Pittsburghese Shirts: Commodification and the Enregisterment of an Urban Dialect. Johnstone, B. American Speech, 84(2):157–175, May, 2009. ![Pittsburghese Shirts: Commodification and the Enregisterment of an Urban Dialect [link]](https://bibbase.org/img/filetypes/link.svg "link")
Paper doi abstract bibtex 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.
@article{johnstone_pittsburghese_2009,
title = {Pittsburghese {Shirts}: {Commodification} and the {Enregisterment} of an {Urban} {Dialect}},
volume = {84},
issn = {0003-1283},
shorttitle = {{PITTSBURGHESE} {SHIRTS}},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2009-013},
doi = {10.1215/00031283-2009-013},
abstract = {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.},
number = {2},
urldate = {2024-06-18},
journal = {American Speech},
author = {Johnstone, Barbara},
month = may,
year = {2009},
pages = {157--175},
}
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