Pittsburgh Dialect

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>I'm doing a research project on the dialect of Pittsburgh and western
>Pennsylvania ...

I live in metropolitan Pittsburgh. I'm not a native Pittsburgher (but my
daughter is). I'll be happy to help if I can; for example, I can do a small
poll among native Pittsburghers at work on any controversial point.

The books and Web entries on "Pittsburghese" are naive and unreliable in my
experience. You can't easily make a whole book on distinctive
"Pittsburghisms", so the books and sites are fleshed out with irrelevant
local references, near-universal mispronunciations, and spurious material.

Distinctive lexical items include (in my experience):

"You-uns" = "you-all" or "you [plural]" [pronounced /jInz/, /j at nz/, /junz/,
etc.]

"Gum band" = "rubber band"

"Rift" = "belch"/"burp" [verb]

"Jumbo" = "bologna [sausage]"

"Rett up"/"redd up" = "clean up"/"tidy up"

"Nebby" = "nosy"

"Ignorant" = "rude"/"impolite" [specifically distinct from "lacking in
knowledge"] [seems to be fully accepted without cognizance of its regional
nature!]

Some of these may have geographically wider use. Pittsburghers tend to
think (probably by contrast with eastern Pennsylvania or Philadelphia) that
"pop" (= carbonated soft drink) is a Pittsburghism, but of course it is
usual in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, all the Great Lakes area, and also
elsewhere.

The most noticeable grammatical oddity, which is absolutely usual in
Pittsburgh and freely used even in semiformal writing, is the elision of
"to be" or equivalent as in:

"This needs cleaned" = "This needs to be cleaned"

"I want done with it" = "I want to be/get done with it"

"My son wants laid" = "My son wants to get laid"

Borderline cases exist, which are accepted by some but not by all
Pittsburghers: e.g.,

(*)"The cat likes petted" = "The cat likes to be petted"

The most distinctive pronunciation oddity is /au/ > /a/, the usual
Pittsburgh examples being "downtown" /dantan/ ('daantaan' or 'dahntahn')
and "South Side" /saTsaid/ ('Saath Side' or 'Sahth Side') (a district of
Pittsburgh). Thus 'power' in Pittsburgh tends to be monosyllabic /par/,
rhyming with 'far'. This is completely usual. Approximately, Pittsburgh
'down' = Chicago 'don', while Pittsburgh 'don' = 'dawn' = Chicago 'dawn'.

A few other things I've noticed, possibly not limited to the area:

"Calbassi"/"calbassy" (/kalbasi/, /k&lb&si/, etc.) seems to be the usual
local version of 'kielbasa'; at the supermarket one might see a pile of
packages of sausage, each labeled 'kielbasa', packaged in Wisconsin
perhaps, under a sign saying 'Calbassi $2.99'.

My pronunciation of the terminal vowel in 'provolone' is absolutely
astonishing to the supermarket clerk: in Pittsburgh it seems to be
universally /prouv at loun/.

Some (IMHO) repulsive expressions which may be widespread in a certain
register seem to be particularly common here: e.g., "big-time" = "very
much", "from the get-go" = "from the start":

"I screwed up big-time from the get-go" = "I screwed up badly from the start"

Phonology reference on the Web:

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/Atlas_chapters/Ch11/Ch11.html

-- Doug Wilson