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Hayna Valley English
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Heyna or No?
 
Despite living in northeastern Pennsylvania my entire life, I have only just now begun to use the term "heyna."  Partially biased towards its usage, I tried to prevent myself from ever using the word.  I've found that in Clarks Summit, the town where I grew up and still live, negatively looks down upon the Heyna Valley English dialect, even though we are guilty of using such dialect.  Guilty.  Sounds negative, eh?  It's true, though.  I only started resorting to the term heyna (isn't it?) because I was working as a part time supervisor at Krispy Kreme and found that the more loosely I used the term, the easier it was to communicate with the workers.  Honestly.  It was kind of crazy to me, but everyone seemed to be using the phrase.
 
Heyna Valley also likes to overpronounce certain words like "film," "athelete," and "mine."  Also, we like to say "yous guys" and "how are yez?"  In Clarks Summit, a town highly defined by its school district, one of the best in the areas, strongly looks down upon such phrases.  In fact, they become the center of the parodies of most teens.
 
A lot of the pronunciation variations (the -th sound becoming just a -t) has a lot to do with the high density of Polish and Slavic immigrants coming to the area in the early 20th century.  It seems crazy to imagine that the assimilation of immigrants would have that great of an effect on the language.  Northeastern Pennsylvania is well known for its coal and many of the state's first permenant settlers were coal miners from south Poland Lemkos, Galician, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Germans.  This mixture of languages may have affected and fueled the formation of this dialect also known as "Coal Speak."
 
So, despite living five minutes away from Scranton, PA, on of the most concentrated cities of the Heyna Valley dialect, that variety of the English language is highly looked down upon and considered the "uneducated" language.
 
I still can't believe there is such a thing as the "Heyna Valley English."  I guess I'm just so used to hearing the vernacular of the area that it no longer phases me to actually be a real dialect.  Hmmm...
 
 
Chimley or Chimbley: Chimney

Swalley: To swallow.

Wrench: To rinse.

Cousint: Cousin.

Skookle: The County Schuylkill.

Bros, Broz: 'Brother', as in "Me an' my broz went to Califor-knee-uh 

Minced Ham: Ordinary bologna.

 

It is believed that some dialects stem from "stupid" people.  Heyna Valley English is one of those.  Even I, before I began this project, believed that the language was derived from simple laziness.  Of course, I've discovered otherwise, but here is an example of such frustration and the belief that dialects come from the less intelligent:

(From a weblog http://topshelfit.com/cgi-bin/myron/news/dailynews/daily.cgi?pands=&url=http://www.breakfastoflosers.com/archives/000529.html)

 

February 25, 2005

it's spelled with an "f", but she's phat with a "ph"

when george and I found out we were going to be parents, it took us about two days to pick out names. we had fairly easy parameters. we didn't want our child to be the sixth ashley or emma or jacob in their class. neither did we want our child to be the only pomegranate.

you know someone is going to name their child pomegranate.

well, we checked out the baby name lists at the social security administration. any name that was in the top 15, or not in the top 100, was immediately discounted. george picked his favorites out of this list of 85, and I immediately agreed.

easy peasy, right? our kid is going to hate how practical we are.

when we made our announcements of name selections, people staring asking us, if we had a girl, how would we spell her name?

hmm, we hadn't really thought about it. there's s-o-p-h-i-a or s-o-f-i-a.

one of the things that I dislike about my hometown is that it inspires the worst accent imaginable. heyna or no?

if you are not from NePA, get down on your knees right now you heathen pig and give thanks that you don't know what I'm talking about.

the accent is a mix of minnesota, chicago and brooklyn with a hint of eastern canadian (not the cute "aboot" part) thrown in. sounds charming, doesn't it?

one of the "coalisms" which annoys me the most is the pronunciation of the letter "h". you see, some members of my family who will remain nameless think "h" is pronounced "haitch". nails on a chalkboard. guess what? in the rest of the english speaking world, there is no "h" sound in the letter "h". just accept it and move on.

also, mangoes are not green bell peppers, they are mangoes. check out what the wegman's has labelled as mangoes. they are not green. nor bell-shaped. nor peppers. so please don't ever order a pizza with mangoes on it again unless you truly want sweet orange fruit on your pie.

before our little girl was born, one of these family members asked us "so, how are you going to spell it if it's a girl? s-o-p-haitch-i-a?"

nails on a chalkboard.

with no hesitation whatsoever, we replied "nope, we're spelling it with an f."