Despite the dearth of linguistic research on South Florida, my place of origin, some linguistic analysis reveals that the majority of my linguistic traits I share in common with the dialect of the New York City area. This is not surprising, since both my parents grew up in the City, as did the parents of a large proportion of my peer group when I was growing up. In this section, I highlight some of the more salient features of my English dialect.
Of particular interest is my apparent acquisition of the complex New York short-a pattern. Although I have not acquired some of the lexical exceptions (such as avenue), I do have the conditioning, albeit in a more continuous pattern than that of a native speaker from New York City. In particular, I do not tend to tense short a before nontautosyllabic nasals, and I do not pronounce the words marry, merry, and Mary the same. Exceptionally, I always tense short a before /ŋ/ (/ng/), which I believe reflects underlying /ey/. You can see the pattern here:
I have also successfully resisted the famous cot-caught merger, despite my tokens being closer to one another (especially before nasals) than those of a New Yorker, and despite my Southern-like inclusion of the word on in the caught class:
While I have avoided most mergers, I do have the typical merger of the /ohr/, /owr/, and /uwr/ vowels:
Particularly non-Southern is the fact that my tokens of /ow/ are all back of center:
Finally, as far as consonants are concerned, I am frequently mocked for my nearly invariable realization of initial str- clusters as something like /ʃtʃɹ/ (/shchr/) as this City Streets example demonstrates:
And that's quite likely to be more than you ever wanted to know about my English dialect. Perhaps you'd like to go back to the home page.