History
Louisiana’s dialects compose the most diverse and eclectic vernaculars found in the continental United States. Allan A. Metcalf discusses the socioeconomic associations linked with speakers of Yat. He notes that Yats mostly live near the Irish Channel in blue collar neighborhoods. The dialect's connotation with the working class, white population encodes the speaker’s identities. Metcalf describes the historical linguistic setting of Louisiana from the Choctaw to the French along with Spanish and English :.
The origins of the accent are described in A. J. Liebling's book, The Earl of Louisiana, in a passage that was used as a foreword to John Kennedy Toole's well-known posthumously published novel about New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces:
| “ | There is a New Orleans city accent . . . associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans. | ” |
Today, few citizens of German or Irish background occupy the Third Ward, however, the presence of immigrant groups in the city of New Orleans has inevitably lead to the formation of the Yat dialect
Historically, the city of New Orleans has been home to people of French and Spanish heritage, as well as those of African heritage, which led to the creation of the Louisiana Creole language. This city came under U.S. rule in the Louisiana Purchase, and over the course of the 19th century, the city transitioned from speaking French to becoming a non-rhotic English speaking society. Similarly, much of the south has historically spoken non-rhotic English. The city's geographic isolation has helped lead to the creation of a new local dialect.
A misconception in other parts of the US is that the local dialect of New Orleans is Cajun. The city's cultural and linguistic traditions are distinct from that of the predominantly rural Acadiana, an area spanning across South Louisiana. While there has been an influx of Cajuns into the city since the oil boom of the later 20th century and while there are some similarities due to shared roots, Cajun culture has had relatively little influence upon Creole culture and thus Yat culture. The confusion of Cajun culture with the Creole culture is largely due to the confusion of these French cultures by the tourism and entertainment industries; sometimes deliberately as "Cajun" was discovered to be a potentially lucrative marketing term.
A Yat accent is considered an identity marker of white, metropolitan people who have been raised in the greater New Orleans area. Speakers with a New Orleans accent are typically proud of their accent as it organically stems from the historical mixing of language and culture. As an African-American population has occupied New Orleans prior to 1803 before the presence of many other Western European immigrants, black New Orleanians share more lingual characteristics with the white, (predominantly working class) population than in most other communities in the Southern, United States. This distinctive accent has been dying generationally in the city due to white flight of the city, but remains very strong in the suburbs.
Read more about this topic: Yat Dialect
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