More on the Philadelphia Dialect

Bibliographic Data

ID8727490
AuthorsRiley Tucker (0000-0001-6082-5790, corresponding author), R Whitney Tucker
Year1964
Volume39
Issue2
Pages157-157
Publication date1964-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Speech (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/453122
OpenAlexW2321753054
LanguageEN
Citations received7

LET IT BE understood, to begin with, that the expression 'Philadelphia dialect,' or sub-dialect, is used here for convenience only, because the city of Philadelphia is the largest center of population in the dialect area under consideration, and contains roughly half of the speakers of the dialect. To tell the truth, I think that the real heart and centre of this dialect was originally, and still is, a few miles to the south, in the eastern part of Delaware County-where, by the way, the first Englishspeaking settlements in this region were made-and that the dialect has spread in all directions from this original home; for it seems to me that the special peculiarities in pronunciation and idiom appear in their most extreme form in Delaware County. Also included in the area of the Philadelphia dialect are the western and northern suburbs (in Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties), the northern section of Delaware including Wilmington, and neighboring parts of New Jersey with the shore resorts from Cape May to Atlantic City.' These resorts, it should be pointed out, are largely frequented by Philadelphians. It is proposed to discuss, in the present article, the characteristics and affinities of this dialect: to point out those features which it shares with other dialects and those which distinguish it from others. The Philadelphia dialect (not being New England, New York, or Southern) is essentially an eastern2 variety of General American, in which final and preconsonantal r is rather generally pronounced, though not with so much emphasis as in upstate New York and the Middle West. In Philadelphia speech one may also observe a general sort of similarity to that of the entire eastern and central sections of Pennsylvania (except the northern counties along the boundary of New York), whereas the speech of the Pittsburgh area is quite different and belongs linguistically to the Middle West

Linguistics · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · History · Philosophy

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