Photo: Willie Shaw on Unsplash
Pittsburgh has its own dialect, and it trips up newcomers within about a day. Linguists call it Pittsburghese, and a lot of it traces back to the Scots-Irish and Central European families who settled here. Here's a starter kit.
The essentials
- Yinz: you, plural. The local version of y'all. It's also why a Pittsburgher is a yinzer.
- Jagoff: a person who is being an idiot. Wildly flexible. Can be affectionate, usually isn't.
- N'at: and that, tacked onto the end of a sentence to mean etcetera. "We got burgers, chips n'at."
- Dahntahn: downtown. Same vowel that turns "house" into "hahse."
Around the house
- Redd up: to tidy up. Company's coming, so redd up the living room.
- Sweeper: the vacuum.
- Gumband: rubber band.
- Slippy: slippery. The porch gets slippy in January.
- Nebby: nosy. A nebshit is a person who can't mind their business.
- Worsh: wash. See also: Worshington.
The grammar that gives us away
Pittsburghers drop "to be" without thinking about it. The car needs washed. The dog wants out. The grass needs cut. Say that anywhere else in the country and people will stop and ask you to repeat it.
Food and drink
- Pop: soda. Non-negotiable.
- Chipped ham: ham shaved paper-thin, piled on a bun with barbecue sauce.
- City chicken: not chicken. Cubed pork on a skewer, breaded and fried.
- Jumbo: bologna.
Out and about
- Buggy: shopping cart.
- Crick: creek.
- The Mon, the Yough, the Allegheny: rivers, shortened, because nobody has time for Monongahela twice in one sentence.
- Kennywood's open: your fly is down. Genuinely useful information delivered politely.
The rule
Using this stuff on purpose is the fastest way to sound like a tourist. Real yinzers don't perform it; they just talk. Pick one or two, use them naturally, and don't say "yinz" in a fake accent unless you want to get made fun of, jagoff.
What did we miss? Send us the word your family uses that nobody outside Allegheny County understands.