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Western Pennsylvania English, commonly known more narrowly as Pittsburgh English or popularly by outsiders as Pittsburghese, is the traditional dialect of American English native to the western half of Pennsylvania, centered around the city of Pittsburgh (whose residents are locally known as Yinzers) plus northern West Virginia and the eastern border of Ohio.〔http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/pittsburghese/〕 ==Overview== Many of the sounds and words found in the speech of Pittsburghers are popularly thought to be unique to the city. This is reflected in the term "Pittsburghese," the putative sum of these features in the form of a dialect. However, few of these features are restricted solely to Pittsburgh or the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Instead, many of them are found throughout southwestern Pennsylvania, the Midland dialect region, or even large parts of the United States. Perhaps the only feature whose distribution is restricted almost exclusively to the Pittsburgh metropolitan area is monophthongization. This means that words such as ''house'', ''down'', ''found'', or ''sauerkraut'' are sometimes pronounced with an "ah" sound instead of the more standard pronunciation of "ow", rendering pronunciations such as ''hahs'', ''dahn'', ''fahnd'', and ''sahrkraht''. 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 (e.g. "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"). When referring to consumable products, the word ''all'' is used to mean ''all gone''. For example, the phrase ''the butter's all'' would be understood as "the butter is all gone." This likely derives from German. 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 Johnstown, Pennsylvania (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005), but different features may be differently distributed. Documented contributions from other languages are ''pierogi'' and ''kolbassi'' from Polish; ''babushka'' from Russian, Slovak, and Polish; and, from German, falling intonation at the end of questions with a definite yes or no answer. Possible contributions from other languages are reversed ''leave~let'' from German and monophthongal /aw/ from contact between English and one or more Slavic languages (Johnstone 2002; Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2005), though these influences are openly posited as speculative. Speakers of Pittsburgh English are sometimes called "Yinzers", in reference to their use of the 2nd-person plural pronoun "Yinz" The word "yinzer" is sometimes heard as pejorative, indicating a lack of sophistication, although the term is now used in a variety of ways. (For more on the pronoun ''yinz'', see the entry below.) Older, long-time residents of Pittsburgh are more likely to use Pittsburghese. Additionally men are more likely to use the accent than women, "...possibly because of a stronger interest in displaying local identity..." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Western Pennsylvania English」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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