"Talking the Tawk"

In the midst of doing some Google searches, I came across an interesting article by The New Yorker that talks of William Labov and his explanations of Brooklynese.  I found it quite interesting, and I thought I would share some of the most interesting facts from the article.  (I also think that bullet points are more logical for this type of thing, so I will do that instead of paragraphs.)

1.) The dropping of the "r" lost its imperial status after WW2.  "'Before the war,' Labov said, 'the judges in the gangster pictures dropped their ‘r’s, but after the war only the hoodlums did it.'"
2.) Apart from the adenoidal "oi" (like saying "boid" instead of "bird"), Brooklynese has remained unchanged for the past fifty years.
3.) You can hear it in parts of New Orleans and Cincinnati because of the "bankers who moved to those cities in the nineteenth century to finance the cotton trade."
4.) "'Brooklynese is exactly the same whether it’s spoken in the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island or in Brooklyn. Or the Lower East Side.' The city’s dialect, [Labov] said, 'is much more indicative of one’s social status than of one’s neighborhood.  Although no one wants to admit this,' he added, 'because we’re supposed to live in a classless society.'”
5.) "What causes dialects to change? Not television, Labov said. The people he calls 'extreme speakers'—those who have the greatest linguistic influence on others—tend to be visible local people: 'politicians, Realtors, bank clerks.'”

So I have to ask--what fact/opinion did you find most interesting?  I thought it was insane how the dialect hasn't really changed in 50 years.  It is hard to imagine, but fascinating nonetheless.