Phiadelphia dialect

PHILADELPHIA DIALECT

Philadelphia is the largest city of the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic Pennsylvania state of the United States (see figure1). Pennsylvania was settled in the late 1600sby the English and Philadelphia became the meeting center for many of the nation’s first leaders. It served as the location of the development and signing of the Declaration of Independence as well asthe drafting of the Constitution . Because of that Philadelphia was America’s first capital from 1790-1800 and today it is an important city with an interesting own dialect.
Philadelphia’shistory helps to understand the language influences that have from the first British, Dutch and Swedish that arrived there. The purpose of this paper is to show the characteristics that made Philadelphiadialect a non-standard way of English language. The characteristics that are going to be developed of this dialect are phonology, grammar and lexicon based on Chaika’s academic text “Everybody speaks adialect” where she describes the characteristics that defines a dialect. Also to describe the language variations is necessary to be aware of geographical conditions and the origin and influences ofother regions that would help to understand the characteristics of this dialect. To understand those conditions we are going to be based on David Crystal’s academic text “Regional Variation” where hepresents English language’s variations according to geographical origin and differences between regions.

Phonological variations happen when a word pronunciation changes between differentdialect groups . In Philadelphia Dialect words have a peculiar pronunciation. Some interesting examples are:
• The common local pronunciation of "Philadelphia" is "Fulladulfya". It is spoken just like theseparate words "full", "a", "dull", and then the monosyllabic ending "fya", in which the 'y' is consonantal.
• Words with "-er-" like "ferry" are pronounced "furry" with the short 'u' of "cut"....