When people talk about the “New York accent,” they really ought to be more specific. There’s the near-midwestern voice of Western New York, the New England-tinged sound of the Capital Region, and the various cultural influences that make up the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens And Staten accents. We’ve also got Long Island — sorry, Lawn Guy Land — which can now be heard on the island’s crosswalk signs.
Crossing signs have long made noise as an accessibility measure, telling those with impaired vision when the road is safe to cross, but I’ve long wondered how someone would use those little ticking sounds to determine which direction is safe to walk in. It tuns out the solution is to add a voice, informing walkers which direction they should move in, and it also turns out that adding voice to Long Island’s roads is extremely funny.
The Long Island accent is just so distinct, so immediately recognizable even within the mélange of accents that make up New York. We’ve all heard it in words like cawfee, mawll, or dawg, when said by men in wraparound Oakleys talking into their front phone camera from the driver’s seat of their F150 to complain about congestion pricing. I even once knew a girl, back in college, whose level of inebriation could be determined by how hard the G got in her pronunciation of Lawn Guy Land.
Long Islanders rejoice, your street signs now sound like you. I firmly believe this should be extended to every area with a unique accent, so we can all appreciate the varied sounds of this country a little bit more.