Illustration by Burton Durand
My senior year of high school, in order to appear more “well-rounded” than my triple-lettering in French, theatre, and orchestra would otherwise make me seem to college admission boards, I took anatomy and physiology. I liked my teacher, Dr. Holcomb, who once, in a nostalgic mood, mentioned to the class that he’d had a brief tenure as a monk before marrying for love—we all naturally found this fascinatingand wondered what his wife was like. But Dr. Holcomb’s most memorable trait was not his romantic past, it was his voice—a loud-voweled nasal trumpet that could cut across the twangs and drawls of his Texas-born students like a scimitar. I’ve never been able to successfully imitate or transcribe it—the alphabet doesn’t seem to have the right letters—but it was one of the few great wonders of my high school experience.
When, after I told him that I’d gotten into Tulane, he revealed that he’d grown up in New Orleans—“Nuh-Waahlinz”—I successfully restrained myself from asking “Then why do you sound like a Yankee?”
Thus was my fascination with the Y’at accent born. Y’at, to simplify, is a working-class mostly-but-not-exclusively-white accent found in those neighborhoods in and around New Orleans that saw heavy immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It sounds, at first hearing, like a Jersey accent—or how someone might mimic one. The name “Y’at” comes from the phrase “Where y’at?,” which is short for “Where are you at?” but more nearly means “What’s up?” (That’s why a local entertainment magazine is titled Where Y’at?) Southern accents are usually thought of as occurring across two different axes—they’re strong or faint, and the “R”s are pronounced or not. On the spectrum from Scarlett O’Hara to George W. Bush, Y’at isn’t even on the board. So where did it come from?
I looked up an old college acquaintance, Drew Ward, who had studied linguistics in college and worked as a dialect coach. He offered to drive me around and tell me what he knew about the accent. Our first stop, a little surprisingly, was Valence Street Cemetery, where the names and dates on the headstones illustrated his point that New Orleans had been a huge entry port for the waves of immigration during the post-Civil War Gilded Age—Ellis Island shows up in the movies, but it was far from the only route into the country for aspiring new Americans. Among the expected English and French names, German and Italian ones also graced the headstones: Giovannis and Heinrichs resting among Johns and Mathildes.
As in the Northeast, recently arrived immigrants, largely German and Italian, crowded together in poor and lower-middle-class neighborhoods, where they mixed with immigrants from the other great origin country, Ireland, and gradually learned to understand each other’s attempts at English. Sure, a little French and a little Southern English crept in—Y’at speakers say y’all as reliably as any other Southerners—but broadly speaking, Y’at evolved to sound like Northeastern dialects because very similar processes were at work. According to Ward, one of the great divides in dialect studies is not among distinct regions but between urban speech patterns and rural ones. In big cities, where people of widely differing backgrounds have to communicate with one another, certain trends dominate. The New Orleans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was big and diverse enough to encourage an urban speech pattern; most of the rest of the relatively rural South wasn’t.
Like most dialects, Y’at also serves as a social and group marker. Y’at was, when it developed, a lower-middle class or “poor white” accent—its speakers may have been educated or not, depending on individual circumstances, but they weren’t the kind of people whose education included elocution lessons. Like everything that can signify a lower social class, the accent has been stigmatized over the years, and even now you should know someone well before you comment on the y’attiness of his or her speech.
However, again like many markers of class or origin, it’s also become a badge of identity, and even honor, for some of its users. People move around more, both geographically and economically, than they used to. There are Y’ats who’ve moved out of their traditional neighborhoods, and new populations have moved into the old Y’at heartlands, neighborhoods like the Irish Channel. This “urban” dialect now pops up in suburbs on the West Bank, and anything Y’at-like heard about town these days is as like to just be an actual Yankee as not.
Whatever the case, the people who grew up using the dialect can still “do” it, even if their accents have diluted a little over time. We all code-switch depending on social context, falling back into semi-private languages of origin or peer group; Y’at is distinguished by a bigger community, but works along the same lines. People are now proud of their Y’at accents and identities: Y’at is represented in the YouTube phenomenon of people recording word lists to show off their accents, a “Creole/Cajun” restaurant in Indianapolis is called “Yat’s” (points for inclusivity if not strict accuracy), and who having seen it can forgive the classic I-don’t-get-all-the-references-but-can-tell-it’s-funny holiday carol “The Twelve Y’ats of Christmas?” Ward described the experience of observing older Y’ats greet each other: most of the conversation was in less accented English, closer to how the surrounding population spoke, but the conversation began with a moment of razzing each other in the old accent. “Where y’at, man?”
In an attempt at field study, Ward took me to a donut shop in Arabi where we hoped to hear y’atting in the wild. I walked through the place slowly, trying to eavesdrop. Maybe?… Maybe a little pull to the “A”s on that one? But nothing was decisive, no slam-dunk Y’at to be heard; and when we got to the counter, the woman who took our order had a lovely, silky, plain-old Louisiana accent. The defeat was softened by how good the donuts were.
Back in the car, I asked Ward if he could try to teach me to fake it. How could I sound “y’atty?” What were the giveaways and the tricks? “Oh you couldn’t ever. I couldn’t ever,” he said. “You could broaden out some vowels and ‘berl’ water and be ‘by’ places instead of ‘at’ them, but you won’t fool anyone. You can’t mimic it at all, not well. It’s something you have to grow up with and know.” He dropped me back home, with the advice to prowl the neutral ground before some of the Uptown Mardi Gras parades. “I bet you’ll hear some among the people parked up there. Get there early.” I did try, but no dice: like a ghost or a set of car keys, the accent refused to appear when directly sought.
Of course, elusive isn’t the same as absent. In the several weeks since I’ve moved back to New Orleans, I’ve heard Y’at in the air—a man ahead of me in line at a sandwich shop, a teller at the bank, a woman walking past me on the street talking into her phone. Not pretty, but interesting; not elegant, but evocative. The accent is a treat to hear because of its richness and its unusualness. One of the real glories of English—of any language—is the many ways it can be spoken, and Y’at is one of my favorites to overhear. Though I’ll never know how to speak it, it reminds me of New Orleans. It’s not how I sound, but it sounds like home.
