Even though I’m in Cleveland, quite a few people I’ve met here use one trait of Pittsburghese or Yinzer English when they speak - dropping “to be” between like, need, or want and a past participle. The classic example is “The car needs washed.”
My question: is this grammatically correct English with an awkward construction, or it it bad grammar? People who seem to speak this way see absolutely nothing wrong with it when I’ve pointed it out to them.
It is correct grammar for the dialect of English that is spoken there.
“Pittsburghese” is a recognized dialect which has been the subject of a good deal of academic study. A friend of is a linguistics professor at the University of Pittsburgh (and, incidentally, the subject of a minor blip of publicity when his paper on the use of the term “dude” was published). He and a colleague from Carnegie Mellon have a website summarizing important aspects of the dialect, which notes:
What does ‘yinz’ mean?
Plural of “you.” Apparently derive from “you’uns.” It’s analogous to the northeastern “youse” or southern “y’all.”
Never mind… I found it in the linked page. 
The construction that drops the words, “to be” from talking about what needs to be done (around here, you often here it as “floor needs mopped” or “wash needs done”) is never “grammatically correct.” However, anyone living in the rural parts of Northwest Ohio would understand you if you said it that way, and think nothing of it. And to show how far that has travelled, I used to encounter it in parts of California as long ago as the early 1980’s! Again, even there, it tended to be used by those with rural background, or less complete education.
After all this time, do people here on the dope really not know in advance exactly what people will say in answer to questions like this?
-FrL-