What ‘The Pitt’ Gets Right (and Wrong) About ‘Pittsburghese’

It’s the verbal tic that everyone and their attending physician has been using the last several weeks: Baby Jane Doe.

“The Pitt” star and Emmy winner Katherine LaNasa’s Nurse Dana Evans certainly has a way with words, and her accent has become an unassailably idiosyncratic detail of the hit HBO Max series’ overall atmosphere. After the moment LaNasa uttered those three words in the Season 2 premiere of the series, a new internet meme was born — quite literally, because, you know, Baby Jane Doe.

Though its title “The Pitt” references the nickname of the emergency department where Nurse Evans, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), and the beleaguered doctors and medical students endure their respective shifts, the drama series’ title also refers to the city in which the show takes place: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

There’s no doubt the writers and Wyle himself have an appreciation for the city in which “The Pitt” is set. Callbacks to the WQED station where “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was filmed; lunch provided by Primanti Bros.; and the odd piece of Pittsburgh Penguins, Pirates, or Steelers paraphernalia, among other Pittsburgh-centric details, feature throughout.

But, occasionally, born-and-raised Yinzers get a real treat.

It might start with a “jagoff” (jerk, asshole, your adjective of choice) here or a “gumband” (rubber band, more on that later) there, but LaNasa’s attempt to capture “Pittsburghese” — especially when considering she’s not a native of Western Pennsylvania — elevates the show with more lived-in details.

“I think she gets the general affect; the general sort of slightly in-your-face, very direct, not hedging her words or trying to be polite or anything, she just says what she means, that’s associated with the female Yinzer,” Professor Barbara Johnstone, the author of “Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect” and a professor of rhetoric and linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, told IndieWire during a recent interview.

The working-class female who is sort of out there and says what she means and isn’t indirect or isn’t being careful about what she says? That fits Nurse Dana “Who Throws Away a Perfectly Good Baby?” Evans to a tee.

LaNasa’s character serves as the resident Yinzer of “The Pitt,” a native Pittsburgher with an accent to match, and one with a deep history for the Western Pennsylvania region.

‘The Pitt’Warrick Page/MAX

As a native Yinzer, I know that we don’t get that much consistent representation in entertainment media. Sure, one of our star former residents is Batman (Michael Keaton), and we live in, what I believe is, the titular neighborhood of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,” but to have a character built as a bonafide native Pittsburgher represented — with an attempt at the accent no less — on an Emmy Award-winning TV series is a new level of Proud to be from Pittsburgh sort of feeling.

“There’s ‘Pittsburghese’ on two levels: there’s still people who have local accents and for the most part are not aware they have local accents, and then there’s people who talk about ‘Pittsburghese’ who often don’t have local accents,” Johnstone said. “It’s really a phenomenon on two different levels, and when we talk about ‘Pittsburghese,’ I think we’re often talking about the second of those two things: the discourse, the talk, the conversation about local speech more than local speech per se.”

It’s why the phrase “Baby Jane Doe” has become such shorthand for identifying or trying to recreate Nurse Dana’s speech in viral TikToks.

But the Yinzer accent, or “Pittsburghese,” like so many regional accents, has a special history that extends back centuries. “Pittsburghese was originally Scots-Irish-English because the Scots-Irish were the original English-speaking people who settled in the area — of course, there were other people here earlier — and their accent just kind of persisted over the generations. Lots of people came from elsewhere as well, Germans and Eastern and Southern Europeans and people from the British Isles,” Johnstone said.

Pronunciation of vowels, diphthongs, and certain regional words are key identifiers for the accent, turning “down” into “dahn” and “really” into “rilly,” among other variants. Then there are certain idiosyncrasies like “jumbo,” a shorthand for inexpensive sausage or bologna, and “gumband,” which may have been a brand of rubber band, per Johnstone, though the name has just sort of stuck.

“Starting in the 1940s and ‘50s, things really changed,” Johnstone said, referencing how the unique accent began to travel and earn its reputation. “You get all sorts of newspaper articles and newspaper cartoons and little booklets and coffee mugs and T-shirts, etcetera, etcetera, with ‘Pittsburghese’ on them and lists of ‘Pittsburghese.’ Somehow, people became aware that they had an accent, and they weren’t aware before because they were very isolated. They never ran into anyone who talked any differently than they did.”

‘The Pitt’Warrick Page/MAX

The “Pittsburghese” that audiences have been introduced to via “The Pitt” is more in line with the contemporary understanding of the accent. “You can find lists of these [terms] online all over the place — ‘Pittsburghese’ words,” said Johnstone. Terms like “slippy,” meaning slippery, and “redd up,” meaning to clean up, are part of the Yinzer vernacular.

Representations of the accent outside of the “The Pitt” are few and far between, mostly because it is so hard to grasp the nuances of the accent and local dialect as Yinzers themselves have debated about the HBO Max series.

The Christian Bale-led “Out of the Furnace” had some Western Pennsylvania representation as it was filmed outside of the Steel City, and 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead,” also filmed in Pittsburgh, utilized the local vernacular, though not in the popularized Yinzer-fied way Pittsburghese is represented today. Then, of course, there’s the “Pawnsylvania” sketch with Nick Kroll and Jon Daly, the latter another native of Pittsburgh.

“As far as who speaks it now, I think things have really changed,” Johnstone said. “It used to be, one of my main findings was that, before the second World War … nobody ever talked about ‘Pittsburghese.’ The word ‘Pittsburghese’ didn’t exist. There was occasionally a newspaper article that listed some quirks of local speech, but they weren’t the things we now associate with ‘Pittsburghese,’ they were just things associated with people being uneducated.”

In the first season of “The Pitt,” LaNasa’s Nurse Dana Evans references volunteering in the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, giving Dana’s characterization that of a born-and-bred Yinzer. “I think that probably has exactly that effect for most viewers, [those] who aren’t as attuned to the actual Pittsburgh accent, as maybe I am and maybe a lot of people in Pittsburgh are,” Johnstone said.

For general audiences (your non-Yinzers), Dana’s accent and affect makes “The Pitt” that much more authentic and lived-in. But for Pittsburghers, some “features” of “Pittsburghese” are still missing, and it all has to do with vowels. “Mom” versus “mowm” or “moawm,” for example. Or your tongue not hitting the roof of your mouth when you say “rilly” as opposed to “really.”

“Unless you knew how to hear the accent, because you have to learn how to hear an accent,” said Johnstone, you might miss those details. As for any advice the professor of rhetoric and linguistics could offer as “The Pitt” heads into its third season, “If [LaNasa] really wanted to indicate to people that she’s from Pittsburgh, she could say ‘dahn tahn.’” Translation: down town.

‘The Pitt’Warrick Page/MAX

What’s more, the production is “on purpose trying to throw in little ‘Pittsburgh’ [terms],” Johnstone said. Though “jagoff” and “gumband” are words, “it’s the sounds, it’s the pronunciation that’s not quite coming through.”

A potential solve? Bring in the Yinzers. “The smaller parts [patients] are people who would definitely have the local accent, some of the older, working-class white men and women who come in and they don’t sound like Pittsburghers … I don’t see why,” she said. 

Of course, Johnstone conceded, “People like us — Pittsburghers, ex-Pittsburghers — are a very small part of the target audience for this show. I mean, obviously they want it to appeal to people all over the place. The amount of time and labor that would go in to making sure that every single person might have a Pittsburgh accent does is probably just not worth it for them.”

In that case, I know a white man in his late sixties — retired, though he loves to play a late recreational hockey game in the early evening and also might be my father — who’d love to meet Wyle, LaNasa, and all Yinz (you) dahn (down) on the Los Angeles sahnd (sound) stage.

“The Pitt” Season 2 finale will air Thursday, April 17 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.