Philadelphian is most commonly used to describe someone who is from (or a resident of) the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After deciphering Philadelphia's unique accent, you'll need to learn the lingo to communicate with the locals. Failure to do so could spell disaster when ordering a steak and cheese or going to an Eagles game. If you've ever wondered when to tell Hoagie instead of sub (always), or what qualifies as jawn (everything), check out these essential Philly slang terms.
Philadelphia has one of the most unusual regional accents in the U.S. UU. Due to the different way vowels are pronounced, the water becomes more woody in the mouth of native speakers. The vowel of the first syllable sounds like “put” instead of “law”, as other Americans might pronounce it.
It's one of the most famous examples of the Philadelphia accent, but it's in danger of extinction. Although the unique vowel system is still used by older residents, it's not common among local millennials. Therefore, whether a Philadelphian refers to his city's famous flavored Italian ice as wooden ice or water ice may depend on his age. Next to Independence Hall and Rocky Steps, Lincoln Financial Field is one of Philadelphia's holiest sites.
Locals call it The Linc for short. The football stadium is home to the Eagles (also known as the Birds or the Iggles in the language of Philadelphia). Before Jawn won national recognition, Chumpy was Philadelphia's preferred multipurpose name. It became a common part of the black vernacular language of Philadelphia in the 1980s.
As linguist Ben Zimmer told My City Paper, it was so popular at one point that a local potato chip brand called its product Chumpies. Some of Philadelphia's other nicknames are The Quaker City, The Cradle of Liberty and The Birthplace of America. A lot of people call it Philadelphia. Jones says Philadelphia segregation may have encouraged change and adoption of “jawn”; black Philadelphians and white Philadelphians don't mix as much as, say, black New Yorkers and white New Yorkers, so a word created or altered in the black community can develop without influence.
Two cities on the East Coast, Philadelphia and Boston, were important in the early history of the United States. While youse is associated with the city's white working class, all of you are still more prevalent in Philadelphia's black communities, although the last sentence is less area-specific than the first. That said, if Philadelphia is on your list of potential destinations, make sure to go over the most popular Philadelphia slang terms before your visit. Black Philadelphians are moving more towards an “eh” sound for that vowel, so “bag” is more like “I beg”.
One possibility is that the mutation occurred in such an extreme way because Philadelphia is, in a way, an extreme place. Jones told me that he once expressed the New York consensus theory about the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate and that “people were furious, writing angry tweets. In Philadelphia, a phenomenon occurred, first with the word “articulation” and later with its mutation “jawn”, known in the linguistic community as “semantic whitening”. Try ordering a hero sandwich, grinder, or submarine in the Philadelphia area and get ready to look dirty.
Alterations to standard American English are consistent and can be understood by any speaker, and the history of blacks in this country provides a historical basis for isolation, which can produce such systematic language changes. In the late seventeen hundred, many events that took place in Philadelphia gave rise to the American Revolution and independence. But in Philadelphia, the change from “joint” to “jawn” followed some pretty standard AAVE rules. As with its architecture, Philadelphia's accent, syntax, and vocabulary are rarely discussed outside the city.
That change is not unusual in itself, those two movements are the most common changes from the standard “stock exchange” vowel, throughout the country, but the fact that white Philadelphia chose one movement and black Philadelphia chose another is further proof of the effect that segregation has on linguistics. . .
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