BROOKLYNESE IN THE BIG EASY? At Lincoln Center's post-Katrina fundraiser Saturday night, Laurence Fishburne trotted out Henry "Brooklyn Boy" Miller's remark about the congeniality of New Orleans [see September 17, 2005]. Then he referred to the "strange Brooklyn-ny kind of accent" one hears around the Big Easy.

This linguistic phenomenon has been noticed by many besides Fishburne. For instance, the mailing list of the American Dialect Society (ADS) has been peppered lately with references to the "Brooklyn dipthong" and the pronunciation "boid" when speaking of a feathered animal.

Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary touches on the subject at Slate. William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania examines it in some detail in "Diffusion to New Orleans," starting on Page 19 of his June 5, 2005 draft paper Transmission and Diffusion (available on PDF at his website).