The Erie Accent: What Is It, And How Has It Changed Over The Past Century?

Linguist and researcher Dr. Keelan Evanini will describe the dialect of North American English spoken in and around Erie, Pennsylvania, and trace the history of how it changed over the course of the 20th century. Based on early dialect research with speakers born in the late-19th century, the dialect features in Erie pattern with other cities in the North dialect region, such as Buffalo. These features included vocabulary words such as "string beans" (instead of "snap beans") and pronunciation patterns such as pronouncing "cot" and "caught" differently. However, the Atlas of North American English, which was published in 2006, showed that the speakers from Erie shared many of their dialect features with other cities in the Midland dialect region, such as Pittsburgh. But Erie is unique, since it is the only city to have changed its dialect patterns from the North to the Midland. Evanini will provide examples for these patterns drawn from the field work conducted with over 100 residents of the geographical region around Erie in an attempt to track down the current location of the border between the North and Midland dialect regions.