Midland American English - Western Pennsylvania

Western Pennsylvania

The dialect of Western Pennsylvania is, for many purposes, an eastern extension of the North Midland; it is spoken also in Youngstown, Ohio, ten miles west of the state line. Like the Midland proper, the Western Pennsylvania accent features fronting of /oʊ/ and /aʊ/, as well as positive anymore. The chief distinguishing feature of Western Pennsylvania as a whole is that the cot–caught merger is almost complete here (it is complete in Pittsburgh), whereas it is still in progress in most of the Midland. The merger has also spread from Western Pennsylvania into adjacent West Virginia, historically in the South Midland dialect region.

The city of Pittsburgh is considered to have a dialect of its own often known as "Pittsburghese". This region is additionally characterized by a sound change that is unique in North America: the monopthongization of /aʊ/ to . This is the source of the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as "dahntahn". Pittsburgh also features an unusually low allophone of /ʌ/ (as in cut); it approaches (/ɑ/ itself having moved out of the way and become a rounded vowel in its merger with /ɔ/).

Erie, Pennsylvania was described as being in the Northern dialect region in the first half of the 20th century. However, unlike other cities in the North, Erie underwent the caught–cot merger and not the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and now Erie has at least as much in common linguistically with the rest of Western Pennsylvania as with the North. For this reason, Erie has been described as the only major city to change its affiliation from the North to the Midland.