<i>Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect</i> Barbara Johnstone (2013) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 266 ISBN 978-0-19-994570-2 (Paperback)

Abstract

Speaking Pittsburghese: The story of a dialect Barbara Johnstone (2013) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 266 ISBN 978-0-19-994570-2 (Paperback) Reviewed by Holman TseThe northeastern US city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the setting of Barbara Johnstone's book about the story of a very distinctive dialect of American English popularly referred to as Pittsburghese. It is a dialect characterized by a set of lexical items such as the word gumband ('rubber band'), a set of phonological features such as /aw/ monophthongization (as in the word downtown [da?nta?n], also spelled as dahntahn), and morphosyntactic features such as the need/want + X'ed construction (ex: this needs washed vs. this needs to be washed in Standard English). Yet, what makes this dialect special is more than simply its linguistic features. As Johnstone shows, Pittsburghese is also special in how it came in to being, in how people have become aware of its existence, and in how people talk about it. A common theme that resonates throughout the book is that Pittsburghers talk a lot about Pittsburghese. Why is this so? How did this formerly unnoticed way of speaking become so consciously linked to local identity? Johnstone addresses these questions by examining the dialect from multiple angles. Each chapter presents a different piece of this captivating story.The story begins with a linguistic description of Pittsburgh speech in Chapter 1. Here, Johnstone makes an important distinction between Pittsburgh speech, which refers to the local dialect as it is actually spoken, and Pittsburghese, which refers to the dialect 'as it is locally imagined' (p. 17). The differences are clearly outlined in more than a dozen pages of tables that list features of both Pittsburgh speech and Pittsburghese. Many of the lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic features that characterize Pittsburgh speech are not even noticed by speakers. Yet, people also describe noticeable features that are not unique to Pittsburgh as part of Pittsburghese. What is important, Johnstone argues, is that Pittsburghese is more than simply about a set of features. It is also about 'how people act, how they interact, and how they experience the world' (p. 35).The theoretical framework of the book, presented in Chapter 2, is grounded in cultural geography and semiotics. Johnstone follows recent scholarship in cultural geography by treating place as a social construct rather than as simply a physical location. Her approach is also phenomenological in its treatment of place as something that individuals experience. Yet, at the same time, Johnstone also considers material aspects of place as tied to topography and economics. The model of semiotics used is one that builds on the work of linguistic anthropologists. Key concepts include indexicality (Silverstein, 2003; Eckert, 2008), which refers to a relationship between signs and meaning, and enregisterment (Agha, 2003), which refers to the process through which linguistic forms become linked with a social meaning.The explanation of how Pittsburgh speech became indexically linked to the city of Pittsburgh and how certain features consequently became enregistered as Pittsburghese begins in Chapter 3 with an overview of the history of the region. The first major group of English speakers in southwestern Pennsylvania were the Scotch-Irish who arrived in the 18th century. This set the model of English for subsequent generations of Pittsburghers, including the many Eastern European immigrant groups that settled in the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These immigrants came primarily for employment opportunities in the steel factories, which would transform Pittsburgh into one of the wealthiest cities in America. Throughout much of this period, however, the mountainous topography of southwestern Pennsylvania isolated residents from the rest of the country making it possible for local speech to diverge from varieties of English spoken elsewhere. …