Metapragmatic Comments And Orthographic Performances Of A New York Accent On Youtube

This paper adopts a metapragmatic approach (Urban, 2006) to analyze responses to YouTube videos on 'how to talk like a New Yorker' in a corpus of YouTube comments (N = 2,649). The analysis illustrates how linguistic features associated with this way of talking are experienced and negotiated by locals and non-locals in their metapragmatic comments and performances of the accent and how they come to be socially recognized as indexical of a certain set of speaker attributes (Agha, 2005; Bolander, 2016). Analyzing user-generated reactions to linguistic variation complements traditional variationist work by illustrating how people experience sociolinguistic difference (Leone-Pizzighella & Rymes, 2017; Rymes, 2014). It also shows how digital sharing and commenting practices expose shifts in language ideologies that mirror the changing status of American English within the Inner Circle.