why can't one pick up Pittsburgh accent? (Aliquippa, Brentwood: home, school)

[Tallysmom]

Originally Posted by scottrpriester

Do you really want to pick up an uneducated sounding dialect?

I really have a bone to pick with this attitude.

Would you go to Vermont and think someone who talked "Vermontese" was an uneducated hick? Or Boston? Or Atlanta?

Why do you think it here?

Yes -- of course you're going to run into morons with the accent -- but you're going to miss a lot of intelligent people, too, if you just dismiss them as morons on the face of an ACCENT. It's just an accent.

[nuwaver88]

Originally Posted by Jay_F

The WORST is when a movie/show is set in Pittsburgh, and they *ATTEMPT* to get the dialect right... Always comes off to me as a terrible mix of Chicago and Brooklyn.

Because that is what it is, I think.

[chielgirl]

I think that the "Pittsburgh accent" along with the grammatical errors does make people sound horribly uneducated.

Yinz guys ain't got none is all too prevalent with down-home burghers.
I don't believe you hear professionals talking in yinzer dialect.
They certainly wouldn't get far in a multinational corporate environment.

[TechieTransplant]

Originally Posted by Tallysmom

I really have a bone to pick with this attitude.

Would you go to Vermont and think someone who talked "Vermontese" was an uneducated hick? Or Boston? Or Atlanta?

I wouldn't feel that way at all towards the areas you mentioned. We spent a month in NE during our honeymoon last year.......their "accent" doesn't sound uneducated at all. The way some (thankfully not all) SW Pennsylvanians speak sounds very lazy and uneducated.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by chielgirl

I don't believe you hear professionals talking in yinzer dialect.

It is a little more subtle, but I have definitely detected the Pittsburgh dialect among native professionals. For example, one of the easiest things to spot is omitting "to be" (as in "This document needs copied").

By the way, I agree that there is no rational basis for claiming one dialect is better or worse than another dialect. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't share that view, so that is a reality people have to deal with, rational or not.

[ajl777]

Yea there's like an affected Pittsburghese and there's true Pittsburghese. The affected Pittsburghese is probably what you will encounter more, whereas true Pittsburghese is a whole nother beast.

[ajl777]

Originally Posted by chielgirl

I think that the "Pittsburgh accent" along with the grammatical errors does make people sound horribly uneducated.

Yinz guys ain't got none is all too prevalent with down-home burghers.
I don't believe you hear professionals talking in yinzer dialect.
They certainly wouldn't get far in a multinational corporate environment.

Yea this is what I was pretty much trying to say. The affected yinzer accent is like maybe you say air instead of there and ou is pronounced ah and most verbs are spoken a little hard. This is common and for the most part pretty standard. True Pittsburghese though is probably not a reflection of the dialect, our georgraphic location, or our ancestral heritage, it's probably more of a reflection of people who have low IQs or haven't done much past maybe graduating high school.

[Jay_F]

Love/hate/indifferent to the sound of the dialect, what really adds to the magic is indigenous word use; perhaps somthing like:

"I seen a grinny and sputzie in a jagger bush eating berries, so I ascraed them with a gumband fired their way."

[fleetiebelle]

It is a little more subtle, but I have definitely detected the Pittsburgh dialect among native professionals.

Me too. Some of the office computer guys will talk about the "mahse", and we've mentioned the "o" sound in words like "stop" and "concert" before.

[aveojohn]

From Pittsburgh Speech & Society :Can people pick up a Pittsburgh accent if they move here as adults?
If an individual is surrounded by speakers with a distinct accent, it’s certainly possible for the individual to adopt certain elements of that accent, and many outsiders pick up local words like “yinz,” at least for fun. It is also normal for such a person to “switch back” to their original accent when having conversations with people who share that same original accent. In general, people’s accents are fairly resistant to change; you tend to sound like the people you were around when you were a child.