Many Americans look down on the speech of New Yorkers, and many New Yorkers themselves don’t like they way they talk. As a matter of fact, until a few decades ago students of Manhattan High Schools were given diagnostic exams and, if needed, speech classes to get rid of their accent, and many New York colleges required voice and diction courses targeted at certain local particularities. The best known of the features which characterise what is often called Brooklynese (more because of Brooklyn’s status as an icon of city life than for any specific linguistic reason) is the vowel of words like coffee, caught, talked, saw, which makes coffee rather sound like cu-uhfee. A similar process applies to the short a in cab or pass or avenue, which makes a New Yorker speak of ki-ubbs which pi-uhss on Fifth i-uhvenue. (Whereas in the surrounding areas all words with a short a are pronounced i-uh, in New York this does not affect the short a in pat, cap, average, etc. – this is the so-called “short a split” of New York). However, there is also one aspect of their dialect of which New Yorkers seem to be proud, and that is their vocabulary: stickball, schlep, salugi, like a dradel and what a schmuck! are all typical of New York. The appeal of these words lies in their invocation of immigrant roots, and this makes the New York dialect, and the city itself, something of a counterpoint to mainstream Anglo America. This is where the disparagement comes from. Today, however, speaking like a New Yorker is no longer a social and professional handicap. Many middle-class New Yorkers of all ethnicities use the dialect, to say nothing of billionaires like Donald Trump. In assuming a New York middle-class dialect, these speakers leave behind a speech commonly associated with their ethnic communities. This working class minority speech has taken on the outsider status the classic Brooklynese has left behind. (Newman, Michael: “New York Tawk”, in: Wolfram, W. & Ward, B. (eds.): American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006: 82-7).