I’m from Pittsburgh.
Some say, “Picksburgh.”
Western Pennsylvania is cursed…nay, blessed with a unique dialect known here as, “Pittsburghese” but in academic circles as Western Pennsylvania English (WPE). Many university-educated natives, implanted academics, and the burgeoning nouveau hipster class look down upon it, and those who use WPE unabashedly are largely derided as jagoffs and yinzers. The origins of our dialect can be directly traced to the Scots-Irish and German farmers and whiskey producers who first populated this region, as well as later-arriving Slavic-speaking (e.g. Polish) immigrants. A “jagger” is any small, sharp-pointed object, and a jagger certainly can irritate the skin. So what’s a jagoff? (“You, Del Duca!”) True, sometimes I can be an irritating or annoying person. And what of “you ones,” or the second person plural personal pronoun? Well, we contract it and, utilizing our unique way of producing certain vowels, arrive at “Yinz.” And thus, a person from this neck of the woods can be justifiably referred to as a “yinzer.” A yinzer can be but isn’t necessarily a jagoff, but the term “jagoff” is unquestionably uttered by a yinzer.
Yinz got it?
Good.
What’s my point here?
Pittsburghese is a perfectly legitimate non-standard dialect of U.S. English. It includes unique phonology, or sounds (e.g. “dahn” for “down” and “warter” for “water”), vocabulary (e.g. “jagoff” and “nebby,” which is an adjective that equates to “nosey.” A “neb-nose” is a person given to prying in the affairs of others. The phrase, “Get ahtta here, ya nebby jagoff,” uttered with any sincerity in any old-school Pittsburgh neighborhood will incite violence), grammar (e.g. need/want/like + past-participle, which gives us: “The car needs washed,” or, when considering phonology, “The car needs warshed,” rather than the more standard, “The car needs to be washed”), as well as certain discourse and prosodic variations. (Prosody is the way language “sings” and includes cadence, intonation, pitch, stress, and rhythm.) I can hear the dialect quickly. I can name that Yinzer in just one word, and that’s largely because of prosody.
Pittsburghese, like any dialect, can be used completely, not at all, or somewhere along the continuum between those extremes. Some people, like my Mom, use many of the features of the Western Pennsylvania English. Others, like me, use one or two. And folks who’ve either moved here for a spell (“awhile” pronounced more like, “Ah-wow” in Pittsburgh) or moved away will often land somewhere in the middle. Any dialect of any standard language expression exists on a continuum of: completely->very-> moderately->slightly->negligibly. (Why is it, then , that nearly every person in my family is a textbook Yinzer yet I end up using very few of the dialectal markers reflexively? There are a variety of personality traits including a pesky perfectionist streak and a desire to be liked/accepted, as well as experiential factors including my having lived away from Pittsburgh for many years of my life, become a professional speech/language pathologist, and also hobbied as a tour guide and a cappella singer.)
Very few people in their everyday lives use Standard American English, or SAE. National newscasters generally do. Politicians used to, but now try to sound “folksy” and local to whatever demographic they’re trying to capture. They “code-switch” to make the people around them believe something like, “Oh they’re one of us! I’ll vote for them.” Actually, almost all of us will code-switch to a more standard English dialect when we’re in the presence of authority, professionals, or an interviewer.
A person is neither less intelligent because they use a non-standard dialect nor more intelligent because they use the standard variation.
Go ahead, read that line up there again.
It’s true.
Verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate with depth and complexity is not determined by the dialect a person uses.
Let it sink in.
It’s also true.
Unfortunately, and I’d argue unethically if not amorally, all of our tests of intelligence, achievement, and acceptance are presented in…Standard American English. As a country, we’ve made the decision that “standard” equates to “best,” and furthermore that “standard” equates to “indicative of ability, cognition, and social worth.”
I want to start this conversation, particularly with my personal experience using the non-standard dialect of my family and ancestors, so that I can springboard into a related conversation about the non-standard dialect of another population in the U.S., a population that has been historically enslaved, oppressed, and devalued.
Next time, we’ll talk about Black, or African-American, Vernacular English (BVE/AAVE).
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