Talkin’ Funny

Each dancer has
a different dialect.
—Jon M. Chu

During a Zoom meeting with a group of friends scattered across the country, one of the more language-creative among us exclaimed: “Jeez oh Pete!” She made me laugh out loud with delight, as she often does. When I remarked upon this fresh way to avoid saying what we all know people are really saying, she elicited another giggle by uttering, “Oh, scratch pa!” After winging out a few more that I couldn’t write down fast enough, another more grounded pal ended the silliness with, “She’s just spouting Yinzer speak.”

Now this might be old news to some of you, but Yinzer was a new one on this Midwestern dame. Turns out it’s a whole Pittsburgh thing, with roots as deliciously salady soupy as is our great nation, a blend of the languages of European immigrants with a particularly U.S.A. dialect that tells your face, in no uncertain terms, that you are now in Our City, the one and only. We all now know about Philadelphia, thanks to Quinta Brunson; I want her to please visit the city at the other end of her state and start a new series about it.

“More than just a geographical location,” I learned from a TikTok video, “being a Yinzer is about embodying a spirit.” That might sound nebulous, but it is in fact a precise, scientific definition. I could hear exactly that in my friend when she lobbed her words at me across the miles: Spice and challenge topped with affection.

The video, speaking specifically of a sports event, continued, “It signifies a proud resident of Pittsburgh who supports the city, its traditions, and its sports teams. It can also be used for anyone who identifies with the stereotypical traits of a Pittsburgher or uses the term ‘yinz.’ ”

Here are a few yinz vocabulary jewels provided by a YouTube vid featuring teacher Jeff Virkus and his assistant Doug:

• nevy: overly curious

• gumbad: rubber band

• sweeper: vacuum

• gimmies: sprinkles on ice cream cone

The same video even offers phonetics lessons detailed and thorough enough to bring a tear to the eye of G.B. Shaw’s Harry Higgins.

• keep tongue back, don’t let it touch the front teeth

• “O” for “A”

• Bucks (Pirates)

• emphasis: UMbrella? INsurance?

• Fahr Tahr (fire, tire)

• red up=clean up

• steerers= Steelers

• car needs warshed

As to the namesake word, “yinz,” that is what got mashed down over the decades from “you all.” A product sales portal called Allegiant Goods offers an explainer:

Centered around Pittsburgh, the dialect stretches throughout Appalachia: Erie County, New York; Youngstown, Ohio; and Clarksburg, West Virginia. Commonly associated with the white working class of Pittsburgh, it’s definitely one of the coolest regional accents in the nation. We say it’s the thinking man’s Boston accent.

Yinz, aka “you all,” is equivalent to “y’all.” Just a bit weirder sounding. For example, one might say to a group of Baltimore Ravens fans, “Djew catch da stillers game lass nite? Yinzes might as woll have been da O-line da way TJ got to yinz alls.”

Translation: “Did you catch the Steelers game last night? You guys might as well have been the [Ravens’] offensive line the way TJ got to you all.”

Keen observers might notice some different forms of yinz used in this example. “Yinzes,” the extra-plural form of yinz, is a double dose of colloquialism for when “yinz” just isn’t Pittsburghese enough.

The connection of yinzer-speak and sports seems particularly cozy, as with this interview outside a Pirates game in which one fan says a Yinzer is “someone who bleeds black and gold.”

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You can learn lots more through a grown-up source: a wonderful compendium of literary writing called, appropriately enough, LitHub. As with a hefty percent of this country’s most interesting dialects and peccadillos, Yinz hails from the Scots-Irish folk who made their way to this country.

Here’s a substantial excerpt from the article, slightly edited for length:

Glasgow, that city of some 600,000, once Great Britain’s veritable second city, despite its reputation for filth and grime grew rich in the 19th century on coal mining and iron forging, textiles and food canning, and most of all shipbuilding, but saw a precipitous decline in esteem and population with the disastrous neoliberal economic reforms of a generation ago.

As a Pittsburgher, this was a narrative I already knew. Because it has always been a place strung between capital and labor, the wealthy and the workers, Glasgow long ago developed a widespread, irreverent radicalism, as evidenced by the conical crown atop the fussy English Duke of Wellington — a perspective about injustice and absurdity that wasn’t unfamiliar to me either.

...Despite the anger from many among the English literati at the first Scottish book to win a Booker, How Late It Was, How Late [the 1994 stream-of-consciousness “grit lit” novel by James Kelman] is written in the sort of dialect that can only really be heard by people from “Used to Be Important” places, from the cauldrons of industry and the forges of labor, from the cities that built the world but were then abandoned when factories closed and mills shuttered, only to have to reinvent themselves over and over.

There is more than a spiritual congruence between Glasgow and Pittsburgh, as Kelman’s “yins” would indicate, the s that ends that word so perilously close a sibilant to the z in yinz and the words so nearly used identically.

...Calling [yinz] the “most salient morphosyntactic feature of local speech,” Carnegie Mellon University rhetoric professor Barbara Johnson explains in her study Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect (published as part of the prestigious Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics series) that “ ‘yinz’ was brought to America by Scotch-Irish immigrants… the descendants of Protestant people from Scotland and northern England.”

There is lots more; it’s a fabulous piece.

Until next time it’s a great day to have a great day, friends.

Lagniappe: How to make a peace- and animal-loving heart happy. According to HistoryFacts.com, Emperor Napoleon “was attacked by a horde of fluffy bunnies. The coup took place in July 1807 as Napoleon and his coterie celebrated a victory with a traditional rabbit hunt. Rather than run away, however, the bunnies began swarming Napoleon and his men. The situation quickly overwhelmed some of Europe’s foremost military strategists.