Posted on 08/16/2019 8:41:47 AM PDT by Vigilanteman
Understand the desire to lose the inflections in favor of a teevee speech patter, but ... one of the really enjoyable facets of traveling around the United States.
American doesn’t have the hard regional dialects found in other parts of the world (ish). The regional speech patterns though are a joy to hear. Listening to two engineers (calculus, not rail) of any discipline discuss a technical item is high entertainment. Joe Pesci, Fred Gwynne, Marisa Tomei take a doofy movie and make it enjoyable for nothing more than the interplay of the speech patterns.
Vive le differance!
KYPD
Am from Boston but love visiting Pittsburgh.The Boston accent and slang
is wickid pissah (”what’re you, retahhhhded?”). The Kennedys have their own accent in Meh-seh-chyoo-setts with vim and vigah.
Yinz think Picksburgh Dad is funny an’ ‘at? Gumbands, chipped ham, the Stillers, jagoffs.
Heard traces of Pittsburghese in a Dennis Miller audiobook—what’s goin’
ahn?
“So dint I see you dahn the Meadows last week?”—overheard at the Permanti Bruhs in Crafton.Kielbasa an’ cheese
sammich.
Mick Irish,Kenzo
I agree. Why do we need to be homogenized?
Admittedly, though, I went about damping down my Maryland accent when I was a young woman. Now, I just love hearing a Maryland accent.
I also like regional accents.
Your screen name sort of gave it away. But those are the three big ones in Philly, aren’t they?
Pittsburgh is not the only place where there is demand for these classes.
Martha Stewart and Tanya Roberts had to take years of diction classes to ditch their New Jersey accents.
Ditto Leonard Nimoy to ditch his wicked chowdah Boston accent.
If you have the chance to look at Meghan Markle’s recent videos... after her marriage to Prince Harry, she’s suddenly developed a British accent in talking to the commoners.
Did she have a tutor, one wonders?
When people point out my yinzer accent, I double dahn. I wouldn’t change a syllable.
I have to steal that!
Yeah. I grew up in da Bronx till age 15 then lawn guy land from there. My father’s mother and her other sons apart from my father were all full of ‘Terlit and earl burner’. (Never Earl boiner. That would be Brooklyn. There is a difference.)
My cousins spoke like that too like it was a badge of honor. My father was edumacated by my mother who mostly spoke properly. I believe she told my father to stop talking like a gavone (gavone or more correctly caffone is Italian slang for a low born jerk). Yes along with Bronxeeze we had NY Italian slang interspersed.
The other weird thing about Pittsburghese is some of the backwards sentence structure. Particularly true in local government, i.e.;
County of Allegheny
County of Allegheny Bureau of Police
City of Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire
etc.
Both the word bureau and the sentence structure are pulled straight from French. And we gave them the heave-ho 260 years ago!
Pittsburgh brings back terrible memories for me.
First job out of college 35 years ago I worked for a stock brokerage firm in Pittsburgh. Think Wolf of Wall Street atmosphere.
I was last in sales every week and the brokerage manager would literally scream his lungs out at me at the Monday morning meetings.
Lasted 11 months before I quit on threat of being fired.
Watched Wolf of Wall Street and it made me sick to my stomach.
I did not realize there was a distinctive Pittsburgh accent. I recently travelled through Pittsburgh, going up the Duquense incline and eating lunch at Square Cafe on S. Braddock. I really did not notice anything different about the way the employees at either place talked.
Ye godz.. I was born in Pittsburgh, but left when I was 10 DAYS old, never went back. We moved to NYC for my first seven years and I still have a touch of NY in my pronunciation, I’m told.
Yes isn’t CCAC Community College of
Allegheny County?
Heard Sean Hannity say to get his job
as a talk host in Atlanta, and
then nationally he had to lose
the Noo Yawk accent.
We lived in Pittsburg when I was 3 and 4. For many years I had a way of saying certain words that I didn’t understand until I did a job in Pittsburg and found that everyone there talked like me.
Yes..Lots of Polish,Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans also
There is a “H” in Pittsburgh. I lived there for almost thirty years. Now I live in the South, but I still love the Burgh.
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