A sample of Pittsburghese:
The language of the early
Scots-Irish settlers had the greatest influence on the speech of southwestern and western Pennsylvania. This influence is reflected mainly in the retention of certain lexical items (
cruds or
cruddled milk (cottage cheese),
hap (comforter),
jag (to tease or annoy),
jag around (to fool around or act foolishly),
jagger (a thorn or burr),
jagoff (an annoying or irritating person),
neb/
nebby/
neb-nose (nosy),
redd up (to clean),
slippy (slippery),
yinz/yunz/you’uns (second-person plural), "punctual"
whenever and possibly
"positive" anymore and reversed usage of
leave and
let, but also in the
like,
need, or
want + past participle grammatical constructions i.e. 'the yard needs mowed' and the discourse marker '‘n’at," literally meaning "and that" (e.g. "The yard n'at needs mowed," meaning "the yard and surrounding areas need to be mowed.") According to a study based only on pronunciation, the dialect region of western Pennsylvania ranges north to
Erie, Pennsylvania, west to
Youngstown, Ohio, south to
Clarksburg, West Virginia, and east to
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005), but different features may be differently distributed.
Having a wife from Pittsburgh all these phrases are becoming well known to me.
Hougini in Omaha