PITTSBURGH — A bunch of yinzers came to dahntahn Pixburgh Friday to redd up on their language skills n’at.

While that sentence might seem like a bunch of gibberish to someone from outside Western Pennsylvania, most people here not only understand what it means but also use some of those words in their daily speech.

It says: People came to downtown Pittsburgh Friday to clean up their language skills and things like that.

The dialect, called “Pittsburghese,” is as unique to our region as Primanti’s sandwiches, the Steelers or the Three Rivers. The dialect is so ingrained that numerous websites, T-shirts and media skits are devoted to it.

Pittsburghese was the subject of a seminar Friday that attracted more than 1,000 linguists from across the country. Held by the Linguistic Society of America, the seminar included dozens of speakers who analyzed nearly every aspect of our regional identity through language, culture and history.

The keynote speaker, Barbara Johnstone from Carnegie Mellon University, has spent the past decade studying every aspect of Pittsburghese, including its historical roots, transformation and current use.

That’s when she started the Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project, conducting hundreds of interviews while researching old newspaper articles and other publications. Johnstone has found that while Pittsburghese might be spoken less today, it still holds an important place in the identity of any Pittsburgher.

Scott Kiesling, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, introduced Johnstone at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown Hotel. Wearing a bright yellow shirt that had the word “yinz” across the front, he lightened the mood before Johnstone took the stage.

“How yinz doin’?” he said. “Enjoying dahntahn?”

Johnstone said the origins of Pittsburghese began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the city’s population exploded with immigrants from Europe. A majority of those immigrants were of Scotch-Irish descent, the main demographic that is thought to have spawned the unique dialect we know today.

Despite its deep historical roots, Pittsburghese is a relatively recent phenomenon, Johnstone said.

Pittsburghers didn’t realize “they talked funny,” according to Johnstone, until World War II when many people left the region to serve in the military and interacted with other people from across the country. It wasn’t until 1965, she said, that the first mention of Pittsburghese appeared in a Pittsburgh newspaper.

She also said the dialect didn’t become part of any Pittsburghers’ identity until the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s. That’s when many people lost their jobs in the mills, and one thing they had to identify themselves with was their regional language.

“People needed something to hang their identity hat on,” she said. “They couldn’t be steelworkers anymore because they had that pulled out from under them. People started to ask themselves what it meant to be a Pittsburgher.”

Johnstone said two clear answers emerged from that question: the Steelers and Pittsburghese.

Even though fewer people use the dialect today, Johnstone said she has conducted interviews with people who still get caught up in mispronouncing or misspelling words.

One interviewee, who had recently returned from college, said she once asked a fellow student to lend her a “gumband.” It took that student about five minutes before he realized she had asked for a rubber band.

In another instance, an adult woman didn’t know it was improper to say “the car needs worshed,” instead of the “the car needs to be washed” until she went to college.

The dialect is so widespread that many teachers in the area don’t correct their students when they use Pittsburghese, Johnstone said, which isn’t necessarily bad when it has become such a part of peoples’ identities.

“Pittsburghese is linked with our local identity in so many ways,” she said. “I’ve even found instances of graffiti tags across the city that use Pittsburghese.”

Because of that, Johnstone said she doesn’t expect current Pittsburghese speakers in the region to redd up their language anytime soon.