Overview

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.

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9780199945689

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Reviews

No dialect in the United States is quite like Pittsburghese-in linguistic distinctiveness, public awareness, and sociolinguistic commodification. And no linguist is better suited to describe the creation, construction, and circulation of this unique sociolinguistic situation than Barbara Johnstone. This book offers a powerful, perceptive analysis presented in engaging styl? a sociolinguistic masterpiece. Barbara Johnstone has the gift of presenting intellectually complex material in a clear and comprehensible way. Here, she elucidates the ideological framework of indexicality and enregisterment, taking the holistic approach of community of practice studies but applying this to the city as community and letting the people of Pittsburgh speak for themselves. Her commitment to this city and its people shines through. Joan Beal, Sheffield University

""No dialect in the United States is quite like Pittsburghese-in linguistic distinctiveness, public awareness, and sociolinguistic commodification. And no linguist is better suited to describe the creation, construction, and circulation of this unique sociolinguistic situation than Barbara Johnstone. This book offers a powerful, perceptive analysis presented in engaging style--a sociolinguistic masterpiece."" --Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University ""Barbara Johnstone has the gift of presenting intellectually complex material in a clear and comprehensible way. Here, she elucidates the ideological framework of indexicality and enregisterment, taking the holistic approach of community of practice studies but applying this to the city as community and letting the people of Pittsburgh speak for themselves. Her commitment to this city and its people shines through."" --Joan Beal, Sheffield University

No dialect in the United States is quite like Pittsburghese-in linguistic distinctiveness, public awareness, and sociolinguistic commodification. And no linguist is better suited to describe the creation, construction, and circulation of this unique sociolinguistic situation than Barbara Johnstone. This book offers a powerful, perceptive analysis presented in engaging styl? a sociolinguistic masterpiece. Barbara Johnstone has the gift of presenting intellectually complex material in a clear and comprehensible way. Here, she elucidates the ideological framework of indexicality and enregisterment, taking the holistic approach of community of practice studies but applying this to the city as community and letting the people of Pittsburgh speak for themselves. Her commitment to this city and its people shines through. Joan Beal, Sheffield University Speaking Pittsburghese: The story of a dialect is an impressive masterpiece that pushes sociolinguists and dialectologists to take a more multi-faceted approach to the study of dialects. Holman Tse, Sociolinguistic Studies

Author Information

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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