The P/U dialect, common in the South, is marked by distinct emphasis on the first syllable of words such as police and umbrella. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “P/U Dialect”
Did you know there’s a dialect of English called PU?
Yes.
Yeah, police umbrella.
Or actually, I should say police umbrella.
Mm—
The kind of people who say cement in Detroit.
-huh.
Right?
Right.
It’s just the emphasis is on a different syllable than you might typically encounter in mainstream English.
Indeed.
And so in the dialect world, in the language world, we call that the P slash U.
Dialect to kind of emphasize those types of people.
It’s Southerners.
A lot of African-American English actually has this feature, occasionally sprinkled throughout the rest of the country.
So it’s an accent on the first syllable.
Yeah, where ordinarily you’d expect it in the second syllable.
They actually slip around like that, don’t they?
Yeah, they sure do.
I have one aspect of the PU dialect.
I say TV.
Do you really?
Instead of TV.
Interesting.
And I don’t know if I picked it up just by goofing around with language.
My father has some of it, so I probably picked that from him.
Oh, yeah, yeah, on the TV.
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