A few years ago, I watched a television documentary called Urban Invaders, a somewhat lighthearted treatment of the topic of rats in New York City. The residents who were interviewed about their experiences with rats included an African-American woman, a Puerto Rican American woman, and a European-American man. Each of these people clearly sounded like a New Yorker, and yet none of them spoke exactly like the others. All of them exhibited some features characteristic of New York City in their phonology, such as raised [ɔə] (found in, e.g., more or floor), which occurred across all three speakers; however, each of these individuals also used variants linked to his or her ethnicity. The African-American woman used phonological features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), such as [f] for [θ] in teeth and monophthongization of [aj] as [a] in climbing. For the Puerto-Rican American woman, the vowels [i] and [u] were realized with no glide and slightly higher than in other dialects. Presumably, the European-American man who was interviewed also indexed his ethnic identity in some way.