Get aht, yinz! Rankings indicate Pittsburgh accent among 'ugliest in all of America'

Don’t tell the locals in the crowd dahn Carson Street on a non-pandemic Saturday night, but the way Pittsburghers talk isn’t sexy.

“The Western Pennsylvania English accent is often considered the ugliest in all of America, so Pittsburgh locals can feel lucky that they’ve escaped last place this time around,” the staff at Big 7 Travel wrote in a ranking released last week that asserts Pittsburghers have the 46th least sexy accent in the nation.

Big 7 says it based the rankings on input from its audience, but it doesn’t detail exactly how the rankings were compiled. Big 7 didn’t immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

Yinzers can take heart in knowing the way we talk is sexier than that of New Jersey, which spawned rock ’n’ roll heartthrobs Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, along with old blue eyes himself, Frank Sinatra.

Their singing voices are better than the talk they used aroun’ da haus, apparently, as New Jerseyan was rated the least-sexy accent in the nation, followed by Long Islandese, Floridian and Minnesota — eh, tell that to the Coen brothers of “Fargo” fame.

There may be little to the list, which is topped by the Texan drawl, followed by New York and Bostonian.

“I never thought of accents as sexy or not,” said Sam McCool.

McCool, a University of Pittsburgh alum who lives in rural Nevada, wrote a book about how Yinzers talk: “New Pittsburghese: How to Speak Like a Pittsburgher.”

The 1981 book is credited with elevating Yinzers to the national stage. He also penned “How to Speak Bostonian.”

He can relate to how some accents have a certain prestige to them, noting how JFK’s popularity raised the cache of the way Bostonians talked. LBJ’s subsequent drawl from the Oval Office didn’t do the same for Texans, at least until the Big 7 listing came out Tuesday.

“The Texas accent wasn’t considered high brow,” McCool said.

The way Yinzers talk has influenced the way people throughout the Ohio River Valley speak, he said, all the way to New Orleans and in parts of Northern Alabama. (Those parts must not have been sampled for the Big 7 list, as Alabaman speech ranked fourth sexiest in the land.)

“I think a Pittsburgher’s going to sound sexy to another Pittsburgher,” McCool said. “It all depends on the person.”