So I'm from this weird limnal space between the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos (in eastern PA); they're geographically right up against each other but they're very, very different. (I identify with the LV more than the Poconos.)
The Poconos: pretty much assume everything true for the greater NYC metro area (including Long Island and northern NJ) is true for here. I don't have actual numbers, but my gut says we're about 1/4-1/3 native-born and almost everybody else moved here from across the Delaware. Everything that isn't New York is pretty much Lehigh Valley, but woodsier.
-The driving is pretty aggressive, but since it's also a huge tourist area, you see a lot of different styles. Driving on 80 will turn your butthole inside out, even if you're used to it.
-"You guys" is the norm, though "yous" is common in informal speech. It's more of the Jersey inflection, actually pronounced like it's spelled.
-The City is Manhattan, though it is very occasionally used in the generic, lowercase sense when talking about other places. You can hear the difference.
-Bagel sounds more like "beggel" than "baygel."
-You stand on line, rather than in line.
-Work commutes are long (1hr+) because so much of the region is a bedroom community of the NYC area.
-Every restaurant and most stores have brochure racks for local attractions. Back in the day we used to have like three Muffler Men, but they're long gone.
The Lehigh Valley (which is actually the region around three small Colonial cities--Allentown, Easton, and Bethlehem): Always been fairly diverse as far as Northern European ancestry goes--PA Dutch farmers, Italian and Welsh/ Cornish quarrymen, Ukranian/ Polish miners & foundry workers, English and Scottish colonials, Irish laborers. The early 20th century gave us southern Black mill workers and Puerto Rican steel workers (Bethlehem Steel recruited down there pretty heavily and for pretty racist reasons).
-Lots of different churches (and fire companies) means lots of different fundraising food sales: fastnachts and pork-and-sauerkraut suppers, pasties, pierogies and halupki, empanadas/ empandillas; everybody does hoagie sales, though.
-There's this whole Sheetz vs. Wawa thing, but Wawa was here first. Everybody has a preference when it comes to the food and coffee, but mostly it's whoever's closest and has the best gas price that determines where you go. (Turkey Hill is the sleeper here, way cheaper drinks and snacks, sometimes best gas prices too)
-PA Dutch was a big subset of the regional culture (but less and less as time goes on). All the weird-ass grammatical shit from the language has made it into the regional dialect (stronger the farther out from the cities you get); for whatever reason, we can't seem to get a handle on prepositions and where prepositional phrases belong in a sentence (German rules? English rules? We don't need no stinkin' rules!). Other highlights include peppering in PA Dutch words in sentences (and, to make it even more confusing, our spelling, pronunciation, and even nuances of meaning are different than Berks & Lancaster counties--talk about hyper-regional), ending declarative sentences with "once/ oncest (wuhnst)" and questions with "say/ say now/ say now once?," using "Yeah-yup!" as a more emphatic affirmation.
-Just like people from Philly, we go "down the shore" when we go to the beach (only applies to Jersey, though--going to like, Myrtle Beach would not be down the shore) and "up the Poconos" (where a lot of people know or knew someone with a cabin, back before everything became gated communities with bougie names).
-"You guys" is common, "yous" is informal; we say it more like "ya's" or "yuhs"
-"Do you want to come with?" is how we ask someone along. We drop that final pronoun. Definitely has roots in German.
-You know an Italian lives (or lived) in a house because there's a stone grotto in the front yard. If Mary's been replaced with flowers or a birdbath or something, the house has changed hands. They're clustered around quarries, usually, because most Italian immigration to the area was from recruiting efforts on the part of limestone quarry owners (and slate, to a lesser degree; slate was more heavily Wales and SW England). I'm a total nerd for how history and geography overlap.
-Some creeks and rivers are named -kill, which is an early Dutch Colonial thing from when they were exploring the waterways; it's way more common in NJ and NY. A lot of our place names are bastardizations of Lenape language.
-We drink soda and put our groceries in bags. I was very weirded out when someone literally asked me if I "wanted my pop in the sack" when I was somewhere in the midwest (honestly I forget exactly where, it was at a tiny store that was a stop along a 3-day Greyhound ride from PA to Mt).
-We put a red sauce (not marinara or ketchup, though) on our cheesesteaks. There's no debate about American or Whiz, it's either American or Provolone. Our pizza is more or less NY style, though our crust is thicker. And Tomato Pie is 100% not the same as pizza, even though it's dough, tomato sauce, and cheese (each ingredient is a different type than pizza and tomato pie is served cold or room temp).
-They're pillbugs, though I had one teacher that called them roly-polies. A potato bug is the same as a potato beetle.
-We stand in line, not on line.
-Traffic is awful. Public transportation barely exists and the most recent update to the transportation infrastructure was under Eisenhower. Forget potholes, we've got sinkholes that take out whole roads. Because we're three cities (and whole bunch of boroughs and townships) in a trenchcoat, road conditions vary widely on any given trip; lots of bad intersections and stop signs that should be lights, but are in townships that have more thru-traffic than the tax base can support.
-Tangent to the above, we're like the warehouse capital of the East Coast. So many big trucks. Nondescript white boxes for miles upon miles, sitting on what was once some of the most fertile farmland in the country. Everybody hates it, everybody complains about it, but it's a part of life and we can't change it (they could in Harrisburg, but that will never happen). I'm counting it as a quirk because at this point, it's almost vernacular architecture.
Okay, I have to stop because I could get so into the weeds on this. We're not as homogeneous as the Midwest (or even the western part of PA) due to us being settled earlier and having more waves of immigration, so sometimes it's hard to differentiate a real Lehigh Valley thing from a generic Mid Atlantic thing, or from a German-American/ Italian-American/ whatever-American thing. I find it all so fascinating.
