they are responsible for the overall structure of the argument and the analysis of the interview data, which they collected. We also draw on earlier work by Danielson on the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh newspaper archive (Johnstone and Danielson 2001), although Danielson was not involved in the preparation of this article and bears no responsibility for any of its failings. For help with Silverstein, Johnstone is grateful to fellow members of the Carnegie Mellon University/University of Pittsburgh Social Meaning in Language group during the fall semester of 2005: Scott F. Kiesling, Brian Brubaker, Maeve Eberhart, and Veronica Lifrieri. We are grateful to Dan Baumgardt and Scott F. Kiesling for doing the coding and analysis of /aw/-monophthongization that resulted in the index scores for this variable. Comments from two anonymous reviewers and this journal's editors, Anne Curzan and Robin Queen, have helped sharpen the argument. This article explores the sociolinguistic history of a U.S. city. On the basis of historical research, ethnography, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic interviews, the authors describe how a set of linguistic features that were once not noticed at all, then used and heard primarily as markers of socioeconomic class, have come to be linked increasingly to place and "enregistered" as a dialect called "Pittsburghese." To explain how this has come about, the authors draw on the semiotic concept of "orders of indexicality." They suggest that social and geographical mobility during the latter half of the twentieth century has played a crucial role in the process. They model a particularistic approach to linguistic and ideological change that is sensitive not only to ideas about language that circulate in the media but also to the life experiences of particular speakers; and they show how an understanding of linguistic variation, language attitudes, and the stylized performance of dialect is enhanced by exploring the historical and ideological processes that make resources for these practices available.

In this paper we test the hypothesis that monophthongal /aw/ is semiotically associated with local identity in Pittsburgh. We compare results of an experimental task that directly elicits participants' sense of the indexical value of /aw/-monophthongization with the occurrence of this variant in the same people's speech. People who hear monophthongal /aw/ as an index of localness are unlikely to have this feature in their own speech, and many of the people who do monophthongize /aw/ do not associate this variant with localness. Exploring how four of these participants talk about this feature and its meanings, we show that the indexical meanings of speech features can vary widely within a community, and we illustrate the danger of confusing the meaning assigned by hearers to a linguistic form with the meaning users would assign to it. We suggest that a phenomenological approach, attending to the multiplicity and indeterminacy of indexical relations and to how such relations arise historically and in lived experience, can lead to a more nuanced account of the distribution of social meanings of variant forms than can studies of perception or production alone.

This article considers a type of material artifact that circulates ideas about regional speech in the United States: T-shirts bearing words and phrases thought to be unique to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I argue that Pittsburghese shirts, seen for themselves and in the context of their production, distribution, and consumption, are part of a process leading to the creation and focusing of the idea that there is a Pittsburgh dialect. To describe how particular locally hearable forms have become linked with the city, I invoke Asif Agha's concept of “enregisterment.” To understand why this has happened at the time and in the way it has, I draw on Arjun Appadurai's model of the “commodity situation.” I suggest that Pittsburghese shirts contribute to dialect enregisterment in at least four ways: they put local speech on display, they imbue local speech with value, they standardize local speech, and they link local speech with particular social meanings.

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OVERVIEWRepeatable linguistic styles emerge out of stancetaking strategies that prove repeatedly relevant and useful for particular speakers in particular kinds of interactions. Previous research has explored how styles can come to be associated with interactional situations (e.g. Biber and Finegan 1989) or social identities (eg. Ochs 1992, Eckert 2000. In some sociocultural contexts, styles associated with individuals can also become ethnographically and interactionally relevant, although we have paid less attention to these. This paper uses a discourse-analytic case study of one individual's talk and writing across genres, together with ethnographic, biographical, and historical research about the sociolinguistic and language-ideological contexts, to illustrate how repeated patterns of stancetaking can come together as a style associated with a particular individual. The individual in question, a well-known 20th-century U.S. political figure, was known for how she talked, which was sometimes referred to as "the Barbara Jordan style." As I will show, Jordan drew on discursive resources from the African-American church and from the American traditions of legal and political debate and oratory, as mediated by particular people in her environment, to create a linguistic style that she adopted across discourse genres. In keeping with one of the two the dominant Western ideologies about the role of identity in persuasion, this style worked rhetorically by forthcoming in Alexandra Jaffe (ed.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on Stance. New York: Oxford UP.