commented.<\/a><\/p>\nThe professional view<\/p>\n
Don Wadsworth is an actor and dialect coach who is also professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University\u2019s School of Drama, where he taught voice and speech techniques for more than 20 years. He\u2019s also worked on several film and television projects where he coached actors on Pittsburgh dialect, including the 2009 film \u201cAdventureland\u201d and 2018 CBS All Access series \u201cOne Dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said some actors can slip into the Pittsburgh accent, but it poses a big challenge for lots of non-native speakers. \u201cWhen I would show them, they would go, \u2018What in God\u2019s name are you doing? What is that sound?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
During his own education, the Pittsburgh native had a dialect coach who taught him to crack the code on learning any way of speaking.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a working knowledge of phonetics, which is really quite important to figuring that sort of thing out,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then, there also was a kind of musicality that you could name for almost any accent or dialect that you would be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wadsworth said he \u201cadores\u201d \u201cThe Pitt,\u201d but that he\u2019s surprised at the lack of Pittsburgh accents among the characters. \u201cIf you put an \u2018ER\u2019 type program in Brooklyn or Atlanta, you would hear some people sound like that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
While it makes sense that not all of the doctors or nurses on \u201cThe Pitt\u201d would be from the area, the lack of regional accents from the patients is less realistic, he said.<\/p>\n
He also said he wasn\u2019t quite sure what LaNasa\u2019s character\u2019s accent is.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think she\u2019s wonderful,\u201d he said, \u201cI really tried to pay attention to \u2026 what she\u2019s going for there. They might have the idea that that\u2019s a Pittsburgh dialect. It is kind of messy and blue-collar-y, and maybe that\u2019s all they need.\u201d<\/p>\n
Featured Local Businesses<\/p>\n
So what is a Pittsburgh accent and what makes it difficult to emulate?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a combination of Scots-Irish and German and Polish and all this kind of stuff, you know?\u201d Wadsworth said.<\/p>\n
In the introduction to the Heinz History Center publication, Lauren Uhl wrote, \u201cPoles, Slavs, Czechs and others were in their own way just like the Scots-Irish. They banded together in neighborhoods, established their own churches and beneficial societies, and built their own schools to maintain their language and culture and pass it on to the next generation.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir young children, however, more adept at learning a new language and eager to fit in with their American peers, learned English in the street, not in school, and so picked up the prevailing Pittsburgh version of English.\u201d<\/p>\n
Butko said the accent is hard to copy because it doesn\u2019t have a lot of distinctive notes. \u201cUnless people are exaggerating it,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then it doesn\u2019t sound right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of the Pittsburgh accent is found in the vowel sounds, where the rounded note of an \u201cou\u201d or \u201cow\u201d turn into a flatter ah sound, so \u201cdowntown\u201d turns into dahntahn and \u201cabout\u201d becomes abaht. There\u2019s also the classic example of \u201ciron,\u201d which shifts into ahrn in the mouths of Southwestern Pennsylvanians.<\/p>\n
Wadsworth said when he\u2019s coached actors into the accent in the past, he tries to keep it subtle, emphasizing the change in those sounds. \u201cSo a lot of Americans say \u2018cotton\u2019 but in Pittsburgh you\u2019d say cahtton or catton.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the way of speaking also often integrates some aspects of a general blue-collar American accent, like dropping the \u201cg\u201d at the end of words like \u201crunning\u201d and \u201cwalking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Butko also pointed out the importance of knowing local slang terms, such as yinz and jagoff.<\/p>\n
He said collective words like \u201cyinz\u201d developed after the use of \u201cthou\u201d fell out of fashion centuries ago. English speakers needed a way of differentiating between the singular \u201cyou\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d meaning a group. \u201cThat\u2019s why there\u2019s \u2018y\u2019all\u2019 and \u2018youse guys\u2019 \u2014 and we have \u2018yinz\u2019 from \u2018you\u2019uns.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
While these pronunciations and terms come naturally to people who have been immersed in them for a long time, it\u2019s a fast-spoken and natural way of speaking that can be difficult to teach.<\/p>\n
Wadsworth hopes in the future, executive producer John Wells \u2014 a CMU School of Drama grad \u2014 and the other showrunners will consider infusing some of the patients on \u201cThe Pitt\u201d with more of that working-class Ahrn City feel.<\/p>\n
He lives in the same neighborhood as the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center\u2019s real-life counterpart, Allegheny General Hospital. \u201cIf you walked into the emergency room down there now, you might only hear that with two people,\u201d he said, \u201cAnd that would be enough to be realistic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pittsburgh accent is one of those \u201cif you know, you know\u201d things. Lifelong denizens of the 412…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-113885","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh","8":"tag-pittsburgh","9":"tag-pittsburgh-headlines","10":"tag-pittsburgh-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}