public eye.
- On the flip side of stigma, NYCE can connote a type of covert prestige, where speakers may be perceived as tougher, cooler, more authentic or down-to-earth. Of course, this can be coopted — think politicians trying to be “a guy you’d want to grab a beer with” — and is not universal.
- NYCE can become a site of meaning for speakers. As gentrification threatens cultural and linguistic loss in parts of the city, born and raised New Yorkers can resist standardization by taking pride in their identity. Acting and talking like a New Yorker becomes a signifier to a special claim to the city.
- New York is a city of contrasts and heterogeneity — not a melting pot, but a mosaic or a salad. The imposition of one unified image ultimately erases its rich history and culture
- Typography can connote meaning in many ways — through size, weight, color, style, cultural signifiers. Motion can embody speech in both pacing and behavior.
- Fluid typography — stretching and morphing — can be used to enhance the distinctions between letterforms as signifiers of sounds.
- The formal imperfections of vernacular typography and lettering can represent covert prestige in its positive nature: acknowledging and appreciating a level of roughness that is natural to the human voice.
- Visual overlays can stand in for cooperative overlap, giving a sense of energy and even cacophony.
Goals
Leverage motion typography to capture NYCE sounds and rhythm.
Showcase the wide range of linguistic features and variants present in NYCE, and the diversity of thought among New Yorkers.
Convey NYCE as a site of meaning, illuminating its relationship with the city and speakers’ identities.
Drive viewers — regardless of familiarity — to examine New York City, NYCE, and New Yorkers in new perspectives.
Craft a compelling, true to life story, embodying a New York(er) look and feel with high execution quality.
Process
Following my research and goal-setting, I decided on the format of the project: a series of audiovisual collages split into Sounds and Stories.
Sounds would focus on short phrases to explore more fluid typography, while Stories would craft a long-form narrative with a cohesive look and feel to showcase the diversity of thought and sound of NYCE speakers. The narrative investigates the main themes I found most compelling through my research: Speed and Energy, Roughness and Sleekness, and Stigma and Appreciation (or Love and Hate).
Visualizing New York City English:
Sounds
Park Avenue
This collage explores variable rhoticity — the tendency to drop the R, especially right after vowels. Some R-ful words require speakers to adapt to a diphthong when dropping the R (e.g. the stereotypical toidy-toid for thirty-third), which contributes to NYCE having a total range of at least 19 vowels.
Bad Bags Black
This collage explores short-A raising, where certain A sounds are produced more tensed and elongated due to the raising of the tongue in the mouth. This often gets realized as an [ɛə] diphthong, which can make the word bad sound almost like bed when isolated. In NYCE, words like back, am, or happy tend to retain the more lax and open [æ] sound.
Hot Dog Cart
This collage explores the cot-caught split — where O sounds which often merge in other English dialects remain distinct. NYCE can resist this merger thanks to the presence of the [ɔ] vowel, also responsible for the classic cawffee pronunciation. The [ɑ] vowel in hot is more open than [ɔ], and is produced without rounding out the lips.
Visualizing New York City English:
Stories
Impact
Once the project was completed, I conducted interviews to gauge how successful it was in its goals, and what viewers would take away from it.
As for my own takeaways, I found this project to be immensely rewarding not just professionally or academically, but also personally. It was a privilege and a challenge — I was floored and humbled by just how much I learned about this city in the process. The deeper I delved into research, and the more people whose help I got, the more pressure I felt to do it all justice. It isn’t perfect, but it’s some of the best work I’ve done.
Given the richness of NYCE — its social importance, linguistic nuances, and fears of erosion or disappearance — capturing and archiving its sounds is vital. My solutions were constrained by my knowledge, skills, and timeline, but represent possibilities among the endless that could be realized.
It’s imperative that we capture the mood, dreams, frustrations, and spirit of New Yorkers as they exist organically. The city creates stories, but is also created by them every day. We have to tell these stories faithfully, or risk being told a version of a city that does not want us, and that we do not want in return. This research has shown me an incredible number of New Yorks I never knew existed, and so I remain optimistic about all the New Yorks that still can be.
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