PITTSBURGH ACCENT

Robb   Sun Jun 29, 2008 7:12 am GMT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9eJbAE1XpM

In this video (starting at 0:33), the woman, Diane Roles, has a very Pittsburghese accent. I am VERY. She was born and raised in SW PA and it's quite obvious. Not many people speak like this nowadays, and it's usually restricted to working class people living directly within the city or its immediate suburbs. This woman is very working class. I've never heard anybody outside of SW PA speak like this. I was born and raised here, so I hear it quite often.

What I'm wondering is, what are some unique features of her accent? How does she pronounce certain things that strike you as odd? Note her pronunciation of "husband"; I can guarantee that she pronounces "cousin" the same way.
Skippy   Sun Jun 29, 2008 1:56 pm GMT
Her accent isn't that thick. Perhaps she standardized it for the interview. I have a friend from Homer, PA who went to IUP for college and she has a very thick Pittsburghese accent. When our other friends and I would get drunk we'd do impressions of her accent and we always just ended up yelling at each other...

"Yinz wanna go to da Burg and si da Stillers 'n at?"
Brian   Sun Jun 29, 2008 5:07 pm GMT
Okay, well her accent is still very Pittsburgh. It's thick enough. Nobody younger than 35 speaks like that anymore. I've only met one teenage boy who talked like she does, which struck me as odd.
Robb   Sun Jun 29, 2008 5:10 pm GMT
<<Okay, well her accent is still very Pittsburgh. It's thick enough. Nobody younger than 35 speaks like that anymore. I've only met one teenage boy who talked like she does, which struck me as odd.>>

Yeah, I agree.
Guest   Sun Jun 29, 2008 6:18 pm GMT
It's funny how kids don't take on these accents anymore. I was in the South a little while ago and even though the parents had these thick-as-tar blue collar Southern accents, the kids spoke with an accent that was somewhere between GA and Northeastern English... they pretty much sounded like the kids in my hometown in Northeastern New Jersey.
Robb   Sun Jun 29, 2008 6:59 pm GMT
<<It's funny how kids don't take on these accents anymore. I was in the South a little while ago and even though the parents had these thick-as-tar blue collar Southern accents, the kids spoke with an accent that was somewhere between GA and Northeastern English... they pretty much sounded like the kids in my hometown in Northeastern New Jersey.>>

I think it's terrible. Homogeneity is awful.
Skippy   Sun Jun 29, 2008 7:03 pm GMT
It disappears with age, and this is only a feature of urban speech. Smaller towns still exhibit regional features, which are actually diverging as time goes on.

My friends from high school who, at the time, I didn't believe had particularly thick Texas accents, now exhibit a pretty thick Texas twang only 5 years later after attending college in Texas (or Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.) but those of us who went away (California, New York, etc.) have more standard-sounding accents.
Guest   Sun Jun 29, 2008 9:45 pm GMT
Why the fucking bizarre post with a huge space?

Do you think these regional accents will disappear soon now because of modern communications and mass media?
Guest   Sun Jun 29, 2008 9:48 pm GMT
It messed up the page.
Skippy   Sun Jun 29, 2008 11:23 pm GMT
No, modern communication only makes it easier to become familiar with "standardized" speech. Languages are still evolving, changing, and diverging from one another. Just because German adopts some English words and English adopts some Spanish words and so on ad infinitum but they remain just as mutually unintelligible as they've ever been... English English and American English continue to diverge from being the same dialect in the 18th century to what have become, largely, dialects that are not always mutually intelligible.

Languages are never going to converge into one, they will only continue to split.