Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese 9781614511786, 9781614512325

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Barbara Johnstone, Daniel Baumgardt, Maeve Eberhardt, Scott Kiesling Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese

Dialects of English

Editors Joan C. Beal Karen P. Corrigan Bernd Kortmann

Volume 11

Barbara Johnstone, Daniel Baumgardt, Maeve Eberhardt, Scott Kiesling

P   ittsburgh Speech a   nd Pittsburghese

ISBN 978-1-61451-232-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-178-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0029-9 ISSN 2164-7445 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Berlin/Boston Cover image: Barbara Johnstone Typesetting: Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of contents

  ix xi A note on notation  

Acknowledgments

 1

Chapter 1. Geography, demography, and culture 1.1 Introduction  1 1.2 History and topography 2 1.3 Current demographics 6 1.4 Pittsburgh as a dialect area 6 1.5 Data and methods 9

 

 

   

 

 

11 Chapter 2. Phonetics and phonology 2.1 Introduction  11 2.2 Mergers and a split 11 2.2.1 The low back merger 11 2.2.2 Mergers before /l/ 13 2.2.3 Split of TRAP and STAN 14 2.3 Phonetic shifts 14 2.3.1 The Pittsburgh Chain Shift 14 2.3.2 Fronting of GOOSE and GOAT 16 2.4 Monophthongization  17 2.4.1 Monophthongization of MOUTH 17 2.4.2 Monophthongization of PRICE 22 2.5 Consonantal features 22 2.5.1 L-vocalization and /l/-insertion 22 2.5.2 Epenthetic /r/ before /ʃ/ 22 2.6 Regional word forms 23

 

                            24 Chapter 3. Morphology and syntax   3.1 Introduction    24 3.2 Complementation of need, want, and like    24 3.3 Positive anymore    25 3.4 Punctual whenever    25 3.5 Merger of leave and let    26 3.6 Preposition-noun compounding   26 3.7 Yinz    26

  Table of contents

vi 

 

Chapter 4. Lexis and discourse 31 4.1 Introduction  31 4.2 A glossary of Pittsburgh English 31 4.3 Word-formation processes 45 4.3.1 Borrowing  45 4.3.2 Derivation  45 4.3.3 Compounding  46 4.3.4 Semantic re-analysis 46 4.3.5 Phonological re-analysis 46 4.3.6 Reduplication  46 4.3.7 Contraction  47 4.3.8 Metathesis  47 4.3.9 Trade names 47 4.3.10 Euphemism  47 4.4 Discourse marking features 47 4.4.1 Pennsylvania Dutch question intonation 4.4.2 N’at  49 4.5 Discussion  50

 

   

 

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

  47

 

 

52 Chapter 5. African American English in Pittsburgh 5.1 Introduction  52 5.2 African Americans in Pittsburgh 54 5.3 Features of supraregional AAVE 55 5.4 Regional phonological features 59 5.5 Other regional features 64 5.6 Pittsburghese: monophthongal MOUTH and yinz  5.7 Conclusions  73

 

 

 

     

  65

 

76 Chapter 6. History and trajectory 6.1 Introduction  76 6.2 The Scotch-Irish  76 6.2.1 From Scotch-Irish English to American English 80 6.3 Other influences on Pittsburgh speech 83 6.4 Attitudes towards Pittsburgh speech 85 6.5 From Pittsburgh speech to Pittsburghese 88 6.5.1 What does hahs sound like? 89 6.5.2 Noticing local speech 91 6.5.3 Pittsburghese in the daily papers 95 6.5.4 The “New Yinzers” 97 6.6 The future? 99

 

 

 

   

 

     

 

 

  vii

Table of contents 

 

100 Appendix. Annotated bibliography 1 Web sources about American dialects 100 2 Print sources about American dialects 100 3 Web sources about speech in Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania  101 4 Print sources on speech in Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania  101 5 Print sources on Pittsburghese 103

   

  105

References

  113

Index

   

 

Acknowledgments This book is an outcome of the Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project, a decade-­ long endeavor to describe Pittsburgh speech and learn how it has come to be tied to Pittsburgh’s identity. For funding, we are grateful to the Berkman Fund and the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University, to the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, and to the U.S. National Science Foundation (Collaborative Research award numbers BCS-0417684 and BCS-0417657). Time for Johnstone’s research and writing was provided by Carnegie Mellon University via University-Supported Leaves in 2003–2004 and 2010–2011 and by the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany for a six-month fellowship in 2011. Participants in a project-planning workshop in 2002 included (in addition to Eberhardt, Kiesling, and Johnstone) Sharon Ash, Susan Berk-Seligson, Sabine Deitrich, Doris Dyen, Beverly Flanigan, Peter Gilmore, Joan Guerin, Kirk Hazen, Daniel Ezra Johnson, Paul Laxton, Bonnie McElhinny, David Miller, Michael Montgomery, Richard Oestreicher, Beth Lee Simon, and Walt Wolfram. We are grateful to them for helping us decide what to focus on and how. For helping us find interview contacts in Forest Hills, we are grateful to Ron Placone, Ken Gormley, Jane Freund, Vivian Broz, Betty Evans, Susan Lawrence, and Toby Yanowitz. For contacts in Lawrenceville, we thank Michael Witmore, Kelly Delaney, Bonnie Isacke, Christiane Leach, Barbara Thompson, Tim Haggerty, Allan Becer, Susan Gilpin, and Thora Brylowe. In Cranberry Township we got help from Marilynn McElhinny and from the staff of the Cranberry Township Community Center. Jennifer Andrus helped with some of the Cranberry Township interviews and conducted some of them herself. Trista Pennington located interviewees and conducted many of the Hill District interviews. For access to archival material, we are grateful to Ron Baraff at Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area and Steven Doell at the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society. Anna Schardt and Neeta Bhasin (Carnegie Mellon) and Fawn Draucker, Natalie McCarthy, and Marc Wisnosky (University of Pittsburgh) helped us with coding and analysis. Dan Baumgardt would like to thank the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon for providing him with the resources and knowledge to work on this pro­ ject. He would also like to thank the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater for providing him with time to edit the manuscript via a Spring 2015 Faculty Reassignment. For their ongoing support, he would like to thank the following individuals at UW-Whitewater: Dr. David Travis, Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, Dr. Marilyn Durham, Head of the Department of Languages and Literatures, and Dr. Janine Tobeck, Head of the Professional Writing and Publishing Program.

  Acknowledgments

x 

Maeve Eberhardt would like to thank the National Science Foundation (award number 0745455), the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh for generous financial support. Thanks also to Shelome Gooden for her collaboration on early stages of the project. We thank Joan Beal, Karen Corrigan, and Bernd Kortmann, the editors of the series in which this book appears, for inviting us to contribute it. Joan made very useful suggestions on an earlier draft. We are also grateful to Emily Farrell, Lara Wysong, and Wolfgang Konwitschny at De Gruyter for their help in bringing the book to press.

A note on notation We use IPA symbols between slashes for consonantal phonemes (for example, /s/, /ʃ/, /r/), but we represent vocalic phonemes by means of key words written in all capitals, such as STRUT and FLEECE, using the system developed by the phonetician John Wells (1982). Key words for the vocalic phonemes we discuss in this book are listed in Table 1. Table 1: English lexical sets, adapted from Wells (1982) Short

Long

Diphthongs

Classes conditioned by following consonants

KIT DRESS TRAP LOT CLOTH STRUT FOOT

FLEECE PALM THOUGHT GOOSE

PRICE MOUTH CHOICE GOAT FACE FEW

POOL PULL STAN STEEL STILL SQUARE NORTH NEAR



Chapter 1 Geography, demography, and culture 1.1 Introduction The books in this series have been about varieties of English linked to whole countries – India (Pingali 2009), Ireland (Kallen 2014), Wales (Paulasto & Pen­ hallurick 2015) – large regions – Northern Ireland (Corrigan 2010), north-eastern England (Beal, Burbano-Elizondo & Llamas 2012), the English West Midlands (Clark & Asprey 2013), Newfoundland and Labrador (Clarke 2010), and huge ­global cities – Hong Kong (Setter, Wong & Chan 2010), Singapore (Deterding 2007), New York (Newman 2014). What, then, justifies a book about Pittsburgh, a medium-sized post-industrial city in what is often thought of as the economic backwater of the U.S., with a dialect that most Americans, much less English-­ speakers at large, have never even heard of and which is in any case receding? Pittsburgh speech has caught the attention of dialectologists and sociolin­ guists for two reasons. First, Pittsburgh speech is a living example of a distinctive urban U.S. dialect of the sort that is becoming less and less common. Pittsburgh is “the Galapagos Islands of American dialects” (Sultan 2006), a historically iso­ lated place where linguistic evolution has taken its own course over the almost 275 years since the area was first settled by English-speakers. While almost every feature of Pittsburgh speech is shared with people in at least one other area of the U.S., the set of features that characterizes the variety is heard only in part of southwestern Pennsylvania. For many decades, dialectologists, sociolinguists, and amateur students of American varieties have noted unusual characteristics of the area’s speech and published their observations in scholarly journals like American Speech. The second reason Pittsburgh speech has captured linguists’ attention is the unusual extent to which Pittsburgh speech has become linked with local identity in Pittsburgh. “Pittsburghese”, as it is called in the Pittsburgh area, is mentioned or alluded to almost every time people talk or write about what Pittsburgh is like or what it means to be a Pittsburgher. The word for a stereotypical Pittsburgher is Yinzer, derived from yinz, the second-person pronoun characteristic of Pittsburgh speech. In other words, a Pittsburgher is someone who speaks Pittsburghese. Words, phrases, and sentences in Pittsburghese can be seen wherever local color is for sale – on t-shirts and sweatshirts, coffee and beer mugs, refrigerator mag­ nets, key rings, and so on – but also in more serious contexts such as the name of a literary magazine and a blog about education written by concerned parents. The strong link between Pittsburghese and Pittsburgh’s identity is the result of a

  Geography, demography, and culture

2 

number of coinciding linguistic and historical facts, and while some of the same factors have led to aspects of the same process elsewhere, there are not many other cities,1 and none in the U.S., in which things have come together as they have in Pittsburgh, to make local speech as visible and meaningful as it is. We touch on the social salience of Pittsburghese throughout the book and return to it in more depth in chapter 6. In the rest of this chapter, we set the scene for Pittsburgh speech, describing the physical and cultural geography of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh area. We focus on how the topography and natural resources of the area came together with political, economic, linguistic, and social history from the 18th to the early 21st centuries to shape the development of Pittsburgh speech. We then discuss why, and in what sense, Pittsburgh and its region should be thought of as a dia­ lect area and Pittsburgh speech as a variety of English. Finally, we describe the data we have drawn on.

1.2 History and topography Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is located in the southwestern quadrant of the state, across the Allegheny Mountains (part of the Appalachian mountain chain) from Philadelphia and the other large coastal cities of the U.S. Northeast, and close to the borders of the states of Ohio, West Virginia, and Maryland. (See Figure 1.) Because of the Alleghenies, Pittsburgh was historically isolated from the eastern part of Pennsylvania and the rest of the East Coast: until well into the twentieth century, the need to cross multiple, often heavily forested mountains made eastwest ­travel across the state difficult, and at times (particularly in winter) impos­ sible. What is now the southwestern part of the state of Pennsylvania was first explored and surveyed by people from the colony of Virginia, to the southeast, rather than by people from Philadelphia, to the east; Washington, DC is in fact closer to Pittsburgh than Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is. As a result of its geo­ graphic isolation, Pittsburgh is now in many ways in the eastern U.S. (by virtue of being in the east-coast state of Pennsylvania) but not of the eastern U.S. These material factors have helped give Pittsburghers a strong sense that Pittsburgh is exceptional, unique and different from any other area. Pittsburgh­ ers’ identity has always been linked to the city rather than to the state or the

1 Something like the link between Pittsburghese and Pittsburgh can be found in Newcastle, ­England, where a way of speaking known as “Geordie” has become iconic of local identity (Beal 1999; Beal 2009; Beal, Burbano-Elizondo & Llamas 2012).

  3

History and topography 

Fig. 1: Location of Pittsburgh

r­egion. Cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky (1980) explored laypeople’s ideas about the regional divisions in the U.S. by looking for terms of “locational and cultural significance” in the business names listed in telephone directories. Zelin­ sky’s study showed that business names in the Pittsburgh area tended not to con­ tain terms referring to larger regions such as “Midwest”, “mid-Atlantic,” “East,” or “keystone” (Zelinsky 1995:151). (Pennsylvania is known as the “keystone state” because of its central position in the original thirteen states of the U.S., so using this term in a business name would link the business with the state.) Pitts­ burghers’ ideology of regional exceptionalism is also linked to the existence of a number of political boundaries, in the form of state borders, which both trace historical distinctions and help create ideological ones. Pittsburgh is close to Ohio, but not ideologically of the Midwest; close to Maryland but not southern; close to West Virginia but not, in Pittsburgh’s collective mind, Appalachian. When we asked the people we interviewed to list a few terms they would use to identify themselves, most included “Pittsburgher” (and many said “American”), but no one listed “Pennsylvanian”.

  Geography, demography, and culture

4 

Geographic isolation played a role in the history of Pittsburgh speech in a more local way as well. Because of its rivers, creeks, and hilly topography, parts of the city are relatively isolated from one another. Going from one neighborhood to another often means climbing a steep hill or crossing a river or a ravine. The topography of Pittsburgh also makes navigation difficult, so that Pittsburghers often learn the routes to places they regularly visit and avoid going elsewhere. (Folk wisdom has it that Pittsburghers “never cross a bridge”.) This led to the ­development of ethnic enclave neighborhoods with dense, focused patterns of social interaction, where people lived on the hillsides and worked in foundries, mills, and factories along the riverfronts. Several non-contiguous African Ameri­ can neighborhoods developed, with weak ties among them. As a result, African Americans have not had a unified political presence in Pittsburgh, which has been controlled by whites with strong European-ethnic ties. Located on a triangle-shaped hill at the confluence of two large rivers, the frontier area that is now downtown Pittsburgh was easy to defend. French and British colonial troops competing for control of the trans-Appalachian west built forts there, and the area was a key site of conflict during the French and Indian War of 1754–1763 (the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War). The ­earliest permanent European-American settlers were primarily Scotch-Irish2 who emigrated to Pennsylvania in large numbers between 1718 and the American Re­ volution of 1776–1783 (Dunaway 1944). These were people from the five counties

2 The terms Scots-Irish and Scotch-Irish are interchangeable. “Scotch-Irish” is the older of the two and the one most commonly used in the U.S., beginning in the nineteenth century, to distin­ guish between two types of immigrants from Ireland: those whose ancestors were Protestants from Scotland, and those who did not have Scottish roots and who were overwhelmingly Cath­ olic. The latter group of Irish settlers arrived later, immigrating in the mid-nineteenth century and after. The Oxford English Dictionary lists Scotch-Irish being used as far back as 1691. Both variants, Scotch-Irish and Scots-Irish, aroused controversy when they first came into widespread use. It was not that the people who had emigrated from Northern Ireland preferred one desig­ nation over the other, but rather that they did not appreciate either designation. Writing about the Conestoga Massacre of 1763, in which Pennsylvanian Scots from Northern Ireland killed 20 peaceful Susquehannock Indians, John Elder noted that not only were the Scots “enraged” at being charged with murder, but also “at being charged … under the name of Scotch-Irish, and other ill-natured titles” (Dunaway 1944:7). According to Griffin (2001:2–3), “These Protestant men and women rejected any suggestion that they were ‘mere’ – or Catholic – Irish. [But] during the eighteenth century they did not regard themselves as ‘Scotch,’ which at this time in Ireland con­ noted radicalism. In most cases, Ulster Presbyterians called themselves ‘northern dissenters’ in recognition of their status within Irish society as well as their geographic concentration in Ulster. However, in Pennsylvania, a colony an ocean away from Ulster and one in which religious toler­ ation prevailed, such a name became meaningless”. For lack of a better alternative then, the name Scotch-Irish stuck. See chapter 6 for more on the Scotch-Irish and their language.

  5

History and topography 

of northern Ireland/Ulster, many descended from Scots who had been resettled there during the 17th century. The English they spoke became the substrate founder dialect for the area (as for much of the U.S. Midland). Although we have very limited evidence about Scotch-Irish phonology, words and morphosyntactic patterns that are indisputably Scotch-Irish (Montgomery 1989; 2000) are still prevalent in the area, as we will see. During the early and middle nineteenth century, Pittsburgh was a staging point for trade with and migration to the west, via the Ohio River.3 More immi­ grants came to the area, mainly from the British Isles, to work in the growing ­industrial sector of the city’s economy. Pittsburgh had the right combination of natural resources and transportation arteries for glass, iron, and steel produc­ tion. Once there were methods for mass producing iron and steel (such as the Bessemer smelting furnace and integrated rolling and pressing mills), Pittsburgh industrialists like ­Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick needed more laborers than were locally available. From around 1880 until 1920, immigrants from east­ ern and southern Europe poured into the area, bringing with them many lan­ guages that have added words to the local lexicon. Contact between English and one of these languages may have been the impetus for the monophthongization of the MOUTH vowel, one of the most iconic features of Pittsburgh speech (see chapter 2). Because Pittsburgh started to industrialize on a large scale earlier than many other U.S. cities, African Americans began to move to the Pittsburgh area early (sometimes brought in as strike-breakers). They worked on the bottom rungs of the ­labor hierarchy (on African Americans in Pittsburgh, see chapter 5). For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Pittsburgh was the steel-­ making capital of the U.S., providing steel for the rapidly expanding national net­ work of railroads in the nineteenth century and, in the twentieth, for skyscrapers and military armaments. The dominant images of the city and its residents were images of tough, proud laborers living and working in a gritty place where smoke and soot were signs of  prosperity and power. When local steel production col­ lapsed in the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Pittsburghers were forced to move elsewhere to find work. The population of the city plunged. Many of these people are intensely loyal to the city (or, in many cases, to a somewhat outdated image of the city) and to the city’s sports teams, and, as we will see in chapter 6, they have played a large role in keeping ideas about the social meaning of Pittsburgh speech in circulation. African American Pittsburghers, on the other hand, are often eager to leave. They see Pittsburgh as racist and inhospitable.

3 Key sources on Pittsburgh history include Baldwin (1937), Hays (1989), Lubove (1996a; 1996b), Glasco (1989; 2004), and Hoerr (1988).

  Geography, demography, and culture

6 

Beginning at the end of the twentieth century and continuing in the early decades of the twenty-first, Pittsburgh has experienced an economic renaissance. The city’s major employers are no longer manufacturing industries but rather the health-care and education sectors, and the city has become somewhat of a hub for high-tech industry, with highly-ranked university programs in engineering and computer science providing a pool of potential employees for companies like Google that have created branches there. Because of its relatively low housing costs, its cultural offerings, its safety, and its attractive setting, Pittsburgh has been identified in a number of rankings as “America’s most livable city”, and for the first time in many decades, the city’s population is estimated to have risen between 2010 and 2013. Pittsburgh was showcased to the world when, on the basis of its successful economic recovery, then-President Barack Obama desig­ nated it as the site for a 2008 G-20 economic summit.

1.3 Current demographics Because Pittsburgh annexed relatively few of the towns that grew up around it, the city proper is small (55.37 square miles, or 143.41 square kilometers) and the Pittsburgh metropolitan area consists of many political entities. The population of the city itself was estimated at just under 306,000 in 2013, with 66% self-­ reporting as white, 26.1% as African American, 4.4% as Asian, 2.3% as Hispanic, and the rest in other categories or in multiple categories (U.S. Census Bureau). The population of the Pittsburgh metropolitan statistical area, which consists of Pittsburgh and all the adjacent areas that are socially and economically inte­ grated with it4, was estimated at 2,360,867 in 2013, based on U.S. Census data (U.S. Census Bureau).

1.4 Pittsburgh as a dialect area In the United States, there are now three major dialect areas that correspond to  early patterns of settlement and westward migration. The original English-­

4 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “Metropolitan … statistical areas … are geographic enti­ ties delineated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for use by Federal statistical agencies in collecting, tabulating, and publishing Federal statistics. … A metro area contains a core urban area of 50,000 or more population. … Each metro … area consists of one or more counties and includes the counties containing the core urban area, as well as any adjacent coun­ ties that have a high degree of social and economic integration (as measured by commuting to work) with the urban core”.

  7

Pittsburgh as a dialect area 

speaking migrants to New England and to the southern colonies tended to be from southern England. The settlers in the middle-Atlantic states tended to be from further north, and their English was different in many ways from that ­spoken in southern England. Many early settlers farmed, and as farmers moved west, they tended to stay at the same latitude, so that the seeds they brought with them would germinate and grow in a similar climate. The primary dialect areas in the eastern U.S. still reflect the diverse origins of these migrants. Pittsburgh is in what sociolinguists call the Midland. (See Figure 2).

Fig. 2: Major dialect areas of the eastern United States. (Adapted from Kurath 1949, figure 3.)

  Geography, demography, and culture

8 

On the basis of phonology, Labov and his colleagues (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006:271–275) describe Western Pennsylvania as a distinctive dialect area within the Midland region. This reflects the fact that one phonological feature, MOUTHmonophthongization in words such as house or downtown, is found almost exclu­ sively in the Pittsburgh area. As we will see in chapter 2, Labov et al. suggest that monophthongal MOUTH is part of a chain shift that is unique to the area. But Pittsburgh served as a gateway for settlers who pushed both west along the Ohio River and south into the Appalachian Mountains, so that most of the other fea­ tures of speech associated with Pittsburgh can be heard to the south and to the west as well as to the east. Like speakers throughout Pennsylvania, Pittsburghers often vocalize /l/ and front the GOOSE vowel. Pittsburgh speech shares some pho­ nological features with Southern varieties – including the lowering of the vowel in FLEECE when it precedes /l/ and the monophthongization of PRICE before /l/ and /r/ – and many lexical and morphosyntactic features of Pittsburgh speech are shared with Southern and Midwestern varieties. Like people to the west, but not people on the East Coast, Pittsburghers merge the vowels in words like LOT and words like THOUGHT. To summarize, there are, in fact, very few words, pronunciations, or mor­ phosyntactic patterns that are used only in the Pittsburgh area. While some Pitts­ burghers use a fair number of regional words or pronunciations, the regions in question are much larger than just Southwestern Pennsylvania. In casual situa­ tions, some Pittsburghers reduce “Did you eat yet?” to djeetjet?; so do speakers throughout the English-speaking world. Some Pittsburghers use anymore in pos­ itive statements to mean ‘these days’, as in “Anymore, she’s sick all the time”; so do speakers throughout the Midland. Some Pittsburghers use redd up to mean ‘clean up’; so do speakers throughout the North Midland and in parts of New En­ gland and Canada. While some Pittsburghers say needs ironed instead of “needs to be ironed” or “needs ironing”, they share this construction with many people in the Midwest. While some Pittsburghers use the second-person plural pronoun yinz, yunz, or you’uns, this pronoun, in one form or another, is common through­ out the Appalachians. The words that are used primarily in the Pittsburgh area are mainly local trade names like jumbo (bologna sausage) and chipped ham (very thinly sliced ham). They are few in number, and we would expect words like these in any metropolitan area. Southwestern Pennsylvanians used to be distin­ guished by their use of cruddled milk ‘curdled milk,’ hap ‘comforter,’ and grinnie ‘chipmunk’. However, these words were probably never used much by Pittsbur­ ghers, but rather by people living in more rural areas of Southwestern Pennsylva­ nia, and they are no longer common. But while there are few individual lexical, phonological, or morphosyntactic features that are specific to Pittsburgh, there is a set of features that come together in this area and nowhere else. In other words,

  9

Data and methods 

there is a set of features Pittsburghers use, which, when considered together – and only then – can be said to constitute a unique way of speaking.

1.5 Data and methods The research we report on in this book was done in the course of a decade-long project that involved several methods of data-gathering. We studied Pittsburgh’s history, consulted with colleagues in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, and pored over all the evidence we could find in the existing literature about the history of En­ glish in Southwestern Pennsylvania. We searched through archives for old record­ ings of Pittsburghers talking. We conducted a preliminary telephone interview with randomly-selected people from throughout the area and more substantial face-to-face interviews with more than 125 people from four neighborhoods ­representative of key phases in Pittsburgh’s history: Lawrenceville, Forest Hills, Cranberry Township, and the Hill District. We used these conversations as ­sources of sociophonetic and ethnographic data, and we transcribed sections of almost all of them for closer qualitative analysis of language attitudes. In the course of these interviews, we recorded interviewees reading aloud, and we played record­ ings to them and asked them to comment on what they heard. We also chatted with many people more informally, in the course of daily life. We listened in on workplace meetings and studied conversations about Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh speech in the “real world” and online. We have analyzed newspaper articles from as far back as 1910; we have analyzed parts of the “WDVE Morning Show” on the radio and “Pittsburgh Dad” on YouTube; we have analyzed t-shirts and refrigera­ tor magnets with representations of Pittsburgh speech on them. We have talked to sidewalk vendors in the Strip District, to Jim Krenn from radio station WDVE, to Curt Wootton, who plays “Pittsburgh Dad”, and to many other people who have had special perspectives on local speech to offer. We have also talked, by email and phone, to many Pittsburghers, in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, who have ­written or called with questions about local speech, and we have talked to many groups of teachers, businesspeople, library patrons, and members of neighborhood his­ torical societies. To contextualize our findings, we have drawn on research about economic change and globalization as well as about language change and social identity. In the chapters that follow, we describe those results of this project that will be of the most interest to linguists looking for an overview of the southwestern Pennsylvania dialect area. Chapter 2 is about the phonetics and phonology of Pittsburgh speech, chapter 3 deals with morphology and syntax, and chapter 4 covers lexis and discourse structure. Chapter 5 departs from the format of most of

  Geography, demography, and culture

10 

the books in this series in being about African American English in Pittsburgh. In adding this chapter, we follow the lead of Newman (2014) in his volume on New York. African Americans have a different history than white Americans, having arrived in colonial America and then in the United States as slaves, and even after the abolition of slavery they have been segregated from whites – at one time, and in some places, by law, and still, everywhere, in de facto ways. For these reasons, many African Americans speak varieties of English that are different from those of whites in the same areas, and Pittsburgh is no exception. Chapter 6 traces the history of English in Pittsburgh and explores the reasons why Pittsburgh speech has become an icon of localness. Finally, we include an annotated bibliography and links to speech samples.



Chapter 2 Phonetics and phonology 2.1 Introduction Descriptions of dialect tend to be implicitly comparative, such that the “dialect” ways of speaking are those found neither in other varieties nor in what is taken to be the standard or mainstream variety (which in the case of American English is notoriously difficult to define). That is, the features of a variety that dialectolo­ gists describe are those that distinguish it from other varieties, and comparative dimensions such as “fronted” or “raised” are often invoked. We unavoidably take this comparative approach, but we attempt to be clear about what the standards of comparison are. It should be noted at the outset that the features we describe are most common in the speech of working-class white Pittsburghers; Pittsburgh speech, like other regional varieties, is not simply an indicator of region but also an indicator of class and ethnicity. (Phonological features of Pittsburgh African American speech are described in chapter 5.) While Pittsburgh has one unique feature in North American English (and is almost unique in the English-speaking world in evincing this feature), most of the sounds of Pittsburgh speech are shared with other Midlands or South Midlands dialect areas, due to the settle­ ment patterns described in chapter 1. Unless otherwise specified, the data on which this chapter is based come from the sociolinguistic interviews described in chapter 1.

2.2 Mergers and a split 2.2.1 The low back merger The LOT and THOUGHT classes of vowels in Pittsburgh are entirely merged, as is  true of the Midland west of approximately the Appalachians in Pennsylva­ nia  (Herold 1990; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006:58–65). Known as the “low back merger”, this merger is at its strongest in Western Pennsylvania, according to Labov, Ash, and Boberg. A merger in perception does not entail a merger in pro­ duction. In Pittsburgh, however, Labov, Ash and Boberg and find that the low back vowels are merged in both production and perception, as shown in Figure 3. Data from our sociolinguistic interviews echo this finding. None of the speakers in our corpus claimed to be able to hear the difference in pronunciation between pairs of words like cot and caught. This is the case, as we will see in chapter 5, for

Fig. 3: Distribution of the merger of LOT (/o/) and THOUGHT (/oh/) in production and perception. (Originally published in Labov, Ash, and Boberg, The Atlas of North American English, De Gruyter Mouton, 2005. Reprinted by permission.)

12 

  Phonetics and phonology

  13

Mergers and a split 

Fig. 4: Overlap of LOT and THOUGHT. Ellipses show 95% confidence intervals.

African American Pittsburghers as well as whites. Figure 4 shows the overlapping acoustic measurements of the LOT and THOUGHT vowels for the white speakers. While this merger occurs in many other varieties in the U.S., particularly in the West, the Pittsburgh version is nevertheless different from other areas where the merger takes place in that the merger takes place further back and higher. In other words, it is LOT that is moving up and back to merge with THOUGHT more than the other way around. 2.2.2 Mergers before /l/ A following /l/ segment conditions several mergers in Western Pennsylvania. In the POOL/PULL merger (/u/ and /ʊ/ before /l/), POOL generally sounds like

  Phonetics and phonology

14 

PULL to speakers of other English dialects as /u/ becomes fronted and lowered in POOL. A parallel conditioned merger is the STEEL-STILL merger. In this merger, /i/ lowers and centralizes toward /ɪ/, so that “Steelers”, the name of the local American football team, is often spelled Stillers in humorous contexts.

2.2.3 Split of TRAP and STAN In many areas of the U.S., including the Pittsburgh area, there is a so-called ­“nasal system” in which STAN words (words with /æ/ before the nasal conso­ nants /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/) are pronounced with a higher vowel than are syllables in the TRAP class that do not end in nasal consonants. There is a great deal of vari­ ation in the degree of difference between STAN and TRAP vowels in Pittsburgh (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006:176), and not all Pittsburghers raise STAN before the back nasal /ŋ/.

2.3 Phonetic shifts 2.3.1 The Pittsburgh Chain Shift Several phonetic shifts have also been identified for Pittsburgh. A subset of these vowel shifts has been identified by Labov et al. as the “Pittsburgh Chain Shift” (PCS). This shift begins with the low back merger discussed above. The backing of the merged LOT/THOUGHT vowel leaves a gap in the vowel space in the low central position. Labov et al. argue that, in Pittsburgh speech, STRUT has lowered into the vacated space. Figure 5 shows this shift in vowel space schematically, and Figure 6 shows the locations in acoustic space of all the vowels in our sample of white Pittsburghers. Labov et al.’s 2006 data suggest that STRUT is significantly lower in Pitts­ burgh than in other dialects of American English. Figure 7 compares the low ­vowels of speakers from various parts of the U.S.

Fig. 5: Schematic representation of the Pittsburgh Chain Shift

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Phonetic shifts 

Fig. 6: Mean values for all vowels in the PSSP corpus. Ellipses show 95% confidence intervals. The LOT and PALM vowels overlap below THOUGHT.

Note in Fig. 7 that the Pittsburgh value for STRUT (the triangle) is lower than for any other area, and the values for LOT and THOUGHT (small square and in­ verted triangle, respectively) are almost the same (because they are merged) and further back than in any other variety. Our own data complicate this picture, however. As a measure of the shift, we correlated speaker averages for the first formant (F1) of STRUT and F2 of THOUGHT. If there is a Pittsburgh Chain Shift, it would predict a negative correlation, as a lower F2 of THOUGHT should predict a higher F1 of STRUT. We actually found a slight positive correlation between the two5. In a multiple regression performed on F1 of STRUT, we found that age had a slight negative correlation with F1,6

5 r2 = 0.3258904, t = 2.2865, df = 44, p-value = 0.02709. 6 beta = −0.551, p