PITTSBURGH SPEECH AND PITTSBURGHESE

Pittsburgh and the surrounding area is a place that defines itself significantly by the way people talk, and there is a folk label for this variety: 'Pittsburghese.' Pittsburghers can describe features of the dialect, they make jokes with it, and even identify a certain kind of Pittsburgher with a derivation of a dialect item ('yinzer,’ from the second person singular pronoun 'yinz,' or 'you-uns'). Soon after I arrived at Pitt, I was invited by Barbara Johnstone to collaborate on a project she had just begun which focused on 'Pittsburghese' and local identity. This project is ongoing and has yielded some suprising results and made me rethink how language, identity, and place are associated.

For full information on this project, please go to it's website.