NEW YORKESE, like the city, has a troubled past and an uncertain future. Where the accent came from is a matter most linguists are still grappling with. And where will it end is also open to speculation.

The general notion is that each borough has a distinct accent. This would mean that there is a Brooklyn accent, as opposed to Bronx accent; and that there is a Manhattan, a Queens and a Staten Island accent.

"Within New York, there are different accents, but they vary very slightly," said George Jochnowitz, a linguistics professor at the College of the Staten Island. "But it is more a product of ethnicity, rather than location."

This means that there is no such thing as Bronx accent or a Brooklyn accent. The variations in New York accent is actually more a result of the ethnic roots of the waves of immigrants that settled in the city, starting with the Dutch, the Irish, the Italian and the European Jews . All these influences ganged up and gave New York its distinctive accent. So New Yorkese speakers either have an Italian-American, Irish-American or Yiddish-American accent.

Jochnowitz is not alone in his belief. As early as 1938, the Federal Writer's Project New York Panorama said: "A product of scores of nationalities, thousands of occupations and millions of people in necessary and constant contact, of whom some never leave the city while others come and go in a day, the New York language reflects every facet of a multifarious environment."

The Italian and Yiddish influence is evident in the way "Long Island" is pronounced as "Lung Guylin," said Jochnowitz. The "dems," "deses" and "doses" were courtesy of the Dutch, according to Robert Hendrickson in his book, New Yawk Tawk: A Dictionary of New York City Expressions.

New Yorkers have the Irish to thank for their now famous "toity-toid ohn toid". A Hofstra University professor, Francis Griffith, attributes New Yorkese speakers' habit of interchanging the diphthong "oi" with "er" to Gaelic language.

The New York dialect may be native to the city's five boroughs but it extends across the Hudson River. It echoes in southern Connecticut, Chicago, Miami, the Gulf Coast area, San Francisco, the Jewish district of Los Angeles, South Carolina, New Orleans and other Southern areas, Hendrickson said.

But whether this accent originated in New York and spread to these places, or that it came from these areas and was transplanted in New York—that's another issue students of the language are still figuring out.

Variations in the New York accent are also a function of class divide, between the upper class and lower class New Yorkers and between the more educated and the less educated, according to Jochnowitz. "The more educated tend to pronounce their Rs," he said.

New Yorkese was considered a lower-class English, and in 1966, William Labov, then a professor at Columbia University, went out to prove it. He went to three department stores catering to different socio-economic classes and asked employees for the location of a department he knew to be on the fourth floor. The employees in the upscale department store said, "Fourth Floor" more often, while clerks in the bargain-basement store were more likely to say, "Fawth Flaw."

Today, Jochnowitz said he hears more Rs from New Yorkers, especially the younger set. As people travel more in and out of New York, as more out-of-towners pour into the city, and with daily ration of "network English" from television and radio, New Yorkers just don't talk the way they used to.

And there are those who take the extra mile to lose their Noo Yawk accent. New Yorkers working in other cities have experienced being the butt of jokes because of their funny way of speaking. As a result, in Manhattan yellow pages alone, there are 26 voice and diction improvement clinics willing to help New Yorkers shed their accents and speak what one speech school calls the "standard American broadcaster English".

So is New York losing its accent? "It's changing, and the change is happening in a fast-changing city," was all Jochnowitz could say, adding that rapid changes in the city's ethnic composition will play a role in defining the sound and tone of New Yorkese in the future. "Whatever direction New York accent may take, it is worth studying."

Perhaps the change is evident in Jochnowitz himself. "I pronounce all my Rs," the Brooklyn native said. "I am now an R-ful person."