personal dialect maps

[edenfalling]

Here is a neat thing!

How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk: What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.

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The quiz determined that my dialect is most characteristic of Newark/Paterson, Yonkers, and Jersey City... which is completely reasonable, seeing that I grew up in northern New Jersey, and specifically the greater New York metro area. (My hometown is on the Midtown Direct train line, for instance.) Apparently this is shown most obviously by my use of 'mischief night' for the night before Halloween, and my use of 'sneakers' for a certain type of shoe. And probably also by the way I pronounce 'caught' -- I have, on occasion, been told that my slight Jersey accent comes out most strongly on words like dog, sorry, and caught, where my vowels have a distinct 'awww' sound to them.

Then again, a bunch of my other answers were more characteristic for Minnesota -- which I know because you get a little map for each answer as you go; very cool! -- and that is also completely reasonable, since my parents are from the Twin Cities and I picked up some idioms and pronunciations from them. :-)

(I speak least similarly to people in Texas, or so the quiz claims. This is based most strongly on my answer to a single question: that I had never heard of a drive-through liquor store. Which is not completely true, but since the only place I have ever encountered that concept is in previous dialect quizzes, I think it is functionally true enough to be getting on with. *wry*)

Comments

[infiniteandsmall]

I got Cleveland, which is a hundred percent accurate, actually.

[branchandroot]

That was kind of fun! Predictably, I got Detroit/Grand Rapids/Toledo, and Michigan in general with a "similar" spread over the northwest plains. Despite having a solid handful of phrasings that were all hot-spotted down the lower east coast and another that are apparently not common in the US at all (yay undergrad that does 80% foreign study in third year). Apparently "devil's night" and "pop" clinched it.

[tephra]

This was surprisingly accurate. Normally the fact I spent a few years in Arizona and then moved to Michigan obscures the fact I drew up in Massachusetts. But then the area where "rotary" and "bubbler" are in common use does narrow things down just a bit. XD

[edenfalling]

Cool. :-)

[edenfalling]

I had a few answers that produced a solidly blue map, too, most of which were the result of things that I know perfectly well are weird and idiosyncratic.

Weirdly, I don't remember my parents saying 'pop' very much, even when I was quite young. Sometimes they said 'soda-pop,' but more often they just named the specific drink in question. They have never really converted to the east coast use of 'soda,' but they haven't exactly clung to Midwestern usage either.

[edenfalling]

Ha! Yes, 'rotary' will pin you down to New England pretty fast. In New Jersey, we call those things 'traffic circles,' and in western New York... well, I honestly haven't seen any out here, so who knows what they'd be called.

[krait]

This was interesting! Some of the questions were very hard for me to answer! (There's no option for "both equally" in the responses to the question about pronouncing "aunt", for example; and I use both "yard sale" and "garage sale" interchangeably -- but most significantly, I call the big road you drive very fast on the interstate, if it is one, and that wasn't an option at all! Sometimes they are highways, but highways are generally narrower and go through small towns, often with stop signs/red lights/a drastic reduction of the speed limit.)

My results said: Baltimore, Fresno, Los Angeles (Baltimore = cot/caught, the latter two = drive-thru liquor stores). None of these are places I have actually lived! Which is more hilarious to me because I have lived relatively a lot of places. (I've spent at least two years in every quadrant of the US except the Northwest!)

So, I dunno. I've taken similar tests before, and get similarly wonky results; all I can guess is that either A) I've had enough influences on my speech patterns that they're indistinguishably blurred at this point, or B) I'm not answering correctly because it's too hard to know what I say; I only know how I hear/pronounce words in my head.

[edenfalling]

It's been really interesting reading the comments on this post, because some of the questions people have answered are NOT questions that appeared on my quiz. I guess it is genuinely interactive, in the sense that it picks and chooses which questions to pose based on one's previous answers. Which is pretty cool. :-)

I suspect moving around a lot (particularly during childhood) will blur one's accent and dialect (which are not quite the same thing), but also the quiz necessarily deals in aggregate averages, so there are always going to be outliers in various directions. Congratulations, you're unique! (Just like a whole bunch of other people... *wry*)

[krait]

Yes, I took a few times afterward just to see what other questions came up. Fun!

I suspect moving around a lot will blur one's accent

Most likely! Especially when it's so many moves. Plus, one thing I was thinking about today is that, as a kid, a lot of my vocabulary came from reading; so I've always called a [traffic] roundabout a roundabout because I read a lot of British authors and that was what they called it! So even when I didn't live in an area where roundabouts were featured, that was what I called them, and if they did exist, it didn't matter what the natives called them, they were roundabouts to me. :D

Another thing that occurs to me is that heavily weighting one question about liquor stores is going to hit a major bump when teetotallers take the quiz. I assume there are no drive-through drink sellers here, but I haven't looked, so for all I know there might be six of them in a ten-mile radius. *shrug* I can go by whether I've heard other people refer to such a thing, of course (and did, essentially) but that's also subject to some odds-altering self-selection (I don't know a lot of alcohol-buyers).

necessarily deals in aggregate averages

Yes, and that's part of why I thought my results were funny - I kind of expected a Midwest answer, i.e. the aggregate average of the map. Instead, I got both margins - basically the inverse. :D

Just like a whole bunch of other people...

Heehee, exactly. *snort* I guess I can take the mean of the three averages, and say "California" is my final answer...

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Denver CO, Aurora CO or Tuscon AZ for me. Which makes NO sense, because of those three, I've only been in one (Denver) for longer than it took to drive through them... and I've never set foot in Aurora at all. I do have a niece that lives there, but she didn't move there until she went to college, so that's not it either.

Then again, my daddy was from New York state, Mom is from South Carolina & Arkansas, and I grew up on Navy bases and spent almost 30 years in the South, so my results are going to be odd anyway.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, I suspect this quiz does notably less well for people who've moved around extensively and/or have parents from vastly different regions.

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

My three cities are in Florida -- one up north and two at the southern tip -- which I suspect is more about retiree snowbirds than anything else, seeing as how I'm pure native Ohioan. My full map does this funny thing where it shades a slightly redder ring around my home turf, though. That's probably from having parents from opposite ends of the state and neuroatypical needs for socialization. The weird part was the individual maps. I kept getting mass amounts of blue over Ohio.

[edenfalling]

I am quite sure Florida snowbirds skew the results -- southern Florida was my own third-most-similar region, after the fierce concentration of red around the greater NYC metro area and the orange of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

How strange that Ohio kept turning blue for you!