I have an acquaintance who routinely leaves out “to be” from his spoken sentences when it falls before a verb. For example, “The dishwasher needs emptied,” “The dog wants fed,” etc. What’s the deal? Is this some sort of regional oddity, or is he just weird?
It’s a Pennsylvania dialect.
Letting you break people into two groups with a simple question…
Nah, that’s not weird at all. What’s weird is people who feel the need to insert a superfluous “to be” in the middle of a perfectly valid grammatical construction.
Perhaps he’s speaking E-prime. 
That construction is common here in Scotland. It was only when I went to the US that I realised that there was anything unusual about it, and that there it was considered a Pennsylvania quirk.
“Or not. That is the question.”
You win 5 internet dollars!
Let’s just say I completely agree with this poster.
A pretty good rundown. I could’ve sworn it was a more midwest thing, am I thinking of something else?
Do people who speak like that also write like that?
I’m a born and raised Pennsylvanian and I hear it both ways and say it both ways.
I just looked at Bosstone’s links which claim that it’s a western PA thing. I grew up in the Philly suburbs but my dad was from Western PA so maybe that’s where I picked it up.
Come to think of it, when I was younger people more than once asked me if I was from the south because they thought I had a southern accent. That always puzzled me. Maybe it was because I was using dialect I picked up from my father.
Quirk? I didn’t realize it was abnormal until I read this thread. I’ve spent most of my life in northern WV, PA, and MD. Just seemed like the normal way people spoke to me.
I do.
My grandmother’s people were from Pennsylvania and she often used that construction.
Well, from an east coast perspective, that’s not so far off, is it? The Pittsburgh area is, I would say, right up against the start of the midwest.
If it’s regional, it’s not confined to Pennsylvania. I was raised in southern California and I was in high school before anyone objected. And it was a friend, not a teacher, who objected.
I fell in with the correction because the alternatives didn’t sound weird to me. And she was so invested in it.
It’s not officially the midwest, but for me it’s not a semantic issue. I mean I thought that this construction was used in large, nonspecific swaths of the midwest, even if I can’t name which ones specifically.
It’s used by some people around the Iowa-Minnesota border, but I was in my 40s before I heard anybody use it. (I grew up in Minneapolis.) Given the Pennsylvania connection, could it be an Amish thing?