Maeve Eberhardt

“(r) You Saying Yes to the Dress?” Rhoticity on a Bridal Reality Television Show

This paper investigates variation in rhoticity on the reality television show Say Yes to the Dress. The study examines the speech of five bridal consultants working at Kleinfeld Bridal in Manhattan. Using the brides’ budgets as a proxy for social status, we ask whether variation in the consultants’ use of (r) correlates with the amount of money the bride states she is willing to spend on her dress, which ranges from

The Sociolinguistics of Ethnicity in Pittsburgh

1,500 to unlimited. Mixed-effect logistic regression analysis shows significant differences across three budget categories, a finding that echoes Labov’s original department store study as well as later replications. We discuss our findings within the frame of an audience design approach to style-shifting and the reality television genre and explore how such a mediated data source can be a fruitful area for sociolinguistic research.

Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese

Recently, there has been a growing interest in regional variation within African American English. This study reviews a work done on local speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, discussing trends for both African American and White ethnic groups. Just as scholars have found in other geographic regions, in Pittsburgh, African Americans and Whites share a number of feature characteristics of the local dialect, but remain distinct in a number of other ways. Research in Pittsburgh, as elsewhere, highlights the complexity, rather than the homogeneity, of African American speech across the country, as speakers exhibit alignment to both regional and supraregional ethnic linguistic norms.

‘First things first, I'm the realest’: Linguistic appropriation, white privilege, and the hip‐hop persona of Iggy Azalea

Linguists have sporadically noted peculiarities of pronunciation, lexis and morphosyntax in the speech of European Americans in the Pittsburgh area, and Pittsburgh speech, locally known as “Pittsburghese”, has been a topic of discussion in the Pittsburgh area for decades. This variety has never before been systematically documented, however. The first and only scholarly book to describe Pittsburgh-area varieties of English, Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese is an essential reference tool for anyone studying the dialect of the Pittsburgh area and the only textbook choice for anyone teaching about it.