What is Denzel Washionton's accent?

Someone   Fri Jan 11, 2008 4:36 am GMT
Someone from another forum wants to know. Can anyone tell?
Guest   Sun Jan 13, 2008 2:38 am GMT
Back East accent. It sounds a bit old-fashioned to the Westerners.
Trawicks   Wed Jan 16, 2008 4:57 pm GMT
He has an African-American New Yorker's accent. It's sort of a conflation of African-American Vernacular English and New York. He has the glide deletion associated with AAVE, but I've definitely heard him show signs of the tense-lax splitting and back-vowel dipthongization which is common in white New York speech.

Because New York's black population dates back as long as it does, I find that in general Black New Yorkers tend to have stronger local accents than other parts of the country. You'll notice, for instance, that both Mike Tyson and Russell Simmons (both from Brooklyn) speak with dialects that are definitely closer to white New York speech than AAVE.