Buffalo English
Buffalo English, sometimes colloquially referred to as Buffalonian, is the unique variety of English used in and around the U.S. city of Buffalo, New York.
The language is part of the North Inland dialect of American English, which spreads from western Vermont to the Dakotas, and is therefore more like the local speech of Chicago and Michigan than New York City.
Key traits
Among its features are the flattening and nasalization of many vowels, resulting in the pronunciation of, for instance, "mom" as "mam". Also, Buffalo residents are often wont to employ "possessification", where the possessive case is applied to business names that are not necessarily possessive. For example, Buffalonians will say they shop at Kmart's, Target's or Home Depot's; have drug prescriptions filled at Rite-Aid's or Eckerd's; rent DVDs at Blockbuster's or Hollywood's (Hollywood Video); and eat lunch at Burger King's, Mighty Taco's, or Outback's (Outback Steakhouse). This trait could be traced to two very popular grocery stores in the area, Wegmans and Budwey's.
Buffalonians also refer to any large enclosed shopping center as a "mall" whether its owners actually call it one or not. Thus the large Walden Galleria is referred to as the Galleria Mall.
Another notable feature is the addition of the definite article to road names whether they have it or not, even numbers. An example would be these directions to Niagara Falls from the main line of the New York State Thruway: "Take the 290 over to the 190 and then go north over the bridges till you get there." The major highways are also often referred to by name rather than number (I-90 is "the Thruway", I-290 is "the Youngman",NY 33 is "the Kensington", NY 198 is "the Scajaquada", etc.): "Take the Youngman to the Kensington to get downtown from Amherst."
Speakers
Like most regional American accents, it becomes more pronounced in working-class speakers. Some claim that for this reason it is more noticeable in the city's southern and eastern neighborhoods and suburbs than their northern and northeastern counterparts.
The area's large Polish-American population also has an impact on some speakers of that ethnic group, who in older generations spoke with at least a slight Polish accent even if they were native-born Americans and first-language English speakers. The phenomenon was once widespread enough that even today residents sometimes jocularly refer to Cheektowaga, a large suburb just east of the city with many Polish-Americans, as "Chickatavaga," a usage that even made an SCTV sketch.
Another feature believed to have originated with Polish immigrants and then spreading to the region as a whole is "there" interjected after a noun or pronoun for emphasis, sometimes more than once in a sentence — "Go out and get us some doughnuts at Tim Hortons there"; "My sister there lives down in Hamburg there." The extreme example is the sort of stereotypical resident who supposedly describes the city's football team as "dem dere Bills dere."