Black Pittsburghers And "Pittsburghese" Accents & Words (article excerpts)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents some article excerpts about Black Pittsburghers and "Pittsburghese" accents and words. 

The Addendum to this post showcases a 2012 YouTube vlog (video log) of a Black Pittsburgh woman doing the "Accent challenge tag". A few comments from that vlog are included in this post after that vlog. 

The content of this post is presented for linguistic and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

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This is part of an ongoing pancocojams post about United States dialects in general and African American dialects in particular. 

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2024/01/do-people-who-speak-pittsburghese-sound.html for a closely related pancocojams post entitled "Do People Who Speak "Pittsburghese" Sound Like They're From The United States South?"

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2024/01/accent-tag-videos-of-black-woman-and.html for two accent tag videos of people from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Also, click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2024/01/black-washington-dc-accents-non-black.html for a pancocojams post that showcases some YouTube accent tag videos of people from Washington D. C.

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BRIEF INFORMATION ABOUT PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh
"Pittsburgh ... is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the second-most populous city in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia and the 68th-most populous city in the U.S. with a population of 302,971 as of the 2020 census. The city anchors the Pittsburgh metropolitan area of Western Pennsylvania; its population of 2.457 million is the largest in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, and the 26th-largest in the U.S. Pittsburgh is the principal city of the greater Pittsburgh–Weirton–Steubenville combined statistical area that extends into two neighboring states, Ohio and West Virginia.

[...]

Regional identity

Pittsburgh falls within the borders of the Northeastern United States as defined by multiple US Government agencies. Pittsburgh is the principal city of the Pittsburgh Combined Statistical Area, a Combined statistical area defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Pittsburgh falls within the borders of Appalachia as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission, and has long been characterized as the "northern urban industrial anchor of Appalachia."[67] In its post-industrial state, Pittsburgh has been characterized as the "Paris of Appalachia",[68][69][70][71] recognizing the city's cultural, educational, healthcare, and technological resources, and is the largest city in Appalachia.

[...]

By the 2020 census, the population slightly declined further to 302,971.[116] Its racial and ethnic makeup in 2020 was 64.7% non-Hispanic white, 23.0% Black or African American, 5.8% Asian, and 3.2% Hispanic or Latino American of any race"...
-snip-
For comparison, click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia for information about Philadelphia, Pennsylvania which is located in Eastern Pennsylvania about six hour by car away from Pittsburgh.

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SELECTED ARTICLE EXCERPTS

These excerpts are given in no particular order.

ARTICLE EXCERPT #1
https://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/pittsburghese/ "Do You Speak American?" Aerican Varieties; Steel Town Speak" by Barbara Johnstone, professor. Carnegie Mellon University and Scott Kiesling, professor, University of Pittsburgh (no publishing date cited; retrieved January 11, 2024)

"The Distinctive Sounds of Pittsburgh
The dialect of the early Scottish-Irish settlers still infuses the “Midland” dialect of the Pittsburgh area with unique words and sounds. Barbara Johnstone and Scott Kiesling discuss the idiosyncrasies of “Pittsburghese.” (The research cited in this essay was first published in 2001.)

Many people in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania are convinced that a distinctive dialect of English is spoken in the area, which they call “Pittsburghese.”

When people talk about “Pittsburghese,” they often mention words like yinz (you, plural), slippy  (slippery), and nebby (nosy), sounds like the vowels in Stillers  (Steelers) or dahntahn (downtown), and expressions like n’at (and that, used to mean something like et cetera). People in Pittsburgh enjoy talking about “Pittsburghese,” and they make commercial use of examples it on t-shirts, postcards, souvenir shot-glasses, and other such items, as well as on the Internet.

But many of the linguistic features considered unique to the Pittsburgh area are found elsewhere in the region. Words like yinz are used in other parts of the Appalachian Mountains. Other features are found to the west of Pittsburgh, in the central and south-central parts of the Midwest. Some pronunciations identified with “Pittsburghese,” such as still (steel) are heard throughout the U.S. Even the features of “Pittsburghese” that are most local can be heard in a fairly large area of central and southwestern Pennsylvania.

Although not confined to Pittsburgh, many Pittsburghers employ a dialect variety that is known as “North Midland” or “Lower Northern” English.

Midland dialect starts in the Mid-Atlantic, spreads to the Midwest and south along the Appalachian Mountains

The earliest English-speaking immigrants to North America brought their native English dialects with them. The people who settled in New England and in the South came mainly from southern England, and they brought elements of southern English dialects. (For example, New Englanders and Southerners alike may drop the r sounds in some words.) The Midland dialect area starts in a narrow band in the Mid-Atlantic states (southern New Jersey, southeastern Pennsylvania, and northern Delaware and Maryland) and spreads westward into the Midwest and southward along the Appalachian Mountains.

[...]

Dialects spread when people pick up features of the speech of people they are like, talk to a lot, and/or identify with, and the children of immigrants were far more likely to want to emulate the speech of the local people who already spoke English than to emulate their parents’ accented  speech. Largely because they have always been segregated from other groups in work, education, and housing, casual African-American speech in Pittsburgh, as in other northern cities, continues to preserve more of the southern-sounding features African-Americans brought with them, although North Midland features can also be heard in many Pittsburgh African-Americans’ speech."...

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #2
From https://www.theroot.com/yup-black-pittsburghers-have-a-pittsburghese-too-1822522580 "Yup, Black Pittsburghers Have A "Pittsburghese" Too" by Damon Young, October 22, 2014
"I went to college in Buffalo, NY, a city which shares many cultural and aesthetic similarities to Pittsburgh. Well, Pittsburgh in a time warp. It's a city that's perhaps 10 or 15 years behind where Pittsburgh currently is, which makes it five years behind Cleveland and 225 years behind D.C.

[…]

Although Buffalo and New York City are on opposite sides of the state, both my school and the city had a robust New York City presence and influence. Initially, I was fascinated by the New Yorkers there. They had their own language and slang, they made curious fashion decisions, and they all assumed New York City was the epicenter of everyone's life, not just theirs (which became extremely annoying).

Example:

Me: "Where are you from?"

Them: "The City."

Me (thinking) "There are like 38053 cities in America! Which f—king* city are you from?"

It was also through them that I first realized I had an accent. As hard as it was for me to understand everything they were saying, it was just as hard for them to understand me. Some even assumed I was from the Deep South (which is as hilarious now as it was then). I was flabbergasted by this. I assumed I spoke "normal, accent-free English" and the New Yorkers were the odd ones. But people from other cities (Buffalo, Toronto, Cleveland, etc) also noticed I had an accent they'd never heard before. It wasn't until sharing this with my best friend — who was in school in Baltimore — who shared that he'd hear the same thing from his teammates and classmates, that I realized it was a Pittsburgh thing.

My surprise at my accent may come as a surprise. After all, Pittsburgh did just win Gawker's Ugly Accent tournament. Perhaps people don't know exactly what Pittsburghese is, but people are aware it is a thing, and native Pittsburghers should be hyper-aware. And I was, but here's the thing: (Generally speaking) Pittsburghese isn't associated with Black Pittsburghers. We (Black Pittsburghers) speak regularly, while they (White Pittsburghers) are on that Yinzer sh-t*.

But this is wrong. Perhaps we don't use the same slang (it's been over 25 years since I called someone a jagoff) and perhaps there are prominent distinctions within our diction, but Black Pittsburghers also have a "Pittsburghese" with its own unique cadence and rhythm. It's just not something we tend to recognize until we get away from home and its more noticeable.

It still took me some time to embrace this. After assuming I was the baseline and everyone else spoke with an accent, it was a bit jarring to learn that the way I spoke wasn't "right," just Pittsburgh. Also, as anyone who's ever been in close proximity with a native New Yorker (Harlemites especially) for an extended period of time will tell you, they're such assholes that they force you to be assholes by osmosis, resulting in you thinking things like "Look, asshole. The way I speak is the right way. You're wrong, and your city is filled with rats the size of penguins."

But it eventually happened. And here I am today, over a decade after first learning I had an accent, beaming with pride after seeing my city being recognized for a way of speaking that I'm not even really completely a part of. This might not make much sense if you're not from Pittsburgh. But I'm used to things said by Pittsburghers not making much sense if you're not from Pittsburgh, so I don't care.”
-snip-
*This word is fully spelled out in this comment.

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #3 
From https://pittsburghspeech.pitt.edu/PittsburghSpeech_FAQ.html 
Pittsburgh Speech & Society [no publishing date. Retrieved Jan 11, 2024]

"Questions and answers

[…]

Do African-American Pittsburghers speak "Pittsburghese"?

Not really. Our research shows that African-American Pittsburghers generally think of Pittsburghese as "white speech", and, in conjunction with the assertion of their own African-American identity, they are far less likely to speak with a Pittsburgh accent than with a more Southern-sounding accent. This is not to say that some Pittsburgh African-Americans don't use some of the same local words and phrases as white Pittsburghers do, though, including "nebby," and "needs washed." African Americans have their own regional variations in the way they speak."....

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #4
From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0271530912000341 Language & Communication; Volume 32, Issue 4, October 2012, Pages 358-371; Maeve Eberhardt "Enregisterment of Pittsburghese and the local African American community

Abstract

In Pittsburgh, there is a recognizable, socially meaningful way of speaking, popularly known as Pittsburghese. Through a number of metapragmatic and metadiscursive practices, Pittsburghese has become enregistered (Agha, 2003, Agha, 2007), and thus ideologically linked to a specific persona, the authentic Pittsburgher (Johnstone, 2009, Johnstone, 2011, Johnstone et al., 2006). In this paper, I explore the enregisterment of Pittsburghese in the local African American community, and the ways in which the dialect is a site for the expression and reproduction of cultural values linked to Whites in the city. For African Americans, Pittsburghese is not only indexical of localness but specifically of White localness, which also has the effect of erasing social class distinctions that may otherwise be important to the meanings of Pittsburghese for White residents of the city.

[...]

In this paper, I focus on the enregisterment of Pittsburghese in the local African American community, and the ways in which the local dialect is a site for the expression and reproduction of cultural values linked to Whites in the city. I argue that as for Pittsburgh speakers more generally, Pittsburghese for African Americans is enregistered as a particular way of speaking, identified as uniquely local. The groups diverge, however, in the other social meanings attached to the dialect, as evidenced in metalinguistic and metadiscursive practices. For African Americans, Pittsburghese is not only indexical of localness but specifically of White localness, which also has the effect of erasing social class distinctions that may otherwise be important to the meanings of Pittsburghese for White residents of the city. In these ways, the notion of Pittsburghese has become raced and exclusionary, creating boundaries between local Whites and African Americans. As will become apparent, however, this boundary making has not been the work only of Whites—African Americans are complicit as well in creating and maintaining an ideological separation between the ethnic groups, in part through the enregisterment of the local dialect.

[...]

African American perceptions of Pittsburghese

Within the African American community, there is also a relatively high level of awareness surrounding Pittsburghese. In sociolinguistic interviews, most interviewees were able to list features of Pittsburghese when asked about local ways of speaking. Although a few reported not having heard the term Pittsburghese itself, they were still familiar with specific salient features, such as yinz and dahntahn. And while many African Americans are aware of the t-shirts and other commodities featuring…"...

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