Overview
Pennsylvania's role in the broader cultural fabric of the United States cannot be overstated. Its historical significance runs back to the country's founding, and this long history has brought with it rich differences in the ways that Pennsylvanians live, think, work, and talk. This project seeks to learn about all of these differences, with a key focus on the last one: differences in talking.
In its first phase, the project will be working exclusively with lifelong residents of Scranton, the city at the heart of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Language, dialects, and social life
Distinct ways of talking emerge over time through processes of language change, and when they become specific to a particular geographic region, linguists often refer to them as dialects.
Dialects are intimately tied to the social lives of the people who speak them. They find their roots in a region's migration patterns and social history, and as the "identity" or character of a region develops or changes over time, so too do the ways of talking associated with it.
Pennsylvania is a hotbed for English dialect diversity. The English language has been spoken here since the 1600s -- centuries sooner than in many other US states -- so there has been a lot of time for new linguistic varieties to grow. It is also quite a large state, both in land area and population, and home to several storied metropolitan centers with significant socio-cultural and economic diversity. All of these factors have contributed to robust dialect differences across the state.
But dialect research in Pennsylvania has primarily focused on the state's two largest cities: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Both cities are dialectally very distinct from each other, and they are also distinct from Scranton. But aside from some of the popular parodies, linguists actually know very little about the language of Northeastern Pennsylvania. One of the aims of this project is to change that.
This project is supported by a Creative Scholarship Grant from the University of South Carolina's College of Arts and Sciences.