In a year in which the country faced the prospect of a presidential debate between a Brooklyn native and a Queens native, a book about New York English seems more than timely. But one of the first things you learn in E. J. White’s new book You Talkin’ to Me?: The Unruly History of New York English is that New York is a single linguistic community, a claim that seems to fly in the face of the lived experience of native New Yorkers. At least among my acquaintances at a recent dinner party, the consensus was that Bernie Sanders’s Brooklyn accent was as easily distinguishable from Donald Trump’s Queens accent as their respective politics. And yet, as White remarks, a distinguished linguistics expert told The New Yorker in 2005, “The fact is—but don’t write this, because it will enrage people—Brooklynese is exactly the same whether it’s spoken in the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, or in Brooklyn. Or the Lower East Side.” As we say where I come from, “go know.”

The book begins with a thought-provoking observation. The United States is the only major country where the received pronunciation is not that spoken by the inhabitants of its primary commercial center. In France, the national standard is Parisian; in Italy, the regional speech of Lombardy around Milan; in England, the triangle that encompasses London to Oxbridge. But in the United States, the standard pronunciation is that of the Midwest—not even Chicago, but that of Columbus, Ohio,