Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the enregisterment of an urban dialect

This article considers a type of material artifact that circulates ideas about regional speech in the United States: T-shirts bearing words and phrases thought to be unique to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I argue that Pittsburghese shirts, seen for themselves and in the context of their production, distribution, and consumption, are part of a process leading to the creation and focusing of the idea that there is a Pittsburgh dialect. To describe how particular locally hearable forms have become linked with the city, I invoke Asif Agha’s concept of “enregisterment.” To understand why this has happened at the time and in the way it has, I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s model of the “commodity situation.” I suggest that Pittsburghese shirts contribute to dialect enregisterment in at least four ways: they put local speech on display, they imbue local speech with value, they standardize local speech, and they link local speech with particular social meanings. In the course of sociolinguistic interviews in the Pittsburgh area, I and my fellow field-workers asked our interviewees what they knew about “Pittsburghese,” the local name for what is thought to be a distinctive Pittsburgh dialect. Their answers were sometimes supported by material artifacts bearing representations of “Pittsburghese.” When I asked for examples of local peculiarities of speech, one interviewee produced a coffee mug decorated with “Pittsburghese” words. Another interviewee, when asked if he had ever heard of the dialect, opened a bag he had brought along and dramatically produced a white T-shirt with letters and images in black and gold. The front of the shirt depicted the city’s skyline with words like pop, redd up, keller, hans, and sammich superimposed on it. On the back was a dictionary-like list of words and phrases with definitions and sample sentences. “This,” he told us, holding up the shirt, “is Pittsburghese.” In another interview, Jenn R., a speaker of the local dialect in Pittsburgh, responded:1 Oh yes. I mean, there’s that store over on the Southside, in Station Square that has the Pittsburghese shirts. In fact, I remember when my friend Karen moved out of american speech 84.2 (2009) 158 state, with– her husband’s job took them out of state and to many other states, I remember sending her a couple Pittsburghese shirts for them. Asked whether she’s familiar with the dialect, Jenn talks about the T-shirt: “Oh yes, I mean there’s that store . . . that has the Pittsburghese shirts.” As in the interview with Jenn R., “Pittsburghese shirts” were often among the first things mentioned when people talked to us about local speech in Pittsburgh. These shirts, for sale at sidewalk markets, in souvenir shops, and online, often look like the one we were shown by the man described above. Figure 1 shows the front and back of a typical Pittsburghese shirt. The shirts are almost always either white, black, or a yellow-orange color thought of locally as “gold,” with printing in white, black, and/or gold. The front typically depicts the cityscape and includes the word “Pittsburghese” (sometimes “Pixburghese”) together with a scattering of words spelled phonetically to represent local pronunciation (dahntahn ‘downtown’, worsh ‘wash’, jynt iggle ‘Giant Eagle’ supermarkets), vocabulary (gumban ‘rubber band’, redd up ‘tidy up’, slippy or slippey ‘slippery’), and sometimes syntax (needs washed ‘needs to be washed’). On the back there is typically a dictionary-like alphabetical list. Newer designs are often simpler, involving a single black word or phrase on the front of a white shirt: YNZ (yinz ‘you, pl.’), I’m surrounded by jagoffs! ‘jerks, irritating people’.2 figure 1 Front and Back of a Pittsburghese Shirt Pittsburghese Shirts 159 As is suggested by the fact that all but a handful of over 100 interviewees had heard of “Pittsburghese” and could talk about it, there is a very high level of dialect awareness in Pittsburgh. This is true even among people who do not themselves have strong local accents, including outsiders who live in the area and many local African Americans.3 Unelicited, naturally occurring evidence of dialect awareness is provided by the ubiquity and variety of items representing “Pittsburghese” that are for sale in the city: coffee mugs, shot glasses, beer steins, refrigerator magnets, postcards, talking dolls, bumper stickers, dog clothing, shirts, and hats. The most prevalent—in that it is among the oldest and most widely available and in that it displays the most variety and reflects changes fastest—is the Pittsburghese shirt. In this article I argue that Pittsburghese shirts are not simply evidence of dialect awareness, however. Rather, I claim, these T-shirts, seen for themselves and in the context of their production, distribution, and consumption, are part of a process leading to the creation and focusing of the idea that there is a Pittsburgh dialect in the first place. To make this argument, I invoke the concept of “enregisterment” (Agha 2003, 2007), the processes by which particular linguistic forms become linked with “social” meaning. In Pittsburgh a set of locally hearable forms have becomes linked with an imagined (in Anderson’s 1991 sense) “dialect” called “Pittsburghese.” To understand why this has happened at the time and in the way it has and why T-shirts have become part of the process, I draw on the literature from critical discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics, and cultural anthropology about globalization and commodification and on eight years of ethnographic participant-observation, over 100 sociolinguistic interviews, and several collections of texts and other artifacts (including T-shirts collected between 1997 and 2008) that represent local speech in Pittsburgh. I show that a set of material, ideological, and historical facts have come together to make Pittsburgh speech into a commodity that can add value to items like T-shirts. Finally, I suggest that Pittsburghese shirts contribute to dialect enregisterment in at least four ways: they put local speech on display; they imbue local speech with value; they standardize local speech; and they link local speech with particular social meanings.