re: #51 wheat-dogghazi-mailgate

Long Island is like that. North Shore people sound more like New Englanders than “Sout’ Shaw” people. It may be a socioeconomic thing, because the North Shore is more upper class white than the south, generally speaking. My mom had a distinct Brooklyn accent (terlet = toilet) but my dad from Queens had a more generic accent, as his father had lived in Montreal and Chicago, and his mother was a Swedish immigrant. I’ve lived away from the Island so many years that whatever NYC/LI accent I had is mostly gone, but now and again I can hear myself saying “dawg” and “law” with a strong dipthong like N’Yawkuz do.

I do the long o with the weird swallow thing like the upper Midwest/Canadian accent if I’m exposed or think about it. (“Sooo-da. Doooncha know.”)

There’s probably a proper way to describe this but.