Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect

by Barbara Johnstone

Overview

This book explores the history of Pittsburghese, the language of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area as it is imagined and used by Pittsburghers. Pittburghese is linked to local identity so strongly that it is alluded to almost every time people talk about what Pittsburgh is like, or what it means to be a Pittsburgher. But what happened during the second half of the 20th century to reshape a largely unnoticed way of speaking into this highly visible urban "dialect"? In this book, sociolinguist Barbara Johnstone focuses on this question. Treating Pittsburghese as a cultural product of talk, writing, and other forms of social practice, Johnstone shows how non-standard pronunciations, words, and bits of grammar used in the Pittsburgh area were taken up into a repertoire of words and phrases and a vocal style that has become one of the most resonant symbols of local identity in the United States today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199945702
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/25/2013
Series:	Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	696,451
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Barbara Johnstone is Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Repetition in Arabic Discourse (Benjamins, 1990), Stories, Community, and Place: Narratives from Middle America (Indiana UP, 1990), The Linguistic Individual (Oxford, 1996), and two textbooks. Her research has explored how people evoke and shape places in talk and what can be learned by taking the perspective of the individual on language and discourse.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Special Symbols and Typographic Conventions

1 Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese
2 Yinz are in Stiller Country: Dialect, Place, and Social Meaning in Language
3 From Pittsburgh Speech to Pittsburghese
4 Perceiving Pittsburghese
5 Linking Dialect and Place in Interaction
6 Pittsburghese in the Media
7 Selling Pittsburghese
8 Performing Pittsburghese
9 The History of Yinz and the Outlook for Pittsburghese

References