Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect

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.


Author: Barbara Johnstone
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 11/25/2013
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780199945702

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.

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