Jewish accent?

March 25, 2010 2:27 PM

American Jewish Accent?

Can anyone explain to a less than informed non Jewish non American why there appears to be a "Jewish Accent" evident in prominent Jewish celebrities such as Adam Sandler and David Schwimmer?

posted by Biru to Society & Culture (38 answers total)

They spend a lot of time in New York?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:30 PM on March 25, 2010

Because their parents and peers spoke that way growing up, and their parents' parents and their peers' parents spoke that way? Why does anyone have an accent?
posted by jckll at 2:31 PM on March 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

I don't hear much of an accent in them, particularly in Schwimmer, but I wouldn't say it's so much Jewish as New Yorkishness (which itself has a hefty dose of Jewishness). Schwimmer apparently was born on Long Island and moved to LA when he was two, so at the very least he probably picked up speech patterns from his parents.

There might be a little more openness in certain vowels -- "hahrrable" instead of "horrible," for example. The cadence and tone might reflect the patterns that historically came from Yiddish or German.

You might check out Jon Stewart for some of the same. I wouldn't say that he has what you'd call a stereotypically New Yawk accent, but especially when he gets wound up you can see sort of the broad strokes of tone and humor that many Jewish comedians have had. Then again, it's the kind of thing that I didn't notice so much until my mom pointed it out.
posted by Madamina at 2:36 PM on March 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Michael Bloomberg
posted by Threeway Handshake at 2:37 PM on March 25, 2010

Jon Stewart Stuart Lebowitz is indeed Jewish but grew up in NJ. A fine point, but...
posted by jckll at 2:38 PM on March 25, 2010

Oh, oops, I thought you were asking for an example of one.
But yeah, "being in New York" is what you're hearing.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 2:39 PM on March 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

What most Americans think of as a "Jewish" accent is really more like a New York/New Jersey accent and this is pretty clear if you hang around a lot in New York or New Jersey.

Or, another explanation is that you don't notice it in celebrities that you don't know are Jewish.

My older relatives who were one generation away from their home countries had accents that were much more like the countries they came from [Poland, Russia] than anything you'd consider Jewish, but it melded into a NY/NJ accent once they moved to the US. Amusingly my grandmother grew up in a household where Yiddish was spoken at home, but watched a lot of television and movies to learn how to speak "proper" American and she was always cracking us up because she spoke this weird sort of fancypants sounding english [think To-MAH-toe and RAW-thr] but it was prefereable to her because she didn't sound "like an immigrant"
posted by jessamyn at 2:42 PM on March 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think it's a Northeastern US accent, mostly NY. My Jewish friends (in Texas) with family originally from the Northeast have a tinge of it, but the ones who don't don't have any discernible accent, other than sometimes a Texas one.
posted by ishotjr at 2:43 PM on March 25, 2010

More to the point if you hear Israelis speaking English, depending where they learned English, they do not necessarily sound Jewish like Americans in the Northeast sound. There is an Israeli accent that isn't really anything like how New Yorkers sound; I used to think you could hear it when Natalie Portman spoke but I'm not so sure anymore.
posted by jessamyn at 2:44 PM on March 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's possible that they simply identify with being Jewish, and therefore adopt some of the more subtle (and not so subtle) ways of expressing that affiliation, such as accent features. This can be both consciously and unconsciously motivated or expressed.
posted by iamkimiam at 2:44 PM on March 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Um. Michael Bloomberg has a Boston accent. Completely different than what the OP is asking about.
posted by dfriedman at 2:45 PM on March 25, 2010

Sandler isn't from New York. He (like fellow Jew Sarah Silverman) is from New Hampshire. That's why his accent is so...mushy sounding?
posted by SassHat at 2:47 PM on March 25, 2010

Can anyone explain to a less than informed non Jewish non American why there appears to be a "Jewish Accent" evident in prominent Jewish celebrities such as Adam Sandler and David Schwimmer?

I don't hear any particular accent when these two actors speak.
posted by pinky at 2:48 PM on March 25, 2010

There might be a little more openness in certain vowels -- "hahrrable" instead of "horrible," for example.

This is just the standard New York pronunciation, although it's disappearing among Kids These Days.
posted by decagon at 2:51 PM on March 25, 2010

Hmm. I'm an American Jew and my first thought is that there isn't. It's possible that several different regional American accents, from a few large cities where Jews tend to live, sound alike to you, and that you just happened to pick up on the Jewish celebrities with those accents. Personally I don't think of Schwimmer as having an accent, and Sandler's speech I'd mostly describe as "annoying." (Then again I don't watch or listen to him much, because I think he's, well, annoying.) I'm talking about people born in America, here - as for older, immigrant Jews, I think there is a typical accent, and that's because people who grow up speaking Yiddish and various Eastern European languages would naturally sound alike when they switch to English.
posted by DestinationUnknown at 2:54 PM on March 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

As another data point, my friend has some of the traits you describe of this accent, and she's an Irish Catholic from Long Island.
posted by ishotjr at 2:54 PM on March 25, 2010

Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg has what sounds to me like a Massachusetts accent. And one that's indistinguishable from any other in Greater Boston.

People of ethnicities that first settled in urban enclaves often have distinguishable accents, but it's the accent of the specific region that other people who grew up in the area but don't share the ethnicity would share.

For example, there's a sub-dialect that people familiar with Boston would associate with Italian-Americans. It's a very subtle deviation from standard, but if you know the speech of the region you detect it. This is the accent of Boston's North Shore where Italian is generally the most prominent ethnicity. My cousins who grew up in Nahant speak the same way; to the best of our knowledge none of our ancestors came from Italy. Very probably people were speaking with that local inflection before there were any Italians living there, since the migration is mostly post-war. Similarly, I know some Italian-Americans who were raised near the Cape, and they have the subtle intonations of the South Shore, where your best guess at someone's heritage is Irish.
posted by Mayor Curley at 2:56 PM on March 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Jewish celebrities such as Adam Sandler and David Schwimmer

Do you have other examples? Because what these two have in common (IMO) is a nasally, (somewhat) whiny voice, with a dry, morose, monotone delivery. I don't think it has anything to do with being Jewish, because others have this same delivery. Ray Romano, for example.
posted by peep at 3:12 PM on March 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Ray Romano = Lawn Guyland, so nthing that this is a Northeastern US accent and not so much a Jewish one. So, nu?
posted by fixedgear at 3:24 PM on March 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

I've got a friend who's sociolinguistics PhD thesis is about New York accents. She says (I didn't just ask her this, I'm remembering it, so it could be all sorts of wrong) that there *are* certain features of certain New York accents that are believed to have Yiddish origins.

First of all, its worth clarifying what you mean by 'accent'. Is it strictly phonological? There's probably some combination of syntactic, lexical, and phonological items that mark this type of speech for you, but I've gotta be honest, I don't notice any of these features in the celebrities you mentioned. I mean, Adam Sandler...he just kind of talks crazy, no? Like a muppet or something.

She focuses on phonology, and I think she said the way you hear some people from the NYC area pronounce g's in words like "singer". In most American dialects, you just get the nasal here, no voiced velar stop, whereas in words like "linger" and "finger", you get the /g/ in many American accents. IIRC that /g/ in "singer" is believed to be a Yiddishism.

Then, there are lexical items. Sandy Cohen on The OC puts a "schmear" on his bagels. They make a big deal out of this in one of the early episodes, to mark him as the East Coast Jewish guy who's not like all these California people (such nuanced writing from McG and his team!).

Last, there are syntactic differences. Some linguists think that certain syntactic patterns in certain New York dialects like topicalization are the result of Yiddish influences. I think the canonical example is "A Cadillac he drives" vs. standard "He drives a Cadillace." This paper on the topic I believe I first came across on ask.metafilter (see what I did there?).

Basically, anything that marks the speech of the Linda Richman Coffee Talk character on Saturday Night Live as being different from Mike Myers normal speech is pretty much a Yiddish influence on New York English dialects. She says "singer" with the /g/, she peppers her speech with Yiddish loanwords, and she topicalizes. Comedians do mad linguistics research all the time but they never have time to publish.

So, these dialectical differences result from large numbers of Yiddish speakers who also speak English being in the area, sort of like how now NYC dialects are starting to acquire some features from English/Spanish bilingual New Yorkers (note: this is controversial).

I don't really know if this relates to your question about the celebrities, but...I think when people in this thread are pointing out that what you may perceive as a Jewish accent is really a New York accent isn't quite right, in fact, its kind of backwards: certain New York accents are what they are because New York has long been home to a large Yiddish-speaking Jewish population.
posted by jeb at 3:34 PM on March 25, 2010 [10 favorites]

What most Americans think of as a "Jewish" accent is really more like a New York/New Jersey accent and this is pretty clear if you hang around a lot in New York or New Jersey.

Yes and no. There is certainly a baseline New York/New Jersey accent, but there are clear differences: Howard Stern sounds different from Tony Soprano (but both are textbook examples of the baseline accent.) Jews also tend to throw in some Yiddish (schmuck, yenta, mensch) that also acts as a language marker.
posted by three blind mice at 3:34 PM on March 25, 2010

Because their parents and peers spoke that way growing up, and their parents' parents and their peers' parents spoke that way? Why does anyone have an accent?

Peers, yes, parents, no. Think of any first generation person you know whose parents are from the old country. Parents retain the old country accent, kids sound whatever they hear around them.
posted by IndigoJones at 3:45 PM on March 25, 2010

Richard Lewis is from New Jersey. Would one describe his speaking style as more quintessentially Jewish or more quintessentially New Jerseyan?

What you're hearing is part "tri-state area" accent and part "Jewish comedian". Since that Jewish comedy style used to be based in New York City, naturally there's some overlap.
posted by Joe Beese at 3:46 PM on March 25, 2010

Not to get too technical here, but what I think you and many people are picking up on here are features of speech styles that are linked to (indexical of) particular social meanings. This is part of what is known as Third Wave variationist sociolinguistics, and it is being pioneered by many people, but probably arguably most importantly by Penny Eckert (also linked above) these days.

From her website:
"...the Third Wave focuses on the social meaning of variables. It views styles, rather than variables, as directly associated with identity categories, and explores the contributions of variables to styles. In so doing, it departs from the dialect-based approach of the first two waves, and views variables as located in layered communities."

This loosely means that certain variables (the length of a vowel, the aspiration of a 't', the rising intonation at the end of a phrase) come to be associated with one or more social groups or identities. People recognize this, although mostly not on any conscious level. The grouping of bunches of these features and associations create multiple 'callouts' to different social categories and influences (it's called 'bricolage' in sociolinguistics)...it is this patchwork that lets us know (and let's us express), at an almost imperceptible level, that a person is say, Jewish and from LA, or gay and from the South, or articulate and nerdy, whatever. These aren't hard and fast rules, they're ever changing, and constantly being reassigned to new categories and taking on new meanings. All of it, all at once.

But there is a style there, and we're picking up on it and giving it right back. We're also folding in accent features, dialect features. And we're playing these up and down based on context and our intentions. We can't help it; it's what we do, and it's AWESOME.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:52 PM on March 25, 2010 [7 favorites]

First of all, the North Jersey accent and South Jersey accent are totally different, so all of these references to a New Jersey accent are just wrong unless you're more specific.

There's a definite Jewish accent among my parents and their Jewish friends from Philly and South Jersey. It's not a Philly accent, it's not a South Jersey accent, it's its own thing and I know an older Jewish person from that area when I hear one. It's something about the cadence in which they speak, and the word order they use, in addition to the accent. As a non-linguist it's a bit hard to explain. They often put the accent on a different part of the sentence than another person would. I should note that these are, for the most part, American-born children of immigrants. I never really noticed it in myself or among my peers growing up, but maybe it was still there but less than the generation before, cause when I lived in Cleveland my Ohioan boyfriend used to make me repeat the word "horrible" over and over because of the "Jewish-y" way I said it.
posted by amro at 5:02 PM on March 25, 2010

Also, my parents and most of their friends probably grew up in primarily Jewish communities in Philly, but my Jewish peers and I grew up in mostly Italian and Irish suburbs. That could also account somewhat for the loss of (or lessened) Jewish accent among my age group.
posted by amro at 5:06 PM on March 25, 2010

Grew up in a mostly Jewish suburb of Chicago and the only people with that accent were the ones from New York. My relatives in small-town Michigan also have exactly none of it - my Israeli uncle has an accent but it's not that one.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:10 PM on March 25, 2010

Going on what amro said, and similar to destinationunknown, growing up Jewish in the midwest, the only time an accent popped out was when an adult tried to sound more "authentically Jewish" by apeing the New York Jewish accent. On second thought, I'd say that it might not be as much an accent on specific words, as it is a kind of cadence. Listening to the way Jewish comedians tell jokes, as opposed to non-Jewish comedians, I'd argue there is a difference in delivery. One or two words might be stressed differently, but on the whole, the rhythm of the sentences is different.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:31 PM on March 25, 2010

Ray Romano = Lawn Guyland, so nthing that this is a Northeastern US accent and not so much a Jewish one.

New York is not the Northeast. :P
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:39 PM on March 25, 2010

New York is not the Northeast. :P

Uh, yeah it is. Though I disagree that there's a uniform northeastern US accent.
posted by amro at 5:47 PM on March 25, 2010

The accent is New York/New Jersey; it's the intonation &/or inflection that is particularly Jewish, and, as mentioned above, is based on the cadence of spoken German/Yiddish.

Compare Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in the Princess Bride (New York Jewish accent) to Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (New York non-Jewish accent).

(IANALinguist.)
posted by elizardbits at 7:18 PM on March 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Not all Jews are linguistically descended from German and Yiddish. A mizrahi Jew's accent might sound more like that of a native speaker of Arabic. So it really couldn't be correct to call any one accent a Jewish one.
posted by clockzero at 7:30 PM on March 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Because lots of Eastern European Jews came to the US around the same time, and emigrated to the same cities.

Same reason people in New Orleans talk kinda like people from Jersey.
posted by Afroblanco at 8:12 PM on March 25, 2010

i consider it more of a new york/jersey/etc accent than a jewish one, per se. signed, new york jew
posted by sdn at 8:47 PM on March 25, 2010

Not all Jews are linguistically descended from German and Yiddish.

The majority of Jews in North America are Ashkenazim. The majority of Jews in the entire world are Ashkenazim. Furthermore, the American Jewish population is the single highest concentration of Ashkenazim in the world. This makes it rather less unreasonable than you'd think to call American English with an Eastern European/Yiddish inflection a "Jewish accent".
posted by elizardbits at 3:09 AM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

IANAL (but I am a Jew.) I agree with elizardbits that a lot of it is in the cadence. To my ear, a Bostonion Jew and a New York Jew have different accents, but often share a few quirks in cadence.

The cadence I'm thinking of is sort of a singsong lilt with some extraneous question marks thrown in. I associate it with studying Talmud, which may be how it came to the U.S. (and to English.)

There's also a sort of self-effacing or even submissive thing going on with a lot of Jewish male speakers, as if they're almost apologizing for speaking to you, that both Schwimmer and Sandler have (although Schwimmer much more so.)
posted by callmejay at 5:55 AM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

Amusingly my grandmother grew up in a household where Yiddish was spoken at home, but watched a lot of television and movies to learn how to speak "proper" American and she was always cracking us up because she spoke this weird sort of fancypants sounding english [think To-MAH-toe and RAW-thr] but it was prefereable to her because she didn't sound "like an immigrant"

My grandmother grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household too, and she also speaks like this! I always assumed it was just an idiolectic thing (or aspirational; we are from Massachusetts and her accent sounds not unlike a stereotypical Boston Brahmin accent).
posted by threeants at 7:12 AM on March 26, 2010

Thirding elizardbits. Your litmus test, I think, is Jackie Mason. If he epitomizes what you mean, we're really talking about a Yiddishe inflection more than a Jewish accent (even though Mason has that as well).
posted by troywestfield at 9:07 AM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]