“Pittsburghese” Online: Vernacular Norming in Conversation

In this paper, we show how a rhetorical and linguistic microanalysis of a conversation about regional dialect helps illuminate part of the relatively unstudied process of vernacular norm-formation (Milroy 1992, 81-122; Our data is an online discussion of the speech of the Pittsburgh area. As the online discussion illustrates, vernacular normformation may involve discursive practices similar to those that result in language standardization. Like standardization In other words, (1) interactional: people who engage in talk about dialect have to do what it takes to claim and keep the conversational floor and successfully contribute to the activity at hand; (2) ideological: in doing so, they draw on and reshape local and supralocal ideas about language and dialect and their social meanings; and (3) historical: people are drawn to conversations such as this because of historical and economic developments impacting on their lives in ways that make them aware of and interested in local speech. Each of these sources of constraint on how dialect-normative talk is shaped plays a role in determining what the norms will be.