I'm taking it, very slowly (each question takes forever to load), as we speak, and am shocked by the third question. There's a place where people lisp the 'c' in 'grocery'? I try to do that and it sounds like the SNL version of Sean Connery's accent.
As a related but random note, "The Pop vs. Soda Page" was done by a friend of mine from High School.
I don't actually have a Texan accent, whatsoever. Jerks.
It's not really an accent quiz, for the most part; it's a dialect quiz. Which is interesting, because it seems a lot of word choices-- especially not-very-commonly-used words-- are actually really good diagnostics.
And: "correctly"? Really?
The thing is not loading for me at all... but I suspect the well-known culprit "People who don't know anything about phonetics trying to describe phonetics". Like when people try to explain that you pronounce something with "a hard S" or "a hard G". No, those concepts mean nothing.
There's a place where people lisp the 'c' in 'grocery'?
I would guess my mom says "groshry store" about half the time.
Huh, I didn't get a 'grocery' question.
Until I saw 6, I didn't get it, but yes, I think I say Groshry. Only I intonate it more poshly, like Grociary.
(After 1, I was thinking "Who says Grothwy?")
6/8, me too. But that's not what "lisp" means.
I think "lisp" was LB's word choice instead of the quiz's, although it's been a while since I took the quiz.
It takes 25 questions from a 140 longer quiz, that I've been trying to access for about a month but it's never successfully loaded. I think it picks them randomly so you aren't guaranteed to see all of them.
"Hard G" tends to be used consistently to refer to a voiced velar stop, as opposed to the "soft G" affricate. No clue what "hard s" means.
I was amazed that it got me perfectly--I was raised in Allentown, PA, which is in a weird transitional area between North Midland/North/Philly/a bit of New York. I've slightly acclimated to Yinzer and the similar-dialect area on my map stretched into Pittsburgh. Then again, it also had another maximum at St. Louis, where I've never been anywhere near to.
My mother hates hates hates my upper Midwest accent. She's from the Bay Area. Apparently, she and my father sound perfect, and my sister and I sound like rubes. The strangest regionalism I grew up with was pluralizing store names as if they were possessives. "Wanna go shopping at the Safeway's? You can come with if you like."
14: Oh yeah. That was common where I grew up too. Kroger's, Aldi's, Penney's, etc.
When I was young, I couldn't pronounce the "th" sounds θ/ð, especially in syllable coda. I always thought of that as a lisp but Wikipedia says that lisps are the inability to pronounce sibilants. Is there a more specific name for that sort of speech impediment?
The vocabulary questions are irritating -- I keep on wanting to accept at least two options as tied for best. Like, "mow the lawn" and "cut the grass" are both perfectly normal. ("Mow the grass" or "cut the lawn" are crazy moon-speak, of course.)
15, that's interesting. Was the invitation with no prepositional object the same, too?
14: One of the bus routes in my town had "Walmart's" broadcast on its destination screen for a while.
18: "come with"? No, that was new to me when I moved to Chicago.
17: yes! I had the same thought on that example.
Oh good, I'm glad this ended up here. I meant to send it along to heebie for posting.
I liked the quiz. Obviously there are individual quirks but by and large it was accurate for me. I didn't get the grocery question but do say "groshry". I also say "tal" (towel) which apparently is somewhat of a Philadelphiaism.
It was interesting to see that "crown" for "crayon" is not a phenomenon unique to my family -- we get a lot of flack over it and I'm not quite sure why. Maybe we got it from my Maryland/Masschusetts-raised father?
I never heard "the devil is beating his wife" for sunshower/liquid sunshine until I was in my 30s. Still seems bizarre to me.
I never heard "the devil is beating his wife" for sunshower/liquid sunshine until I was in my 30s.
These words must mean something but I have no idea what that is.
The other thing about the vocab questions is that I want to sort them into three categories -- "I'd say that"; "I, personally, don't say that, but it doesn't sound strange at all"; and "That's peculiar." Maybe four -- I could split 'peculiar' into "Someone who uses that isn't from around here, but it's still normal sounding" and "Really strange".
Is the devil usually nice to his wife, but upset by the weather?
What does Western PA call it, then, Moby?
Holy mother of fuck, this thing is slow. Anyhow, I live 2 miles from where I was born so I assume that's how I sound.
30: As soon as the sun shines, I'll ask somebody.
What does Western PA call it, then, Moby?
England calls it "daytime".
I've never heard any name for it. It only happens about 10 minutes per year anyway.
There was another discussion, maybe here, involving about 5 names for some sort of road, none of which I'd ever heard before, to the disbelief of others. It turned out it was referring to roads that sort of run parallel to a highway for miles at a time. Apparently those are more common elsewhere.
An access road. Or maybe a service road. Or a frontage road. These all sound fine to me, but I think "access road" is in my native idiolect? I'm not very confident about that though.
35: I've used all of those terms and can't think of one being obviously more native to my own idiom either.
See, to me an access road or service road have specific meanings but NOT the one outlined in the quiz. Of course, I have never been anywhere where there is a road running parallel to the highway like that.
Oh right. That was one of my ties -- they're service roads or access roads interchangeably.
Are they a really big city thing? I think of them as happening where a limited access road is traveling through a street-grid -- it'd be hard to merge onto the highway from an ordinary street, so the streets connect to this little road that's mostly there to provide entrances and exits for the highway.
They're definitely a Texas thing. Miles and miles of highway, often in the middle of nowhere, with two extra roads running alongside.
Have I not complained vociferously enough about how mind-bogglingly dangerous two-way access roads are? Where traffic hurtling down the off-ramp crosses oncoming traffic (whose reaction time is compromised by assessing hurtlingly-fast-highway-leavers) on their way to their own lane?
38: We had one in our town and was in the middle of nowhere.
I mean, big city and dense suburbs. Like, I think of them in nearby Jersey and Long Island.
40, yep. Nothing like oncoming headlights at highway speeds to make you feel alive. Oh, and the drunk drivers. That's also a big help.
38: I think of them as much more common in suburban-to-rural areas where limited access raised or depressed highways don't make sense.
It's something I associate with the D.C. and Baltimore areas. You have the main highway, and then next to it you have something that's also considered the highway but has a lot more exits and onramps. Is that right?
who the hell calls a firefly a peenie wallie?
Also I don't believe I've ever said "thespian" aloud.
The short quiz can be off, depending on the questions it asks. I took the short quiz and it didn't even come close. I took the long quiz and it nailed my exact hometown.
Groshery is normal outside the Northeast.
Frontage roads are common in the Midwest.
You can actually look at the maps for all 140 questions on that website too.
I didn't know there was a name for what they call sunshowers, but I drove for half an hour in one recently and, though the intense rainbows were absolutely amazing, damn was it tough to see anything else.
I definitely heard and maybe said groshries growing up. I don't now.
It's actually sunny and pleasant today.
45: For an example, map I35 between Austin and San Marcos. If you zoom in, you'll see the labelled access/frontage road on either side. I'm having trouble thinking of one in DC.
I live within five miles of where I was born, but the quiz results peg me 400 miles north of here (all five cities listed are in the SF bay area). (I suspect this is because when asked to what the term "The City" refers I said "other," because no one refers to LA as "The City".)
140: You can actually look at the maps for all 140 questions on that website too.
Yes, we've talked about and linked to the underlying research before.
any Canadians tried it? short quiz thinks I'm from Minnesota/Wisconsin, but it's really weak: 5 most similar cities average around 42%, 5 least around 25%.....agreed with LB that for many questions (more than half?) I could have picked two equally reasonable answers depending on which logic I used.
It pegged me for North Carolina, though the Raleigh-Durham area is a yellow dot surrounded by a sea of dark red, which I guess means I speak like a native North Carolinian in a metro area with high in-migration.
My comment from over there because I loathe the commenting system etc. from over there.
Did this a few weeks back with my son. I almost linked at the other place [i.e this place--JPS] but it was so grindingly slow that I did not feel comfortable directing anyone to it. Maybe that's better now; I was thinking it may have been getting a lot of traffic at the time.
Anyway, our results were pretty good and rather different than yours [teo's--JPS] other than we both also scored high for the Bay Area! (For one of the versions--we both did both--one of us had Oakland as the most likely place.) The two of us were the same for areas definitely not being from--New England, the South, and NE Minnesota--but my general peak area was more midwest while his was centered more on east-central PA. A directionally correct if slightly exaggerated reflection of my NE Ohio upbringing versus his Western. PA one.
With the question on the grassy place between road and sidewalk (tree lawn for some people) they could have pretty much nailed me down in one if they had "devil's strip" for an answer. As far as I know it is specific to Akron*, not even extending to Cleveland (it may be used in some other surrounding locales--but not far if it does.
Looking for information related to the specificity of "devil's strip" from 56.3, it seems that somepeople in other parts of Ohio might use it; but in general it seems pretty single city-specific. Came across this amusing tale of forensic linguistics (originally from The New Yorker so some of you aesthetes latte-sippers may have previously encountered it:
"In each note, the kidnapper demanded money in a semiliterate rant: 'No kops! Come alone!!', followed by a terse instruction -- 'Put it in the green trash kan on the devil strip at the corner 18th and Carlson.'
"Shuy studied the letters and then asked, 'Is one of your suspects an educated man born in Akron, Ohio?' The cops were stunned. There was one who matched that description perfectly, and when confronted, he confessed.
"As Shuy subsequently explained, 'kop' and 'kan' most likely were intentional misspellings by someone posing as illiterate. And he knew from his research that the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street -- sometimes known as the 'tree belt,' 'tree lawn' or 'sidewalk buffer' -- is called the 'devil strip' only in Akron, Ohio."
It's OK; I'm out on probation now.
I'm not surprised in the least that Akron has satanic slang unique to itself.
56: And suddenly, I know your real name. (I think I had guessed some FB comment was you before, but never knew for sure.)
60: Quiet.
As I think I've mentioned before, I started Facebook under this pseud and picked up some folks from MB's place and here, and then switched to my real name because I'm a crazy person.
The Whore of Akron is generally acknowledged to be the greatest in the world.
At least one of the questions ("what does 'The City' refer to") is changeable based on where one lives, so not really a dialect thing.
63: Yeah, I kind of hated that question. "The City refers to... whatever the nearest city is?" Funny how people all over the US apparently answered "New York City", which I think is probably not their actual idiomatic usage, just what they thought they were supposed to answer given the weird question.
54: Can't get this particular quiz to load but I seem to remember from the dialect maps, it doesn't do well with Canada. I mean, it gets the general Canada/not Canada but doesn't get some of the regional variations. I'll let you know if I ever get the page loaded.
I said "The City" refers to NYC, even though I'm from the DC area. That's because no one calls DC "The City." Only people from the New York area call the big city near them "The City," and that's because they think they live in the center of the universe.
It sticks with you for a while after you move, though. I used to embarrass myself terribly in college, referring to NYC as "The City". I'd hear myself being provincial as soon as I said it, but I wouldn't catch it ahead of time.
(I'm actually surprised Boston was an option -- I remember noticing when I was in Cambridge that while people reacted to "The City" as meaning NYC as annoying, no one ever misunderstood. I figured that meant that NYC was the closest plausible "The City", and no one talked about Boston that way.)
63, 64: Honestly, I bet there's an amoeboid map like the pop/coke/soda map based on what's your relevant "The City", and that only very large cities appear on it. Like, someone who lives in Albany probably refers to NYC as "The City".
68: There is. That always struck me as the most useless question. I believe this is from the same older data set that Katz pulled his questions from; linking to it since Katz's site seems to be down so much. (And here's the complete set of maps.)
Not necessarily "very large cities", even. As someone has observed, San Francisco is basically the X of the Ythe Manhattan of the Bay Area, with only 800,000 people. It seems to be idiosyncratic whether that term is used or not.
Gah, link failure. city map Complete set of maps
"Other" is a healthier option than I would have thought, though.
Does "The City" refer to New York City or to Manhattan below the park?
That map shows that there is one person in northern Vermont who thinks of LA as "The City." Who is that guy?
Usually when I say "the City" here I mean the LA City government (e.g., the City really needs to put up a stoplight at this intersection).
I still can't actually take the quiz because too fucking slow.
In a similar vein to "The City" (in that they somewhat capture urban area/associated hinterlands) but with a lot more choices, are these nice sets of sports fan maps. Pretty sure they (or a subset) have also been linked here before, they have them for: MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL and NCAA football.
Yep, did not get anywhere near my accent. It's a five-way tie between Buffalo NY, Minneapolis MN, Rochester NY, Vancouver WA and Gresham OR. I guess they're all pretty close to the Canadian border but I'm from the Maritimes so I'd expect Maine to come out more.
But I am definitely not from Philly, AL, LA or MS - in spite of spending several years in AL.
74: New York City, if uttered outside the five boroughs (or in implicit contrast to a place outside the five boroughs). I think if I were in Brooklyn or Queens, I'd probably refer to Manhattan as "The City", at least in the form of "I'm coming home from work on Tuesday, but then I'm going back into The City to meet friends." But I'm not sure if I'm being idiosyncratic there, and I'm thinking back to the last time I lived in Brooklyn which was ages ago. Maybe the same for the Bronx, but I think it depends on what part.
Wouldn't be Manhattan below the park -- that's not a breakline. Manhattan below the north end of the park, or below 125th street, it wouldn't be impossible to draw a line there, but I don't think anyone does.
I admit I didn't put down what I refer to as The City because I'd be the only person in Maine calling SF The City.
80, 81: Now I feel even more sad for the plight of Detroit.
Cities in Flight--best SciFi ever!
Not necessarily "very large cities", even. As someone has observed, San Francisco is basically the X of the Ythe Manhattan of the Bay Area, with only 800,000 people. It seems to be idiosyncratic whether that term is used or not.
If it helps any in the provincialism stakes, to us Knifecrime Islanders, the entire Bay Area is San Francisco. I didn't realise Oakland was a separate city until I was at least 20, and I have cousins who lived in San Francisco for many years.
Also, for Londoners "The City" means the bit that's under the jurisdiction of the City of London Corporation, where all the bankers were (and many still are) until Canary Wharf took off. I'm pretty sure we've discussed it here before, but it's kind of crazy. Corporations really are people there, for voting purposes.
Here's a nice map of all the places in the US you don't want to live.
85: I think my district is in there--hard to tell since they are all so gerrymandered up. A bit surprise because it is a competitive district, parts of two blue dog districts merged with enough goobers. But even though almost all Dem, it's a strong guns, God, and hating on the blacks Obama area. Dems only competitive via unions and residual union loyalty.
80,81: Is there anywhere else in the country where people outstate would refer to "the Cities"? Even here in MPLS, you sometimes hear it if the context makes sense, e.g. "Cousin Lars is safely back home in Osakis now, but when he came down to the Cities he really cut loose."
The grass between the sidewalk and the street is the boulevard, of course, which can be confusing when you also have any number of streets with "Boulevard" in their names.
Frontage roads around here are often named "Frontage Road". An "access road" would be something you would find in some industrial or possibly recreational area. Something that would take you to a grain elevator or a boat landing or something.
I mentioned not super long ago that I've often wondered just how specific it is to prefix someone's surname with "that" in certain contexts. "Yah but if you want to hunt on the old Olson property, you're going to have to talk to that Jesperson down at the feed store, he owns it now"
Any other big cities where the railed city transit is just "the Light Rail"?
Also, from a long time ago, I believe no one else has ever heard the rural Indiana usage of "mango" to mean "banana pepper", so it might have just been that one guy my friend's brother served at Subway.
I have been chewing through the long-form quiz, one question every minute or so, because I'm dogged like that, all afternoon. And now I'm enthralled to find there are people who, rather than calling 'shotgun', call 'high hosey'? Is that some kind of firetruck metaphor?
88: My former Indiana farmgirl coworkers insist it was their word for bell pepper, but maybe any non-spicy one counts.
Like, "mow the lawn" and "cut the grass" are both perfectly normal. ("Mow the grass" or "cut the lawn" are crazy moon-speak, of course.)
I haven't taken the quiz or read the whole thread, but I always say "mow the grass".
90: Huh, maybe there was confusion at the time of the initial incident about which vegetable was so indicated.
In college I wrote poetry about New York, in which I referred to it exclusively as "the city". But I was young and this was back when that show was popular.
Even then, I don't think it's a sin. It is the most citylike city in the U.S., if you think of cities as being high-density accumulations of buildings (which I do).
I have been chewing through the long-form quiz, one question every minute or so, because I'm dogged like that,
Wow, that's even slower than when I took it. But my doggedness kept me up until 1:00 AM when I took it. Have I ever shown such doggedness in employment-related activities?
I think I say "mow the yard". Or rather, Jammies says it and I vaguely wonder how he knows that should be done.
When I took it, yesterday, there was a picture of a trolley/street car/whatever thing, and "What do you call this?"
That one seemed unfair, because surely you use whatever the local word is. DCers don't demand that all subway systems be called The Metro, etc. And yet New Yorkers call it The Metro when down there.
I have yet to take the long-form quiz, but the results of the short-form one impressed me. I thought for sure I'd be all over the map, because I know I've picked up dialectical habits since leaving the Northeast (and because I had to think really hard about whether I say, for ex, APricot vs. APEricot), but the very clear focal point on the map was almost exactly between the places where I spent ages 6-11 and 12-17.
I feel like I clicked "That use of 'anymore' is unacceptable." like 5 times.
96: But New Yorkers do think that all subways are "trains." Which is NOT TRUE. Trains are trains.
98: It's funny; it's not at all part of my idiolect but I hear it now and then and find it endearingly charming.
But they wouldn't have called that streetcar/trolley/electro-future-mobile a train...
98: I didn't get that in my short form, but I assume it means positive 'anymore', which has become part of my idiolect, but just because somewhere along the way I liked the way that it works. Most people around here don't use it. Also, 'The City' is San Francisco, which was not among the choices.
98: Moby* recently used it here in a non-standard way** and I had just previously taken the quiz and it reminded me of it. I think they are all subtle variations of wrongness.
*Not that I can talk; I'm dreadful about such things.
**Anymore I have to spend a couple of days in the sun before you can tell.
I finally finished the darn thing, and NYC came in second. It thinks I'm from Yonkers. I mean, I could walk to Yonkers from my apartment in under an hour, so it's not that far off, but I'm still crushed.
101: I wasn't sure how to respond when the answer was, "Sure, I'd say that. To amuse myself." Like, "Where you at?" I say that all the time!
102: I said unacceptable almost every time, but there was one where I had to stare at it for a while until I noticed that there was a 'not sure' option.
103: New York, Yonkers, Elizabeth, and Newark were all 60/59% for me.
104: I pretended I don't do that kind of thing. I sort of love, are they called dual modals? "Might could"? But they're not really in my dialect, so I didn't claim them.
105: Yes! The one about cute clothes or something?
106: I'm 59/58% on all of them.
||
Should I go out and see a big inflatable yellow duck come up the river, or sit here like the pretend-drudge that I am?
Would either of these be better than sex?
|>
I liked the question about how you pronounce "aunt." I had never before noticed that I pronounce it differently depending on whether I'm referring to the category of person, or a specific relative.
My mother pronounces the word "dad" differently depending on whether she means her own father or not. With her own father it is said with a straight-up Irish vowel. So weird.
There, I grew up saying 'ant' for both, but for some reason trained myself into 'awnt' for the category as an adult. 'Awnt' sounds hopelessly pretentious in front of a name, though, so I retained 'Ant' before names.
The fucking thing won't fucking come. And I'm getting tired.
I guess "Mr. Clinton?" would be an inappropriate joke.
115.--Is this the sex thread too?
Could be. What are you wearing?
Does anyone here call 'high hoser'? And if so, where are you from?
119: So this is the sex thread now. (Actually what was that even a choice for?)
Damn thing isn't loading but:
I only realized that there are people who have three or only one pronunciation for merry/marry/Mary when I read about it in my late twenties.
When I took it, yesterday, there was a picture of a trolley/street car/whatever thing, and "What do you call this?"
A tram. Growing up a trolley was a bus which ran off power from overhead lines.
As a child fizzy stuff was 'soft drink' but I've been slowly absorbed by the soda borg.
Oh and 119 to 115? Apparently not.
119: Also please, pineapple wedding? Monkey whateverthefuck?
Also annoyed at its IPA transcriptions of the different pronunciations of "pecan". All the (correct) versions where the first vowel is short and unstressed are expressed as ɪ, when for me and mine it's clearly ə.
It nailed my Philly-Jersey ass right good. (I don't say "wooder" for water. Although my sister sometimes lets it slip.)
I think it does quite well on the Northeast micro-idiolect/dialects; I think a lot of the equivalents of "devil's strip" for me are in the set.
because no one refers to LA as "The City"
People who live in the San Fernando Valley, which is mostly within the city of Los Angeles, often refer to going towards Hollywood or downtown as "The City."
Took the quiz and to my surprise it pegged me as Boston with Plymouth and Lowell MA and then NYC. Least similar: Detroit, Flint, Milwaukee and Toledo. Lots of dark blue in th northern midwest, lots of red in Eastern MA, Maine and a tiny dot in NYC. Closest outside the New England or NYC is South Florida. I would have thought that my early childhood in Boston would have long since been washed away, but I guess not, though I only got 55.4 for it.
often refer to going towards Hollywood or downtown as "The City."
Are you The City? No, I'm going north right now.
high hosey
Yeah, when I was a kid we did in Boston. But it wasn't just for the front seat. It was used as (extended to?) a claim on something "High hosey the $item."
As I said elsewhere, I got the aunt one. It was tough reading it carefully. BTW, ahnt for all cases.
The streetcar question wasn't a cheat (City was). It wasn't asking what you call the local transit system. It was asking what you call this thing. Streetcar, trolley, tram, light rail, etc. I wanted to answer PCC, but that option wasn't available. (He should have used a more modern looking vehicle.)
Oh, I am pissed that I got matched with Boston but only at around 47%. What?!
40: They were called "feeder roads" where I lived in TX, though. I haven't taken the quiz---was "feeder roads" one of the choices?
133: Not sure if they were. Did you live in or near Houston? I recall (and also recall seeing that "feeder roads" was a local thing) Wikipedia concurs: Over 80% of Houston freeways have service roads, which locals typically call feeders. They are one of the most characteristic features of the Houston urban landscape--many, many businesses are located right on the feeders, some of which are three lanes on each side of the freeway.
Sort of near, yes. Although I think terms other than "feeder" were used in other parts of the state.
135: Yes, Wikipedia has a rundown.
Nicknames for frontage roads vary within the state of Texas. In Houston and East Texas they are called feeders. Dallas and Fort Worth area residents call their frontage roads "service roads", and "access roads" is the predominant term used in San Antonio. All signs reference "Frontage Road" despite local regional vernacular.
So, I did the quiz. Apparently Providence, RI, or New York. But the match is only 35%. I guess it's picking up the similarities between British English and the NE US.
Does K Street in NW DC count? It has a service road in from 12th St to near 21st.
Working half-a-block from a baseball stadium, upon leaving the office I somewhat regularly get to experience the confusion of infrequent visitors navigating unfamiliar streets, parking lots and alleyways. But having chosen poorly tonight with regard to my leaving time, I can authoritatively report that the people who would drive into town to see a giant inflatable duck be pulled behind a towboat are dangerous morons.
What is your word for a street upon which you can only drive in one direction?
a) A one-way street.
b) I have no word for that.
c) I have never heard of that concept.
139: Do you happen to know whether it's the same duck we'd have had a month or less ago, just tugged upriver? Or is the giant inflatable duck thing a thing all over? (I don't even know that there is a giant duck for our event, but if not why do they put giant inflatable ducks on buildings all over the city to advertise? I've never cared enough to find out.)
d) A feeder/service/frontage road. (Offer not valid in rural areas.)
OK, I did the long, drawn-out version, expecting to be positioned exactly where I grew up. Not even close. I get a five-way (almost) tie among Rochester, Buffalo, Albuquerque, San Francisco, and Oakland. The matches are 56+/-1. I've never even lived near any of these cities (guess parents matter, since the final two make sense). Also, apparently the boyfriend maps as either from the middle of MI or New Orleans (short version). Those are two areas I wouldn't expect a lot of idiolect/dialect overlap, to be honest. Is there some strange migration pattern I don't know about?
Things suggested by Google Images when one types "giant inflatable":
ball
duck
(skipping boring ones)
lounger
floating island
rat
141: No, it seems to be a different giant inflatable ducky. I think it is now a "thing." (And yeah, you had one, but it doesn't look like it actually floated on the river. Losers.)
Losers.
And actually, Pirates 4 Reds 1 in the 9th in the semi-critical baseball game (at this point almost certainly only playing for home field in the one-game playoff given that the Cards are up by 6 in their game).
145: You can't quite see my house in any of those photos but yeah, I knew about that much and was willing to believe there might have been a floating duck too. You win!
So play-in game next Tuesday literally right in the middle of work event I've been planning (but we already have hotel rooms and restaurants because diligence).
40: Access roads a Texas thing? That's so unheebie, heebie. I associate them with car-reliant, relatively new development, which to be sure describes most of Texas.
any Canadians tried it? short quiz thinks I'm from Minnesota/Wisconsin,
I haven't tried it, because I can't get the page to load. I assume I would come closest to Minnesota/Wisconsin, but I wonder if I have some New Jersey now.
As I said at The Other Place, this test seems to be designed to distinguish Northeastern and Midwestern dialects very carefully, which is why it includes so many terms that seem totally bizarre to anyone not from the one city that idiosyncratically uses them. It's very successful at that. Since the West is much more homogeneous linguistically, the test doesn't work nearly as well for Westerners, who all seem to get somewhere in the Bay Area as their top probability.
I've only even visited two of my Most Similar cities, Madison and Milwaukee, WI, and those only since adulthood or in the latter case before I was old enough to talk. I'm a little surprised I speak more as if I were from my mom's region than my dad's, though I knew I'd be more like theirs than like where I grew up.
It located me nearish to where I think my grandmother grew up. Way off. Could try the longer one but the server is so damn slow.
Huh, I noticed the test was a bit slow when I took it last night, but not nearly as bad as other people have been saying. I guess the time zone thing worked out to my benefit for once.
Okay, I just took the 25-question quiz, and I couldn't have been more wrong (in expecting a similarity to Minnesota/Wisconsin).
Most of my map is green (mid-range similarity for the Midwest, the West, the PNW) to dark blue (least similar for the South), with orange and red (most similar) for New York state and it looks like northern New Jersey. Dark red for NYC and also for a patch in upstate NY that might be east of the Adirondacks. Most similar cities: Newark NJ; Elizabeth NJ; Yonkers NY; New York NY; and Buffalo NY. I also have an area of orange in southern Florida (though most of the south is blue): what's that about? (the impact of the snowbirds?).
I also have an area of orange in southern Florida (though most of the south is blue): what's that about? (the impact of the snowbirds?).
Yeah, South Florida tends to pattern linguistically with the Northeast due to migration patterns.
I've tried it four times today, and each time even the "short" quiz has been way too slow.
What is "the City"?
huh? (sorry I haven't read the thread and am just now taking the test)
When you do read the thread you'll see that many other people had the same reaction.
Personally I put "other" because that's not a term I ever use in the sense they mean.
Yeah, I put "other" as well.
The results are surprisingly right: heavy dose of Eastern Mass, shading into New Hampshire and Maine, and a what's really surprising, a heavy spot of similarity right around where I lived in PA when I was aged 7-10.
My dad was in the military, and we moved every three years, and it dawned on me later that I was a really good mimic. My speech and accent changed in short order when we moved.
With her own father it is said with a straight-up Irish vowel. So weird.
My father was "Dad," standard Canadian/North American pronunciation (but we had a bunch of nicknames for him, including Johnny, Johnno, Sir John A...yes, his first name was John). But his father/my paternal grandfather was always "Da" (Irish vowel) to me. A bit odd, but that's how we rolled.
Is it U-tah or U-taw? I type this question within view of the Great Salt Lake. I always said U-taw but I also imagine this is the part of the country where those are not separate phonemes.
I also imagine this is the part of the country where those are not separate phonemes.
That is indeed the case.
That use of "anymore"--I clicked that it's incorrect despite the fact that I heard it all the time growing up. I never used it and it sounded country to me. All of this, for me, touches on that question of "why don't I have the accent/dialect I grew up around?" I guess the answer is: even then, I was a little snob.
All of this, for me, touches on that question of "why don't I have the accent/dialect I grew up around?" I guess the answer is: even then, I was a little snob.
Indeed, class is an important dimension to linguistic variation that this test doesn't consider at all. (Race is another one.) There's something very American about focusing exclusively on geography in defining dialects. Which is not to say that American sociolinguistics is all like this; Bill Labov at Penn has done lots of work on these other factors, and he's an enormously influential figure in the field.
163: Keep that lake at a distance. It looks good but smells like hell. Go up Big Cottonwood to Silver Lake for a nice lake plus a possible moose sighting.
I guess the answer is: even then, I was a little snob.
Yep. To the question of what to call a group of two or more, I answered "you," even though the casual slang/dialect where I grew up was "youse." But my mother always corrected "youse" to "you," so I guess she was a snob too?
Albuquerque, but only 45.2. Fort Collins 45. Least similar, at 28.7, the city of my birth (and my father's upbringing).
155: (in expecting a similarity to Minnesota/Wisconsin).
NW Wisconsin/NE Minnesota have a very distinct dialect that may extend to the Thunder Bay region but I would not expect to otherwise be Canadian. This is probably a good thread to again link Rick Aschmann's idiosyncratic/chock-full-of-info map of North American dialects. More focused on pronunciation than word choice, but still relevant. What made me think of it was that he has some side bars on "special topics", one of which he calls "The U.S. - Canada Border and the "Badge of Identity".
And one person here would probably be interested in ehst he calls "The Unique Position of Nebraska"--aka "the lingusitic center of North America." Basically where "cot"≠="caught" (E/W) and "pin"≠="pen" (N/S) meet.
I googled around to try and find something similar for the UK, but nothing seems to exist. I guess it'd be a gigantic labour, given how many UK dialects and accents there are, and how microscopically small the geographical boundaries between those can be.
I did find some sites with samples of accents and dialects, and the two from where I'm from are separated by nearly 100 years:
Modern:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBC-Voices/021M-C1190X0043XX-3201V0
early 20thc:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Berliner-Lautarchiv-British-and-Commonwealth-recordings/021M-C1315X0001XX-0651V0
The modern one is fairly close to how I'd expect fairly well-spoken people [the people speaking are teachers] from my area speaking standard English to sound. It's a long sample in which they are discussing different dialect words they'd use, and these are all people from within a radius of a couple of miles.
46: peelie wallie is Scots for feeling/looking pale or wan or out of sorts. I haven't ever seen a firefly so I don't know whether this is relevant. (Glasgow Scots anyway: unless it's just something my gran's people said -- she was from Rutherglen.)
There's this: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/regional-voices/lexical-variation/
Which supplies a map for locales of variation re "happen she were wearing a mask" -- but I think not for any other phrase? (It's a start.)
http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/changlang/across/languagetimeline.html
"Words hated by Johnson, and omited from his dictionary, include bang, budge, fuss, gambler, shabby, and touchy."
(s/b "omitted" there, British so-called Library)
re: 172
Yeah, peelie wallie would be something people would say where I'm from, too.
"That map shows that there is one person in northern Vermont who thinks of LA as "The City." Who is that guy?"
That guy is an Angeleno passing the time in a motel in northern Vermont where he's been sent for a meeting/inspection visit/whatever.
The second link in 171 is completely incomprehensible to me, but it sounds as if it could easily have evolved into the modern one.
re: 178
I think people speaking more casually, particular older or more working class people, or people from more rural parts of the county, would still speak a bit closer to the older clip, but not quite in that way. It does sound a bit archaic. The people in the first clip are speaking standard English, but discussing dialect, rather than speaking _in_ dialect, iyswim.
One Shropshire idiom that's always fascinated me -- bcz wtf, basically -- is that older people (maybe hardly any left now), if they said "I doubt it's going to rain today", would mean "I think it's pretty likely it will rain today" (rather than "I think it's pretty likely it won't rain today"): element of uncertainty arcing towards the positive, in other words. Except idly rereading Fowler after he came up on a thread recently, I discovered that the ageing Shropshire usage was once the more common usage (and found in Shakespeare etc).
So maybe it's found in other non-metropolitan places in the UK, and around the US also?
Obviously words shift their meanings: "silly" once meant pure and innocent blah blah, but that kind of gradient or continuum of shift you can imagine. "Doubt" seems just to have switched its polarity -- which is much harder to imagine.
180. But it did in fact switch its polarity. I think at the end of the 18th century in most dialects, but I'm not quite sure of the date. Historians? AWB?
Yes, I think Fowler said it was changing in the early 19th century. And Shropshire was in many ways socially a fossil of the early 18th century when I was growing up there (said not entirely jokingly).
What I find hard to imagine isn't that this could possibly happen -- because it did! But what it was like while it was happening? It doesn't seem to work like, say, "imperialism", which Fowler notes was formerly a term of celebration and has now (in the 1930s) become sharply critical and more. That's a clash between different forces in politics, with one gradually edging out the other. What caused the turnaround for doubt?
75/177, University of Vermont is in the northern part of the state. The Angeleno is probably a college kid who traded beach bum for ski bum.
I did it again, and this time in put me in the Bay Area: Fairfield/Sacto/SantaRosa/Concord. But, once again, lowest scores in western CT/MA.
Along the lines of "anymore", some of the country people in Michigan would use "yet" in a way that sounded very strange to my ear. I would have rephrased the sentence with "still", but most sentences with "still" don't sound sufficiently strange when you sub in "yet".
I may have given different answers on the streetcar question. Still undecided on the roly poly/pill bug question.
On doubt: I was reading some Anthony Price books recently and he has some characters using "misdoubt". Frankly that was confusing, especially when the uses were often preceded by a negative, e.g. "I don't misdoubt".
I hadn't realized that rolypolies (many of which I rolled around and/or crushed in my youth) were a crustacean.
Nor had I. I told the test that I had no term for that, but I later recalled that we (in my family) used to call them pill bugs. I see them very infrequently now, and haven't had occasion to call them anything. That test very much reminds me of what things were called here, and there, and over there. I used to say "grinder", for example, but no longer. Similarly, I said "frappe" at one time.
188: I learned that when a bunch of us goofing off recorded a bug rap, with each of us rapping the part of a different insect (I took roly poly/potato bug). Someone subsequently showed it to an entomologist, who commented something like "Very entertaining, but technically neither a roly poly nor a slug is an insect."
Well, no, obviously a slug is a worm. Ew. Related to snails, which apparently some people eat. Ew.
Slugs are not worms. Slugs are molluscs.
I admit I was being mean to worms and slugs equally, which is totes unfair.
Related to snails, which apparently some people eat. Ew.
Like me. When last I ate at the fancy southern food restaurant near here, I had snails on grits. I took the leftovers home and mixed them in to scrambled eggs the next morning, and damn. Eggs and snails, yum.
I have cheese on grits once. I've also had cheese on eggs. But I've never taken the leftover cheese from grits and put it on eggs.
I finally got to take it, and it would appear I'm from either Oregon or Minneapolis. (Nearly equal probabilities.) That is .... not correct. I mean, Oregon is only one state to the north, and my mother is from Ohio, but still.
Liveblogging my dialect quiz! I took it again. Top 4 were cities in Utah (I speak like a Mormon?), but the fifth was actually a city I have lived in! I'll take it as success.
Related to snails, which apparently some people eat. Ew.
Yeah. A mollusc, like oysters and clams and calamari. Yay.
roly poly
Another new one for me. As far as I know they're just called woodlice over here.
It looks on Wikipedia like of the five common types of woodlouse in the UK, only one is the kind we have that rolls up, and it's more geographically restricted than the others (south, east, and coasts).
Maybe. I'm only familiar with the rolling up kind, having grown up in the south east. Having said that, is it just me or are woodlice like fairies, in that only children can see them? I can't remember the last time I encountered a woodlouse, but they form a substantial part of my early childhood memories.
All you need is a little rotting wood, GY: don't claim to b be a grown-up yet, but I'm older than you and I saw a ton of them in Shropshire only last week. And I've seen them on my third floorHackney windowsill too, though not so recently.
(The Dutch call them Pissebed, bcz of the ammonia smell.)
All you need is a little rotting wood
And love.
For pubic lice, you don't need the rotting wood.
Right, in that case it's more of a result than a cause.
Watering the herbs in my windowboxes, I just rousted out dozens of woodlice, large and tiny -- they are gradually hiding and dispersing once more.