New York City English, or Metropolitan New York English, is a regional dialect of American English spoken by many people in New York City and much of its surrounding metropolitan area. It is described by sociolinguist William Labov as the most recognizable regional dialect in North America. Its pronunciation system—the New York accent—is widely represented in American media with many public figures and fictional characters. Major features of the accent include a high, gliding vowel (in words like talk and caught); a split of the "short a" vowel into two separate sounds; variable dropping of r sounds; and a lack of the cot–caught, Mary–marry–merry, and hurry–furry mergers heard in many other American accents. Today, New York City English is associated particularly with urban New Yorkers of lower or mid socioeconomic status, descended from 19th- and 20th-century European immigrants. It is spoken in all five boroughs of the City and Long Island's Nassau County, as well as in varying degrees among speakers in Suffolk County (Long Island), Westchester County, and Rockland County of New York State, plus Hudson and Bergen Counties in northeastern New Jersey. History The origins of many of New York City English's diverse features are probably not recoverable. New York City English, largely with the same major pronunciation system popularly recognized today, was first reproduced in literature and scientifically documented in the 1890s. It was then, and still mostly is, associated with ethnically diverse European-American native-English speakers. The entire Mid-Atlantic United States, including both New York City and the Delaware Valley (whose own distinct dialect centers around Philadelphia and Baltimore) shares certain key features, including a high vowel with a glide (sometimes called the aww vowel) as well as a phonemic split of the short a vowel, (making gas and gap, for example, have different vowels sounds)—New York City's split not identical though to Philadelphia's. Linguist William Labov has pointed out that a similarly structured (though differently pronounced) split is found today even in the southern accents of England; thus, a single common origin of this split may trace back to colonial-era England. New York City became an urban economic power in the eighteenth century, with the city's financial elites maintaining close ties with the British Empire even after the Revolutionary War. According to Labov, New York City speakers' loss of the r sound after vowels (incidentally, not found in the nearby Delaware Valley) began as a nineteenth-century