Visualizing New York City English

Design, Project Management, Writing
# Content, Motion, New York City, Research, Storytelling, Typography, Work

Summary

Visualizing New York City English is an audiovisual project celebrating the rich sociolinguistics of New York City.

Sitting at the intersection of history, linguistics, media studies, storytelling, and design, it explores the narratives told about and through “the New York accent,” 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

Significance

Millions of people claim a relationship to NYC, whether they have never stepped foot here or have never left — linking the city with love, hate, amusement, resentment, longing, regret, and everywhere in between, rarely singled down to one feeling. My hope is that by learning more about New York City English (NYCE), viewers can also gain new insights into New York City itself.

Understanding the speech system of the city and the narratives surrounding it can challenge preconceived notions — or explain hidden dynamics for those who had no previous knowledge on the topic at all. It can open up more nuanced, intricate, and vastly more interesting versions and histories of NYC, and deepen our relationships with the city in the process. It can make visitors and new residents more informed, polite, and empathetic towards the community they are navigating through, whether for a single day or for the rest of their lives.

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.

— E.J. White, You Talkin’ to Me? p. 209

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.”

Key Findings

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).

Scripting

I created a loose script to record with narrators, using phrases that captured both sounds and narratives found in my research. To avoid putting words into anyone’s mouth, I instructed each person to use the descriptions in a sentence however it felt true to them (e.g. “Some people say New York is…”).

Recording

I recorded with 13 speakers over January and February of 2022. In addition to the script, I asked my narrators additional questions to add more nuance to the content. These included "Where or when do you find peace in New York?", "How do you reconcile the love and hate that the city gets?", and "How do you ultimately feel about your accent, or New York accents in general?"

Audio Editing

After going through a few rounds of filtering to find the best flow of content, I mixed the audio on Audition. I left pauses as short as possible, even overlapping some, to convey the NYCE conversation style — as if all speakers are sitting around a table talking to each other. A background jazz soundtrack helped complement the pace of the speech and smooth over discrepancies between clips.

Moodboard

I used Pinterest to find typography-focused images that inspired me: some based on letterforms, others on texture or layering treatments, and other simply on their “New Yorkness.” Capturing a wide spectrum of time periods and formal influences, the final board skews retro, with a sense of nostalgia inspired by my secondary research.

See Moodboard

Motion Design

On AfterEffects, I used sliding transitions with varying directions to convey a feeling of energy, excitement, even unpredictability. Rough edge and wiggle effects timed to speakers' laughter add another level of liveliness and movement to the text.

Previous slide

Next slide

Finished Works

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.

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.

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.

Tina Solo