Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Northeastern American English

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was redirect to American English. ugen64 00:14, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Northeastern American English

This article groups the Boston accent and New York-New Jersey English together as a single dialect or dialect cluster, and this isn't well motivated at all. The two dialects don't have much in common at all. The low-vowel merger patterns are in some ways the basic taxonomy of American English dialects, and Boston and New York disagree on all of them. (New York has phonemic æ-tensing and father-bother merger but not cot-caught merger; Boston is the exact opposite.) They are both historically non-rhotic and lack most tense-lax neutralization, but that's no more justification for grouping them together as a single dialect family than it is justified to group Boston and Pittsburgh together because they both have cot-caught merger. The New York accent has more in common with that of Philadelphia than with Boston's. Boston and New York accents aren't even geographically contiguous, and they don't share a common historical origin; Western New England intercedes between them and always has, and has completely different features (rhotic, tense-lax neutralizing, etc.).

In short, I recommend to delete this article because there is no such dialect or dialect family as "Northeastern American English". The differences between NY and Boston English are more fundamental than the similarities; and the posited "Northeastern" dialect ignores the existence of Western New England, which is also in the Northeast. The content of this article should be moved back to Boston accent and New York-New Jersey English; the similarities between the two accents should be remarked on, but not treated as if they make the two dialects into a single one. AJD 18:49, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Comment. Older works on American dialectology (up through the 1940s) used to group NYC and Eastern New England into a single dialect group, usually called "Eastern" (as oppposed to Northeastern as in this article). The Eastern dialects were opposed to Southern (from Washington DC southwards) and General American (called "Northern" by John Kenyon), which was everything else. But it is true that ENE and NYC didn't share any innovations, the usual criterion by which it is decided whether two dialects descend from a common ancestor. The only innovation they both have, r-dropping, was certainly imported from England, rather than developing independently, and the South got it too, so even r-dropping isn't unique to NYC/ENE. Failing to undergo mergers before intervocalic [r] isn't an innovation either. And even if it were, some Southern accents fail to undergo those mergers too. So it's true, there's nothing (in phonology at least, I don't know enough about dialectal differences in vocabulary to say) that ENE and NYC have in common to the exclusion of all other dialects.

As far as moving content elsewhere, I should point out I'm the one who moved most of the content into this article (it already existed before I did, but there was very little there). But I didn't move anything out of Boston accent and New York-New Jersey English; I moved things out of American English, because that page is getting really long and I thought it would be a good idea to shift some stuff out of a big page and into a small one. As far as voting, I abstain (for now, at least). If the page fails VFD, I'll move the content back into American English. --Angr 19:30, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Delete, as original research, there is no such dialect, text describes a basket of regional influences in un-scientific terms. Wyss 00:53, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Delete or turn into a Disambig between the Boston and New York accents. Gazpacho 00:57, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Weak Delete. Smacks of original research. --Ryan! | Talk 01:20, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, POV original research. Megan1967 05:32, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• As the person responsible for most of the content in the "Pronunciation" section (I take no responsibility for what's in the "Lexicon" section other than giving it that name and the IPA transcription of "ayuh"), I vehemently deny that it is original research or POV. It's based on published descriptions of American regional accents by the likes of John C. Wells and William Labov. And what could be POV about simply describing two accents, making no value judgments about them? If this page gets deleted, its content is going back to American English, so it's important to establish right now that the content doesn't violate Wikipedia policy. --Angr 10:03, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• If any of this material is to be recycled in other articles, then it must not be deleted because the contribution history needs to be preserved for GFDL compliance, and the archive isn't reflected in mirrors. Redirect to American English in that case. --iMb~Mw 11:23, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Well, it looks like majority opinion is for deleting or merging this article. I'll go move the content of the Pronunciation section back to American English, where it came from in the first place. As for the content of the Lexicon section, I don't care if it gets deleted or merged. --Angr 06:18, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.