Do You Have A New Orleans Accent?

Flags that have flown over New Orleans

It seems we are going to get into a rut of starting each installment with a quotation.  Let's get that part out of the way and start with a quote from the late, great Wolcott Gibbs who was giving advice to New Yorker editor Katherine White when he wrote the following in 1937.

Quoth Gibbs:

"This magazine is on the whole liberal about expletives. The only test I know of is whether or not they are really essential to the author's effect. "Son of a bitch," "bastard" and many others can be used whenever it is the editor's judgment that that is the only possible remark under the circumstances. When they are gratuitous, when the writer is just trying to sound tough to no especial purpose, they come out."

This blog is not particularly liberal about expletives, as regular readers have no doubt noticed.  Your humble narrator deplores the general coarsening of public dialogue and culture (with all apologies in advance to future President Trump) and he eschews salty language and "sailor talk."

Now, with that out of the way, let's start a genteel conversation over tea and crumpets and cucumber sandwiches with the crust cut off---

The New Orleans accent is as varied and mysterious to most people as are most other things in this wonderful city Frau Schmitt and I call home.  Some people arrive expecting to hear a Southern drawl. They are soon disappointed.

New Orleans is located in the South, but it isn't really part of the South.  It is its own island.  New Orleans is a predominantly Roman Catholic city, especially the part in which we live, but that doesn't mean it is part of the Bible Belt.  As a long-established major port city, New Orleans' polyglot population has interbred and intermixed and juxtaposed its myriad tongues into a form of speech that can be heard elsewhere in other port cities, but not in the rest of the South.

You'll read that a New Orleans accent most closely approximates a Brooklyn accent, and that is true much of the time.  My accent, which comes by way of the New York side of Connecticut, sounds enough like a New York accent that some people mistake me for a transplanted Manhattanite.  In some parts of New Orleans, though, I'm mistook for a native.

Notice that I said I am mistaken for a native in some parts of New Orleans.  In other parts of the city I'm mistaken for an Englishman. The city is a Pandora's box of accents depending upon in which neighborhood you land.  When Frau Schmitt and I first visited the Lower 9th Ward, we could barely understand what anyone was telling us.  The accent there is that different.  The same can be said in Gert Town, in Zion City, in the East, in Versailles, in Uptown, and in the Irish Channel.  Don't even get me started on Yat Speak.

Frau Schmitt, who heralds from Hamburg (that's a port city in Germany that you may have heard of) always tells people we moved here from Boston, which is true.  People from here always say when she says that, "I thought you had a different accent from here."  They never question that she isn't originally from Boston.  Boston may as well be on the moon.  In a lot of ways, it is, from a New Orleanian's vantage.



We know where we come from.  Our destination is clear.  We keep our word in faith, not in fear.  You can call us classical, modern, or retro as long as you never consider us so-so.

Like the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (Frie und Hansastädt Hamburg), New Orleans has salt on its tongue and our river is might.

If you can't get to Hamburg, you can always follow your Nola.



If you aren't particularly interested in slick commercials trying to sell you a vision of the city you're visiting, you can stay with us.  Believe me, there is a physical New Orleans in which we all live, and then there is also a New Orleans of the mind.  Find the best of both worlds on Esplanade Avenue.  Think about staying at La Belle Esplanade where you can talk like you want to and say what you mean----just say it with the same mouth you use to kiss ya mamma.

À votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade
Where every morning is a curated breakfast salon.