Perfecting the Pittsburgh Dialect

0:00This is CityCast Pittsburgh. I'm Megan Harris and here's what Pittsburgh's talking about. After living in this city for more than a decade, I decided it was time for a challenge, learning to say one sentence and a convincing Pittsburgh accent. Today we're revisiting my Pittsburgh ease lesson with a local dialect coach and talking about why he thinks it's so distinct, but y'all he tricked me. He asked me to recite Shakespeare in a Yinser accent. And if you think that's easy, well, stay tuned. Don Wadsworth is an actor, voice coach and speech teacher. He's here with me in studio. He's a professor emeritus at CMU's School of Drama and maybe most importantly, you are a born and bred Pittsburgher. Welcome to CityCast. Thank you very much. That's quite true.

1:00I've been able to have a life in Pittsburgh, even though I've worked out of town a lot. Can you explain to me maybe the difference between accent and dialect? I'd always heard it called a Pittsburgh accent, but I learned through the process of getting ready for this lead producer, Mallory Falk discovered that it is not in fact an accent, it's a dialect. It depends on who you ask. Really? Well, even the dictionary definitions get a little confused. Is it by nationality, by history? Well, here's how I look at it. As a person who does this for a living, this is the way I look at it. You're the expert in the room, no doubt. No, no, but I'm saying other people have different ideas. So to me, a dialect is a regionalism. Okay. So it's some brand of the way one naturally speaks. So for Americans, for most Americans, you're saying British and American sounds are dialects. So Brooklyn for us is a dialect. Okay. South Carolina is a dialect. Most of these are codes of geography.

2:01Whereas an accent is a person who is making a transition from the way they normally speak into another language, like English, for example. So we call German, Italian, French, and a zillion other languages accents. But people use them interchangeably. Sometimes I do too. But technically speaking, and nobody cares if it's technically right or not, but technically speaking, Pittsburgh would be a dialect not unlike Houston or Michigan. Okay. What is the first thing that you tell students about that Pittsburgh dialect when you first get started with someone? The way that I go about this, let me just spend a second on this, is that you do some dissecting of what the sounds are. When you say, the way most people would pronounce the following words is this, spot, dog,

3:01hot, coffee. But where you hear some strong Pittsburgh dialects, you'll hear this, spot, dog, coffee, you know? The awesome. The awesome. So where people normally would have kind of a bright file in there, hot. It's kind of a bright sound, hot. When we go to the Pittsburgh dialect, we go hot. It's very hot outside, very hot. We start there. And even if you only did that, you would have a good start on this. How important is rhythm, too? Because one of the first things I noticed upon moving here is the kind of the upspeak at the end of a sentence. Exactly right. Exactly right. You know, what are you getting at the store? Like there's always that extra emphasis right at the end. I bet that some of that has to do with our Irish background in there. Because an Irishman often has a bit of a lift at the end of the sentence, you know, and it has that lift to it. And so, so Pittsburghers have something like that left from like 120 years ago where they'll

4:05say, I'm going downtown. Has like a question, Pat. Yeah, question mark. That's a good way to put it. Sounds like a question. And so did Irish people, even today. Now that's a pretty strong version of a Pittsburgh dialect. So if it was getting too cartoonish, maybe we'd get that out of the way. But we would keep things like a major thing, of course, is the owl sound like crowd, owls down like that. And so anytime I need something authentic, I'll find it on YouTube, like a real person who really owns that dialect. And so I think some homework on a real Pittsburgh dialect in which you weren't making fun of it and you weren't exaggerating it involves political leaders. You know, we had Sophie Maslow in our city for quite a while, who had a very strong dialect. Indeed. Former mayor of Pittsburgh, the only female mayor still to the state. Right. And like it was astonishing to hear us speak. Let me say it is a great personal honor to be the mayor of this city.

5:11And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support. Bill Cower, you know? Yep, former coach of the Steelers. Absolutely. As a coach, you ask people to trust. And what is trust? Trust is something as a coach you have to earn. Trust is unconditional. But trust can be powerful. And quite a number of people who had sort of prestigious jobs. And so it wasn't about like a social class thing. It was just about the common sense of where people learn to speak and how much they wanted to kind of hold on to that. So you can still hear Bill Cower. I mean, he's still. Oh, yeah. And every Sunday on ESPN. Absolutely. And you can still hear him say, Crod, when he means crowd. Every single time. Well, I think I think that I'm ready to study with you as well.

6:14Do you think you can give me some particulars on maybe getting a phrase or two correct? Sure. Absolutely. Let's see how bad I can mess this up. We're not. So I brought you a classic phrase. Don brought props. I brought a phrase. A phrase that lots of folks might know and would never, ever under any circumstances be done with his dialect. OK. So it's Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Shakespeare. So we could have fun with it. So if we were going to speak in a very particular way with this, I'm preparing some high British stuff now for a play I'm about to do. We would say, speak the speech I pray you as I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue. Very forward, very, very clean, right? Very certian, McKellen. Very much so. Very much so. And just a few blocks away from where that person lives, you will hear a working class English accent. Speak the speech I pray you is our pronounce it to you, tripping it on the tongue, you

7:18know, very different thing altogether. Yeah. Goes in a different place in your voice, has a different rhythm, as you mentioned. There's something about listening to accents and dialects like this that tickles the brain in a really fun way. I totally agree. I totally agree. It's a fun job, believe me. I'm amazed that I got this job. But Pittsburgh, different story. Yes. So we don't have too much to do in the very first words, OK? But most people outside of the US have a hard time with a TH sound, OK? Because it seems so rude. Because you have to stick your tongue out to say the people go, ooh, it's a little gross. So for example, the French will always say, Fausaire, Mausaire, they're not going to do that TH sound, OK? So we go, speak a speech, speak a speech. Speak a speech. Speak a, or you can put a little d in the speak the speak the speech. I'm trying to get it to be muddy actually. Speak the speech.

8:18Something like that. OK. That's right. Then you go, I pray ins. I pray ins. I pray ins. I pray ins. You can't be that protective of it though. You have to like throw it away. OK. So it goes, speak a speech. I pray ins. Speak the speech. I pray ins. OK, we'll get that. I know. I did it downturn too, which also feels weird as soon as I say it. Then we go, as I pronounced it, as I pronounced it, which is quite ironic little joke there. Yeah. So you go, as I pronounced it, as I pronounced it, as I pronounced it. Yeah. It's a very basic idea. I'm giving you some directions. Take my directions. As I pronounced it, as I pronounced it, yeah. As I pronounced it, to you. As I pronounced it, to you, I feel like adding a hand motion makes this feel more adorable. Feel free. If it makes it work, it's fine. Fighting myself, copying your body language too. Do whatever you like. So as I pronounced it to you, it's trippin' on the tongue. Trippin' on the tongue. Ona. Ona. Trippin' on the tongue.

9:21Trippin' at trippingly. We're gonna say trippin'. Trippin'ly. Trippin'ly. Trippin'ly on a tongue. That ING thing, it's way too much work. Trippin'ly on a tongue. Yeah. Now that ona, bury it. Okay? Yeah. So it's on a tongue. Ona tongue. Yeah. Very good on your on. Okay. That's exactly right on the on. Okay. Not one. That good. Good job. We got one word out of that. That's good. It's what we call dental eyes, okay? We go, tuh, tuh, tuh. So your teeth come down on your tongue, actually. Ona tongue. Trippin'ly on a tongue. Trippin'ly on a tongue. Tung, tung, tung. Yeah. Okay. We try and make it sound a little dull, actually. Here we go. It's a major operation. I can see it. Good see it in your face. Trippin'ly on a tongue. You're getting there. Okay. Here's the whole deal, okay? Okay. Trippin'ly on a tongue. Speak the speech.

10:22Speak the speech. I pronounce the tung. Trippin'ly on a tongue. See why people go, what is this dialect that you're teaching me? What is this? It's so unusual. Is this a real example you give to people with your experience? No. No. I'm just doing this to make a fool out of you. Congratulations. I just thought we would start with something that people know. And also I wanted to find an owl word in the longs. So pronounced, I thought was ironic. Pronounced, yeah. Yeah, okay. What's a real phrase that you give people when they're starting out? I don't usually do that with phrases. No, you just, like, do you just work with the script as a prison? We've stopped with the script, yeah. But I would say, you know, there are things that will come up, like even the name of the city can be Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh with the K. Yeah. Or Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, yeah. Familiar with that one. Yeah, right. You don't live on the north side or the south side, you live on north side.

11:24North side. Again, we don't want to say our THS. Okay, yeah, yeah. We're getting rid of anything that we can let go of. You know, be sloppy or take a shortcut. If you say, if you don't believe something and you want to prod somebody to go further with it, you go, another way of expressing something that you don't believe you go, get out, get out, can't be true. Red, yellow, blue, they're killers. Killers. They're not colors, like the rest of the world says. Yeah, what color? What color is your hair? What color are you using? So there's a lot of that kind of work that people are very comfortable with, especially when people share that accent together, that dialect with them. Have you ever taught Pittsburghers how to speak with this, you know, what is kind of a native dialect, but maybe they just, they grew up in the era of television or about like they needed to shed it to leave town and be taken seriously. Well, here's the thing, like you don't normally teach this dialect.

12:26It doesn't come up very much. It's remarkable that I've had it. Mon Hollywood. Bring it back. Sorry. We just don't have those stories. Now, I think we could name about 10 or 12 films that are set in Pittsburgh, but even them, even they didn't use the dialect always. We used it in this Tom Holtz, really, out of film called Dominic and Eugene, because it was very much about a working class environment, and we name the city quite a lot. It doesn't happen in flash dance except for maybe one or two characters. The biggest kind of adventure professionally for me was war here with Tom Hardy. And it did take place in Pittsburgh. You saw Pittsburgh, but my job in that particular film was to make Tom sound like an American period because he's so very, very English. He's got the working class kind of personality, but we had to take all that sort of East End

13:27London out of him. So going one step further and making it more Pittsburgh, nobody was interested in it. From East End London to Southside Pittsburgh. That's exactly what it was. That would be way too much. So the point of all this is sometimes we use it, sometimes we don't. Where it seems to fit into the milieu of the world and the personality of the film that you're doing, then yes, we'll turn that on. Yeah. Don, this has been thoroughly embarrassing for me. Thank you so much for your time. You're very welcome. I'm glad to have done it. That is all for today here on CityCast Pittsburgh. We will be back tomorrow morning with more news from around the city. We'll talk to you soon. I can't say the word trippingly. I think that's the problem. Ironic that you're mixing that word.

14:29Chippantly. Chippantly. Chippantly on a tongue. Chippantly on a tongue. Okay. Chippantly. Chippantly on a tongue.