By Maggie Samole / Staff writer

Git your fellow Yinzers together, have some chipped ham and go aht to watch the Stillers. The validity of sentences like previous one will be discussed at “Do You Speak American,” hosted on Monday, Nov. 12 at 7 p.m.

The event, hosted Psi Chi, the psychology honor society, and the Diversity Student Coalition, focuses on the many colorful dialects of the English language. A movie will be shown followed by a discussion led by assistant professor of psychology Kristen Asplin.

Asplin, whose primary area of study is language acquisition, said the program concentrates on the different dialects in each region of the country.

“We are not going to talk about English outside of America,” Asplin said. “We will talk about how other languages, like Spanish, are changing the English language.” She said that correct spoken English is often very different from what English writing teachers want to be used.

The movie being shown addresses the discrimination of people with different accents or dialects and whether or not the language we speak changes our way of thinking. It will discusses whether English is deteriorating as a language.

“This will give students an opportunity to look at their own language in a new way,” Asplin said. “Things they think are perfectly normal are unique to certain areas, and thing they think are odd are ‘normal’ somewhere else.” She said understanding the different regions and their ways of saying the same things will give students a better understanding of different types of people.

According to Dr. Barbara Johnstone, professor of rhetoric and linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, the dialect used in Pittsburgh or “Pittsburghese” is not entirely unique to the Pittsburgh area. Rather, Johnstone’s research on Pittsburgh speech and society concludes that the dialect called “North Midland U.S. English” is used in a wider region.