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.

This book explores the history of Pittsburghese, the language of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area as it is imagined and used by Pittsburghers. Pittburghese is linked to local identity so strongly that it is alluded to almost every time people talk about what Pittsburgh is like, or what it means to be a Pittsburgher. But what happened during the second half of the 20th century to reshape a largely unnoticed way of speaking into this highly visible urban "dialect"? In this book, sociolinguist Barbara Johnstone focuses on this question. Treating Pittsburghese as a cultural product of talk, writing, and other forms of social practice, Johnstone shows how non-standard pronunciations, words, and bits of grammar used in the Pittsburgh area were taken up into a repertoire of words and phrases and a vocal style that has become one of the most resonant symbols of local identity in the United States today.

This text reports on an ethnographic study of journal-keeping in a university science class. The author spent a summer semester attending a general education class in geology as a participant observer, took extensive notes, interviewed class members and the professor, and analyzed journal entries and other documents related to the class. She provides an example of ethnographic methods to be of use to other composition researchers, especially in her careful attention to reflexivity, that is, the effect of the researcher and the research on data. The book provides a detailed exploration of journal keeping from the perspective of both the students and the professor, as well as case studies of how two students in particular used journal keeping. Journal entries are examined not simply as texts produced by individuals for a class assignment, but as the outcome of a socio-political process, including the goals of the general education curriculum, the goals of the geology course and its instructor, the students' personal and educational goals, the institutional constraints on the professor, the methods of the researchers, and the dynamics of classroom interaction.

Linguists usually discuss language or dialects in terms of groups of speakers. Believing that patterns can be seen more clearly in the group than the individual, researchers often present group scores with no indication of the variation within the group. Even though linguists acknowledge that no two individuals speak alike, few study individual variation and voice.
Barbara Johnstone makes a case for the individual's importance and idiosyncrasies in language and linguistics. Using theoretical arguments and discourse analysis, along with linguistic examples from a variety of speakers and settings, Johnstone illustrates how speakers draw on linguistic models associated with class, ethnicity, gender, and region, among others, to construct an individual voice. In doing so Johnstone shows that certain important questions in sociolinguistics and pragmatics can only be answered with reference to individual speakers. Johnstone's study is important both for the understanding of speech as expressive of self, and for the study of variation and mechanisms of linguistic choice and change.

A text in qualitative research methods for students in English, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics taking a course in sociolinguistics or linguistic research methods.