It's been called to my attention that I should explain the title of this blog as it involves the Pittsburgh dialect. Below is a definition (from the wikipedia page on Pittsburghese) of what the "n'at" in "business n'at" is all about.
* n'at a "general extender" (McElhinny 1999; Johnstone, Bhasin and Wittkofski 2002; Wisnosky 2003; Johnstone and Baumgardt 2004; Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006).
Example: "We bought a notebook and some pencils n’at."
Further explanation: Reduction of and that, which can mean "along with some other stuff," "the previous was just an example of more general case," or (at least in Glasgow, Scotland) something like "I know this isn’t stated as clearly as it might be, but you know what I mean."
Geographic distribution: Southwestern Pennsylvania (see above citations).
Origins: Possibly Scots-Irish. Macaulay (1995) finds it in the regular speech and narratives of Scottish coal miners in Glasgow, a principal area from which Scottish settlers emigrated to Northern Ireland, and from there, to the American colonies.
There's a little accent quiz at http://www.gotoquiz.com/results/what_american_accent_do_you_have that uses some of the basic questions developed by linguists fro studying accents. I can't get the html code to work, but this is what is says about my accent:
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Inland North
You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
It also lists me as pretty high (~85%) for the Northeast and Philly, ~70% for Midland and ~65% for the South. The only thing that jumps out at me as suspicious abut the test is that it didn't list my accent as being the furthest away from the Boston accent because I really hate the Boston accent. I hope to god I don't sound like those fucking morons.
Below is part of an article form the NY Times (3/17/06)
"Pittsburgh is a special case," Professor Labov said. "Generally, local dialects have been absorbed by larger regional ones. But Pittsburgh, though part of the Midland, has retained its own speech patterns. In fact, Pittsburgh does things no place else does, like pronouncing 'ow' as 'ah' and very often dropping the 'l' when it comes at the end of a word." (Radial, for example, winds up sounding like radio.)
Julie Schoonover, the barkeeper from Corning, had described the dialect of the Steel City (a k a Pixburgh) more succinctly: "If you want to hear some freaky talk, go to Pittsburgh," she told me. "It's all 'yinz goin' dahntahn' down there."
WHERE A regional accent ends and another begins is, of course, fluid, and it has taken linguists like Professor Labov years of repeated testing before they could confidently define the borders of the various phonetic regions.
The librarian in Westfield, N.Y., still exhibited the classic Inland North speech pattern. But an hour south, the woman behind the information desk at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center on Interstate 79 pronounced cot/caught and don/dawn (dahn/dahn) as if they were the same, exactly as Professor Labov's maps predicted would happen once a traveler left the Inland North.
Outside Lou's Little Corner Bar in Pittsburgh's Little Italy, which is known as Bloomfield, it was snowing hard. Inside, a loud argument about the president and weapons of mass destruction was taking place. Did he know? Did he not know? The bartender, Donna Bruno, whose fiancé is in Iraq, did not have an opinion. But on the existence of Pittsburghese, she was clear.
"Of course we talk funny," she said. "We string words together. East Liberty becomes S'liberty. Down the street becomes dahnthestreet. And it's always what yinz doin? Why we talk this way, I don't know, but it might be because each neighborhood was settled by different ethnicities during the steel years." Professor Labov basically concurs with this theory.
Dawn Spring, a waitress working the breakfast shift at Tom's Diner on East Carson Street, had learned from experience that Pittsburghers speak a language of their own. She'd lived in Texas briefly. "I'd say, 'I'm gonna redd up my car,' which means clean up, and no one down there knew what I was talking about. We say yinz, they say y'all. We say gum band for rubber band. We in Pittsburgh may not speak proper English, but we know what we're saying. And that's what matters, right?"
Professor Labov agrees, up to a point. "I love the variety of language," he said. "The puzzling thing about this whole business of dialects is that sound changes do not help us communicate. Dialects prevent us from understanding each other. And yet, instead of growing weaker, as one might expect with television and telephonic communication, regional dialects are strengthening. That's the mystery."
There was little mystery as to what the flashing blue lights just off Liberty Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh signified. "License and registration," the police officer said as he leaned into my car window. "You're in the bus lane, son."
"License," "registration," "bus," "lane." Nothing unusual about the way these words were being pronounced. Couldn't he have said, "I cot you driving dahntahn in the bus lane, son"? I briefly considered doing a cue-card test but just as quickly rejected the idea. Asking for directions out of the city and back to New York seemed like the more prudent course. He let me off with a warning.
For the first time in two days, what was being said trumped how it was being said.
