Pittsburgh English - Overview

Overview

Many of the sounds and words found in the speech of Pittsburghers are popularly thought to be unique to the city. This is reflected in the term "Pittsburghese," the putative sum of these features in the form of a dialect. However, few of these features are restricted solely to Pittsburgh or the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Instead, many of them are found throughout southwestern Pennsylvania, the Midland dialect region, or even large parts of the United States (Wisnosky 2003). Perhaps the only feature whose distribution is restricted almost exclusively to the Pittsburgh metropolitan area is /aw/ monophthongization. This means that words such as house, down, found, or sauerkraut are sometimes pronounced with an "ah" sound instead of the more standard pronunciation of "ow", rendering pronunciations such as `hahs' `dahn' `fahnd', and `sahrkraht'.

The language of the early Scots-Irish settlers had the greatest influence on the speech of southwestern and western Pennsylvania. This influence is reflected mainly in the retention of certain lexical items (cruds or cruddled milk (cottage cheese), hap (comforter), jag (to tease or annoy), jag around (to fool around or act foolishly), jagger (a thorn or burr), jagoff (an annoying or irritating person), neb/nebby/neb-nose (nosy), redd up (to clean), slippy (slippery), yinz/yunz/you’uns (second-person plural), "punctual" whenever and possibly "positive" anymore and reversed usage of leave and let, but also in the like, need, or want + past participle grammatical constructions i.e. `the yard needs mowed' and the discourse marker ‘n’at i.e. `and so forth/etc.' e.g. `The yard n'at needs mowed,' meaning `the yard and surrounding areas'. According to a study based only on pronunciation, the dialect region of western Pennsylvania ranges north to Erie, Pennsylvania, west to Youngstown, Ohio, south to Clarksburg, West Virginia, and east to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005), but different features may be differently distributed.

Documented contributions from other languages are pierogi and kolbassi from Polish, babushka from Russian, and, from German, falling intonation at the end of questions with a definite yes or no answer. Possible contributions from other languages are reversed leave~let from German and monophthongal /aw/ from contact between English and one or more Slavic languages (Johnstone 2002; Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2005), though these influences are openly posited as speculative.

Speakers of Pittsburgh English are sometimes called "Yinzers", in reference to their use of the 2nd-person plural pronoun "Yinz" The word "yinzer" is sometimes heard as pejorative, indicating a lack of sophistication, although the term is now used in a variety of ways. (For more on the pronoun yinz, see the entry below.)