"Regional speech may be fading, but..."

[Wilson Gray]

WRT the

"here nah"

cited in the article, my wife, from Kingston in the Wyoming Valley of
the Susquehanna River, tells me that she and her children friends used
to sing, to the tune of Boola-Boola, the following jingle:

Heyna! Heyna!
Heyna! Heyna!
We're from Plymout'
Pennsylvania!

According to a local publication entitled "The [Wyoming] Valley,"
_heyna_ is used by speakers of the Valley dialect to form tag
questions:

"The state of Wyoming was founded by people from The Valley, heyna?"

-Wilson



On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      "Regional speech may be fading, but..."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Other than that dubious starting premise, this is a sorta fun piece
> on the "Dutchified" English of Lancaster, PA and environs in today's
> Times, with a lot of nice (if not particularly novel) data:
> http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/travel/escapes/20rituals.html?scp=1&sq=Lancaster&st=nyt
>
> One cute feature that I'm sure has been commented on by others is the
> (unsurprising) resemblance of the syntax of the dialect being
> described to that of Yinglish (mutatis mutandis, so it's "Throw
> Father down the stairs his hat" instead of "Throw Mama from the train
> a {kiss/knish}").
>
> LH
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
 -Sam'l Clemens

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