Audio Prejudice
Audio Prejudice? The Staten Island Accent
by Robin Locke Monda
Last year I invited Staten Islanders to take an online survey about the sounds of Staten Island. One of the survey questions was, “What sounds do you hate that are specific to Staten Island, and why?” Seventy-six people responded to the question. Answers fell into two equally weighted categories.
Sounds That Staten Islanders Hate
The first category covered machine and vehicle sounds. Almost fifty people cited traffic, screeching brakes, ATVs, garbage trucks, buses, the railroad, dredging, planes and helicopters. A sub-category of machine and vehicle noise included amplified sounds, like horns blaring, ferry announcements, car alarms and construction noises.
The second broad category of hated local sounds falls under what I would call audible human expression. About half of the respondents within this category cited what they perceived to be expressions of rudeness: “people complaining”, “voices of prejudice”, “vulgar/profane language”, “sounds of hatred”, “neighbors fighting”, “mothers telling their little kids…to shut up”, “declarations of preachers and prophets”, “the sound of mediocrity”, “overt religiosity”, and “overt homophobia”.
The other half of respondents within the second category had strong reactions to the local accent and poor grammar. Respondents cited “heavy accents”, “Staten Island accents”, “expressions and accents from the South Shore”, “obnoxious Staten Island accents”, “the dopey way Italians pronounce the food of their culture”, “incorrect English from Staten Islanders”, and “thick, nasal accents.” In some cases it seemed that respondents equated the accent with rude behavior and lack of intelligence.
A House Divided?
As a person born just outside of Boston, I can relate to those who have regional accents. Brooklynites have suffered ridicule in this department for years. People born in southern states often encounter prejudices and preconceived notions of who they are when they move north of the Mason-Dixon line. One example: I know a very intelligent and gifted person who was born in Pennsylvania, near the West Virginia border. He went to ESL classes in New York City to unlearn his regional accent because the people within his profession would not take him seriously.
What is surprising with regard to my survey is this: the respondents are all Staten Islanders. We appear to hate the voices within our own community, not on the basis of the content of their speech, but on the basis of the sound of their speech. At the very least, this is sad. Is this a form of self-loathing? Could it be that we are ashamed of the community we live in? Or is it an issue of perceived class difference?
I suspect that the people who hate the Staten Island accent did not grow up here. They’ve come from other regions of the country and hear their own voice as the norm. But consider this: within many of our local neighborhoods, other accents abound. As respondents to my survey have reported, a walk around Staten Island will bring you encounters with people from India, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Liberia, Mexico, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Russia. Not a single respondent, however, listed a foreign accent or a foreign language as a sound they hated.
The general impression left by the survey is that Staten Islanders find foreign accents interesting and the local accent hateful. I leave you, the reader, to consider why we have this bifurcated attitude.
Photo of Demetrius Felder posters by j for jendetta (flickr) All rights reserved.
