So long to the Brooklyn accent:
The first thing theatergoers will notice about the revival of "A View of the Bridge," Arthur Miller's 1950s drama about a working-class Italian-American family in Red Hook, is that the characters are speaking a different language: Brooklynese. You got a problem with that!?
You can hear the mellifluous — some might say grating — dialect being celebrated on Broadway by Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber. But that may be the only place. Linguists say features of the classic accent are heard less and less in the city itself, especially among the younger generation. Mocked and stereotyped, the long o's and w's have fallen out of favor, unless you're auditioning for a mob film.
A lot of other accents are disappearing, too. You don't hear that many deep-South drawls or New England twangs anymore. They're all being swamped by TV the flat, perfect tones of TV newscasterese. Too bad -- we're losing a lot of regional charm.
