Hallucinating distinctions (was New Jersey Dialects)

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>>>Out of curiosity though, what's a "Pittsburgh twang"?  Can you put it
>>>in
>>>IPA (or our listserv substitute system for IPA)?  I think I know what
>>>you
>>>mean, but I want a native speaker's take on this!
>>>
>>>
>Um-- not sure.

This is in reference to the word "couch". I think the distinctive
Pittsburgh feature here is that the "ow" /au/ sound is like "ah" /a/ in
Pittsburgh, so it's "dahntahn" for "downtown", "power" sounds about the
same as "par", etc. So "couch" would be /katS/ or so, I think.

-- Doug Wilson, Pittsburgh (but born and raised in the [outside] world)