When I was growing up on Pittsburgh's South Side in the late 1940s and 1950s, I spoke a working-class idiom that, over the years, has become known as "Pittsburghese."

At that time I had no idea I was speaking a special language and that my lingo would become celebrated, once Pittsburgh began to lose its steel mills and its Smoky City reputation, as part of the city's rich heritage. It would even be preserved on everything from coffee cups and T-shirts to an obnoxious push-button doll called Chipped Ham Sam.

I didn't know I talked "funny" when I was growing up and thought my biggest problem when I went off to Edinboro State College in the early 1960s was ridding myself of excessive profanity, another linguistic inheritance from my working-class youth.

In 1969, during my first semester of teaching in the English Department at Southern Illinois University, a linguistics student came into my office and asked to interview me because of my dialect. When I indignantly told her I had no dialect, she asked me to say "Washington," which I pronounced "Warshington." She asked again if she could interview me.

Having lived in exile from Pittsburgh for more than 40 years now, I've lost most of my Pittsburghese way of speaking, but I have my moments. To this day, I still refer to my hometown neighborhood as the "Souseside," a fitting slip of the tongue because, when I was a kid, I couldn't walk a block on the South Side without passing by a beer joint.

My kids like to remind me that, when they were growing up, they'd often hear me ask my wife Anita -- who grew up in Coraopolis, looks cute in a babushka and understands Pittsburghese -- if I could have a "sammich" for lunch. On their visits to Pittsburgh, they delighted in hearing their working-class grandmother, Lil, who worked at Arsenal Meats out on Polish Hill, offer her son no less than a "jumbo sammich."

But of all the idiomatic words and expressions, the one that most exemplifies "Pittsburghese" is that notorious version of "you," usually spelled and pronounced "yinz" by the current generation of self-described "yinzers."

The problem I have with the "yinz" pronunciation is that I never said "yinz" when I was growing up. I remember saying "yunz," and if I were speaking to more than one of my "Souseside" buddies, I used "yunzes."

I don't know how "yunz" became "yinz" over the years, but I was relieved when I read Sean Hamill's Jan. 20 Post-Gazette article, "Expert Says Fewer Folks Use Pittsbughese? Git Aht!", about the work of Pittsburghese expert and Carnegie Mellon University professor of linguistics Barbara Johnstone. I'd worried that maybe I was wrong, that my memory was fading and my tongue faulty, until Mr. Hamill, in an aside to his main article, wrote, "Oh, and you should know that the 'yunz' spelling, instead of 'yinz' is probably more accurate to the sound most Pittsburghers make."

In her interview with Mr. Hamill, Prof. Johnstone pointed out that the ubiquitous Pittsburghese has now become part of the city's "young, hip, urban culture" but often those who claim to speak Pittsburghese "know some of the words, but they don't have the accent." If that's the case, then let me offer some advice and instruction to the current "hip" generation trying to sound like a Pittsburghese version of Eliza Doolittle.

First of all, keep in mind that Pittsburghese, while a working-class idiom, was not, for my generation, an ignorant or uneducated way of speaking. Those of us from the South Side who attended Humboldt Grade School after World War II were taught the proper use of English from teachers who had us conjugating verbs and diagramming sentences daily. At South High, we read Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, memorized passages from Shakespeare, and some of us even studied Latin for four years.

We learned proper English in grade school, studied a dead language in high school and, thanks to our immigrant grandparents, could speak bits of a foreign language in our homes, especially at the supper table. But out on the streets and in the alleys, we spoke Pittsburghese.

While Pittsburghese has those delightfully odd expressions and words, like "redd up" and "nebby," its accent, when I was growing up, echoed the hard life of a J&L steelworker or an Arcade Cafe waitress. It had the sound of those who, all too familiar with the daily strain and fatigue of hard physical labor, spoke with as little stress as possible.

If today's "yinzer" generation wants to speak with a Pittsburghese accent, "jist" try "speakin'" with less stress. Drop the "g" sound in words ending in "ing," remove the middle syllable from words like "slippery" and collapse multi-word expressions, like "going to" or "what do you want to do." That way, someone speaking Pittsburghese this winter might say, "It's gonna be snowin' and slippy out so wear some rubbers," or this spring might say, "Yunz goin' to the Pirates game or whatcha wanna do."

If you "wanna" express your disgust with the endless snow or the Pirates' endless "losin' " ways, add an obscenity (perhaps the one Pitt quarterback Tyler Palko threw on national television) as an adjective in front of "snowin" or "Pirates," (remember to drop the "g") and you'll sound just like I did when I was "livin' " on the "Souseside."

As for that "yinz" or "yunz" controversy, try saying each word to see which causes the least stress and strain on the palate. "Yinz" can't say I didn't tell "yunz" so.

First Published: February 13, 2011, 5:00 a.m.