Santa Claus is goin' Dahntahn [12]
Santa Claus is going Downtown
(author’s interpretation)
Phonetic Characteristics. Among the Pittsburgh citizens it is popular to
pronounce the word house as [haːs] (hahs); the word out is pronounces as [aːt] (aht);
found − as [faːnd] (fahnd); downtown − as [daːntʰaːn] (dahntahn). The citizens of
Pennsylvania who were born before 1900 do not use this sound ([l] → [w] [o]) any
more, but it used to be very common till the mid-twenties of the XX century [13]. This
phonetic process is called monophtangization of /aʊ/:
The diphthong /aʊ/ becomes monophthong [aː] before nasals (downtown),
voiceless sounds (fowl, hour) and vowels (house, out, cloudy). Monophtangization
does not appear in the final position (how, now), where diphthong /aʊ/ can appear. The
sound [a:] is often orthographically depicted as [ah]. The colon after [a:] means that
the sound is long. This feature is phonologically related to the other changes which
occur in Pittsburgh Speech, in particular with "Pittsburgh Chain Shift", which was
mentioned in works of several American scientists [14; 15; 16]. Monophtangization of
vowels in such lexical units as now, down, house, out is not something special for the
Southern England (such pronunciation can be noticed in the speech of the
representatives of London working class). Although in the USA it can occur in
Pittsburgh only. Similar features are the stereotype for the area of Pittsburgh and the
pronunciation like dahntahn can be mentioned, it should be definitely confirmed that
the speaker is form Pittsburgh and he/se is a native Pittsburgh Speech speaker [17, p.
36-38].
In accordance to some researches' papers it can be considered that people in
different districts of Pittsburgh may have various accents [18]. Probably the same
sounds and words are used more often in one sphere than in the other ones. It may
depend on such things as the working class neighbourhood and the area where people
commute to work (the place of living equals the place of work; the place of living does
not equal the place of work). All this occurs because children learn the way of
pronunciation, above all, from their peers, not from their parents, and each new group
of immigrants in the city learns English from people who already speak this language.
Dialects are spreading when people pick up the language peculiarities from the people
they want to follow; for the most part the latter ones are locals who have already spoken
English.
Lexical Characteristics. The language and speech of the inhabitants of Pittsburgh
is characterized by a certain variation. Depending on the situation and the specifics of
the speaker's position, the words can be used in different meanings, at different
frequencies. The Pittsburgh Speech speakers have created a number of unique dialectic
words commonly found in Pittsburgh and its outskirts, and which also acquire various
meanings depending on the context.
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