Social Class Factors
Many professional-class New Yorkers from high socioeconomic backgrounds often speak with less conspicuous accents; in particular, many, though hardly all, use rhotic pronunciations instead of the non-rhotic pronunciations, while maintaining some less stigmatized features such as the low back chain shift and the short-A split (see below).
Similarly, the children of professional migrants from other parts of the U.S. usually do not have many, if any, New York dialect features, and as these two populations come to dominate the southern half of Manhattan and neighboring parts of Brooklyn, the dialect is in retreat in some of the more gentrified parts of the city. Many teens attending private prep schools are barely linguistically recognizable as New Yorkers except in their pronunciation of the broad A in "water" and other Northeast characteristics. Nevertheless, many New Yorkers, particularly from the middle and working class, maintain a clear New York accent.
Read more about this topic: New York Dialect, Macrosocial Extensions
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