While in a hotel room the other night, I watched a few episodes of MTV’s The Jersey Shore. For those living on Mars these past two years, the show follows a group of young ‘Jersey’ layabouts during a raucous summer on the titular coastline. If ‘The Decline and Fall of the American Empire’ is ever written, this show warrants its own chapter.
By the way, Americans might note an intentional error in the above paragraph: the ‘Jerseyites’ in ‘The Jersey Shore’ are mostly not from New Jersey. Three out of eight of the original cast members are in fact from Staten Island, a working-class borough of New York City. Hence, their accents are more traditional New York than contemporary Jersey, exemplified by JS cast member Vinny Guadagnino:
Note Guadagnino’s non-rhotic accent, particularly repeated r-less pronunciations of ‘hair’ (as hɛ:).
Many New Jersey residents take offense to ‘The Jersey Shore,’ particularly as it passes off young New Yorkers as representatives of Jersey culture. And much of this, I believe, is a matter of speech.
Some New Jersey accents indeed fall into the spectrum of New York City metropolitan English. However, as I’ve said here before, my impression is that the ‘New York City-accented’ part of New Jersey doesn’t extend much further west than Paterson and much further South than Edison. And as strongholds of non-rhoticity like Hoboken and Jersey City are becoming increasingly attractive to affluent commuters, such accents are perhaps getting rarer by the day.
So is it possible that the producers of the show hand-picked cast members with accents that conform to stereotypes? Beyond the three Staten Islanders, the remaining males on the show include a Bronx native and a Rhode Islander (the non-rhotic RI accent is not entirely dissimilar from traditional New York). Some are perhaps right to take offense; there is only one Jersey accent in the bunch.
In reality, of course, the state has a wonderful variety of accents. There is the NYC-influenced accent mentioned above, of course. Accents in the Northwest part of the state, meanwhile, are much more strongly ‘Northern’-sounding (I’ve noted a monopthongal /o/ in GOAT for some speakers), while accents in the rural Pine Barrens almost sound slightly Southern. So it’s best not to reach conclusions based on what one sees on TV.
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Interesting. I didn’t know they were mostly not New Jerseyites. Do New Yorkers say “the shore,” “the shoreline,” “the coast,” “the beach,” or “the ocean”?
Gore Vidal was a few years too early to mention “The Jersey Shore” in his The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (which, of course, isn’t really a history like the Roman one).
New Yorkers say ‘the shore’ if it’s the jersey Shore. The say ‘the beach’ if it “Rockaway Beach,”……
Very unbookish of me, but I had no idea Gore Vidal already wrote that book!
In the South Jersey/Philly area, it’s definitely “the shore”, or, more specifically, “down the shore”.
Having been brought up in South Jersey (about a half hour east of Philly), I was certainly struck by the abundance of New York-ish accents when I went to Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ (in the center of the state). Very few students were from the South.
Depending on which town you visit along the Jersey shore, you encounter strikingly different numbers of speakers with North Jersey/New York accents. I didn’t hear them that much in Ocean City, for example, but I heard them a lot in Seaside Heights. (It’s been a while since I’ve spent any significant time “down the shore”.)
And no, I’ve never watched that show!
“Jersey Shore” is very popular with some viewers, but the picture it conjures of NJ (where I live) is one more example of the bad rap NJ has had forever. Th state has three major accent areas, conveniently divided for the most part, into north, central and south.
As one would expect, the NYC accent spills over into the north and the Philadelphia accent in the south; the center? Some aspects of both. Non-rhoticity shows up in words like corner, where the first r is not voiced, but the last r is rhotic, in central NJ – cawner. In the north, it sounds more like cawnuh. There are dialect pockets all over the state which do not fit most of the stereotypes ginned up by the north, central, south paradigm.
From what i hear the most southern part of NJ is borderline ‘southern’ accent. the southernmost tip of NJ is on the same latitude as DC (farther south than Baltimore), and then there’s the Delaware accent (which i don’t really know well).
Delaware strikes me as pretty close to Baltimore and Philly, accent wise. Once you get to the mid-Atlantic, you do encounter some glide deletion, although it’s much more limited in scope than in the South.
I’m actually from that southern most tip (quite literally). Since moving away from NJ, I’ve had a couple people ask me if I’m from the south while I had never thought of my speech as southern in the slightest, nor that of my 20-30s peers. BUT, my grandmother and her siblings (all lifelong residents) had a clear enough southern tinge that I never noticed the difference between their speech and my grandfather’s from Alabama.
An aside, Jersey Shore may not be representative of locals but it’s not much more extreme than the behavior of the plethora of rich New Yorkers and Philadelphians that would visit my tourist town every summer to party at the shore.
One of my roommates has a friend from northwestern New Jersey. She sounds very “Northern” indeed. This is even more the case with my roommate from the Scranton area in northeastern Pennsylvania which borders northwestern New Jersey. She could probably pass as a Chicagoan. She once pointed to pieces of pineapple on a plate in our kitchen and said that her friend “caught the fruit”. In my head there was a wild pineapple with legs hopping around in a forest and her friend hiding in the shadows, waiting for it to fall into his cleverly disguised hole in the forest floor. Maybe you guys can guess what she really said
Scranton can sound very upper-midwestern. I remember having a classmate from there my freshman year in college, and speculating that she might be from Minnesota! (I was not very aware of regional speech differences then). According to William Labov, the area partially participates in the Northern Cities shift, so it’s not surprising there is a bit of a Chicago-like accent in Scranton.
haha I had to repeat that aloud in my (probably terrible) fake NJ accent to catch that one.
I think I mentioned that once a coworker from California had to speak “Joizey” for a moment to be understood by her colleagues at our New Jersey jobs. It was rather embarrassing all around.
(It involved the Don/Dawn merger.)
Yes, I recall reading this ages ago. One of the things that binds all jersey accents is that they are generally not lot-thought merged.
What a boring show.