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The Pittsburgh accent has long been part of the region’s identity and culture. But people from around here also have some unique ways of pronouncing some words that outsiders might find a little strange.
Good Question! asker Jameel al Khafiz wondered about the pronunciation of North Versailles, which is about 13 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
“I was wondering why we in Pittsburgh pronounced the city of North Versailles [Ver-SAYLZ] the way we do, as opposed to the French pronunciation, which would be Versailles [Ver-SIGH],” al Khafiz asked.
Spelling pronunciations and French allies
Allen Wagner’s family first moved to a part of North Versailles known as Port Perry, a bustling port along the Monongahela River. The community was eventually taken over by the railroads that served the nearby Edgar Thomson Steel Works, as land was bought by the company for shipping and other industrial needs.
“When I was living there as a small boy, I watched them fill the valley with slag from the mills,” Wagner said. “The other thing that used to happen to us was that whoever had the newest car in our family got to put it in the garage, because when you went out in the morning, your car was covered in metal flake dust from the mills.”
As was true for much of the Pittsburgh region in the mid-20th century, the local economy was dominated by manufacturing. Many families worked in the steel or glass industries, and the township’s population peaked between 1960-1980. It’s since dropped, but an Amazon warehouse recently opened off of Route 30, employing about 200 people.
The name “Versailles” is a reference to the Palace of Versailles, a former residence of King Louis XIV of France. According to Frank Kordalski Jr, whose family has lived in the North Versailles region since the 1920s, the western Pennsylvania township was given the name in 1869.
“It was actually passed down as a nod to our French allies during the Revolutionary War,” Kordalski said. “And then, everyone asks, ‘Well, why don’t you say North Ver-SIGH?’ … But I honestly don’t know why.”
Versailles — as we’ve mentioned — is a French word, and in that language, the double “l”s at the end aren’t pronounced.
“That's very difficult to pronounce if you're an English speaker, and we generally don't — very, very rarely do we pronounce things, names of things, with sounds that aren't English sounds,” said Barbara Johnstone, a retired professor of linguistics and rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University whose written and researched a lot about the Pittsburgh accent. She said pronouncing words this way isn’t a sign of ignorance — and it isn’t a mistake.
“It has to do with how the word is spelled, and I think people are pronouncing it the way it's spelled Ver-sails. And that's very common. We call that spelling pronunciations.”
People who don’t know the original pronunciation are going to fall back on how it’s spelled. It happens a lot in English. The “s-a-i-l-l-e-s” at the end of Versailles looks like the English word “s-a-i-l.” This also happens with the city of DuBois, Pa., which is another French word that would be pronounced “Du-BUWAH” in that language — but pronounced “dew-BOYS” here.
Cedars of Lebanon on the hill
Good Question! asker David Reinwald is originally from Chicago, and says it took him a while to get used to the pronunciation of Mt. Lebanon (regionally pronounced as “Leb-uh-NIN”) versus the country of Lebanon (“Leb-uh-NAHN.”
“I just wondered why that was pronounced the way that it was,” Reinwald said. “I would hear it often on the news, and it kind of amused me over and over until it took me a long time to get used to it, actually.”
Michael Cahall, a volunteer at the Historical Society of Mt. Lebanon, where he gives tours and speeches to visitors and classes about the township’s past. The area was first developed as farmland in the late 1700s and grew gradually until the early 1900s as transportation became more available to the community. According to the township’s website, the first streetcar to Pittsburgh began operating in 1901 and soon after, multiple housing subdivisions were created.
Many of the buildings along Mt. Lebanon’s business district were constructed in the 1920s and ’30s, which aligned with the opening of the Liberty Tunnels (in 1924) and Liberty Bridge (in 1928). The accessibility to the South Hills meant many former city dwellers packed up and headed for the suburbs.
“The community was blossoming,” Cahall said. “You could now, in your private car, go from Mt. Lebanon to your work in Pittsburgh those days in 20 minutes to a half hour.”
Geoff Hurd has lived in the township for 42 years and volunteers at the local historical society. He said the name “Mt. Lebanon” allegedly came from a trip a minister, Rev. Joseph Clokey, took to the Middle East in about 1850. He brought back two trees — called cedars of Leba-NAHN, planted them prominently in his front yard and people took notice.
“People would look at those things and obviously they weren’t native trees to Pennsylvania and ask, you know, ‘What kind of trees?’ And the answer was cedars of Lebanon,” Hurd said. “He lived on the hill part of Bower Hill Road and somehow this transmorphed and the neighborhood got to be known as Mt. Lebanon.”
Both Hurd and Cahall said they haven’t heard much controversy about the township’s pronunciation.
Linguist Johnstone says that the way most English speakers pronounce the country of Lebanon stresses the first syllable the most, “LEB,” the middle syllable the least, “uh”, and the last syllable a moderate amount, “NON.” But actually in English, it’s much more common to only have one stressed syllable in the word.
“If you do that, then you get ‘Leb-uh-NIN.’ You only stress the first syllable and the other two vowels both get reduced in this way,” Johnstone said.
That’s in line with how we say some other common three syllable words. Think “cultural,” where just the “cul” is stressed, or “vacation.”
“The main stress is on the ‘cay,’ the secondary stress is on the ‘vay.’ If you said it really fast or said it really casually, you might end up saying ‘vuh-cay-shun,’” Johnstone said. “When you pronounce it fast that way, the vowel gets reduced.”
While some might see the region’s pronunciation of these places as unusual, Johnstone emphasized that it’s not wrong.
“The proper pronunciation of the name of a town is how people pronounce it themselves.”
If you ever get a chance to visit Mt. Lebanon or North Versailles, they’ll tell you they’re pronouncing their town’s name right…because they are!
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