Scientists Claim Brooklyn Accent Doesn't Exist

Photo by Gage Skidmore

BROOKLYN, NY — A lengthy and instantly controversial report posted to the Atlas Obscura travel site this cold, dark Thursday has taken the position — based on interviews with various esteemed and instantly unlikeable linguists — that New Yorkers' accents are distinguishable not by which borough they claim, but instead by their socioeconomic and ethnic grouping.

"There’s no Brooklyn accent," the author writes. "It’s just a New York accent, and the mere fact that someone’s from Brooklyn is extremely unlikely to indicate anything about the way that person speaks."

One of the report's foremost sources is Kara Becker, a New Jersey native who plans to set up an online experiment to test her hypothesis. (Her hypothesis being, again, that there is NO SUCH THING AS A BROOKLYN ACCENT.)

Via Atlas Obscura:

Her experiment, a website which is nearly ready to launch, supplies audio of various New Yorkers reading a set passage, and asks visitors to the site to guess which of the five boroughs the visitor thinks the speaker is from. “I would love to find out that there are things that distinguish a Queens accent from a Brooklyn accent!” says Becker.

But she, along with the other linguists I interviewed, is extremely doubtful that she’ll discover any such difference.

Read the full report at Atlas Obscura. And tell us, in the comments or by email: Blasphemy? Junk science? Or have you been convinced that native Brooklynites are indeed condemned to the same speech patterns as dem ruffians up in the Bronx?