Yinz and Nebby

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Daniel calling from Pittsburgh.

Hi, Daniel.

Hiya, Daniel. What’s going on?

So, I moved to Pittsburgh about a year ago from Chicago.

And Pittsburgh has all these great words that I’ve never heard anywhere else and way of speaking.

So I guess the most common one is yinz.

So I’m from New York originally, and we say like yuze a lot.

Yuze? Yuze guys?

Right. And it usually means two people.

But here, so it’s yin.

So I understand that it means more than one person,

But it’s still, it’s not as fluid as used.

So where does this come from?

In older forms of English,

You could make plurals by attaching the suffix en,

And you still see this in children and brethren, right?

But we don’t do that anymore.

But there is some speculation that the yuns,

Which comes to us from Scots,

Actually is the inheritor of that tradition of pluralizing.

It just doesn’t exist in modern English, but perhaps this is a throwback.

Oh, okay.

Do you have any other examples of things you’ve heard there in Pittsburgh?

Oh, well, there’s also nebby, which is meant to be nosy.

And my neighbor that I met, and she asked a couple of questions,

And she said, oh, don’t mind me, I’m just being nebby.

And again, I understood what she meant.

But then, because I just thought it was like a shortening of nebbish,

Right.

It’s a Yiddish word.

But then a friend of mine pointed out that actually that’s not what nebish means.

And I thought to him, I was like, yeah, that isn’t what nebish means.

Nebish means, you know, like meek or timid.

Yeah, I think neb comes from an old word that means nose or beak.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it’s also one that probably comes to us from either Scots English or the northern dialects of England.

Because these are the types of people that settled in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh, it’s got, what, two rivers?

The Allegheny and the…

The Mon…

I can’t even say it.

Yes.

You’re still working on that one, huh?

The Mon, they call it.

Even though it is in the center of a landlocked state,

It still has a little bit of this kind of island.

How should we put this?

Dialects tend to cluster in places where people tend to look inward rather than outward

And tend to have a feeling of an island mentality.

Think about the island of Manhattan or the peninsula in San Francisco

Or a variety of places around the world where certain kinds of features happen to the local culture

Because they’re literally an island.

But it can also happen in places where they’re not literally an island.

They’re only like psychologically or geographically kind of separated from the surrounding area

Or the surrounding country or state, what have you.

I just think that’s kind of what’s happened in Pittsburgh.

Okay.

There’s a great deal of good work that’s been done about the Pittsburgh language,

And one of the things is at Carnegie Mellon University,

It’s called the Pittsburgh Speech and Society.

They have a dictionary.

They have some recordings, some podcasts.

It’s great stuff.

We’ll link to it on the website.

There’s more work that you can read out there.

We’ll try to find some of this and collect it in one place

So you can go to some reliable sources

That can tell you a little bit more about what you’re hearing.

All right?

Great, great.

Thank you so much for your call, Daniel.

Thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye.

Yeah, let’s definitely link to that site, Grant.

They have recordings of people of various ages from Pittsburgh talking,

They have little podcasts about the dialect there.

It’s fabulous.

And if you go to that website, you can find out what a grinny is.

Oh, what is a grinny?

G-R-I-N-N-Y.

You’re not going to tell me.

You’re going to make me look it up.

Oh, I’ll tell just you.

Just you, Grant.

Okay.

It’s a chipmunk.

A grinny?

Yes.

Isn’t that fabulous?

I don’t know if it’s because they look like they’re grinning when they have little nuts in their cheeks.

I don’t know.

I don’t know what the origin of it is, but there are all kinds of wonderful things on that site,

And we will have it on our website, which is waywordradio.org.

You can always call us, the numbers 1-877-929-9673,

Or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.