Talk geography
Have a fun quiz in the New York Times. It offers to say where you’re from based on your answers to 25 dialect questions.
It’s a little tricky if like me you have a habit of picking up bits of dialect from all over – but it’s not too tricky if you’re aware that you do that and can correct for it. I carefully gave the answers that were what I grew up with, not necessarily what I say now – and at the end there I was on the map. Good fun.
Interesting. Mostly they seem pretty certain I don’t come from most parts of the US – which is right by about 15,000km. However, one question gave very strong localisation to NY/NJ/Yonkers (Pronouncing Mary, Merry and Marry differently). That surprised me because we normally think of the NY accent as quite strong and harsh and in my country I’m regarded as having a soft slightly posh accent (English teachers for parents).
Pegged me exactly. Fun to read the different regional terms, especially the various names of those things for which I lack any word (e.g., the strip of grass between the sidewalk and road).
That’s a giveaway, right there. :)
SC,
‘Road verge’.
I think I confused it. I got an error.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html?r=8040j0k80000106010000040080201050810214020020j0400
Oh it worked for me now. Pretty close. I grew up in central ohio. I tried to pick how I said things as a kid, like “crown” and “carml”, though I’ve “corrected” myself when I was older.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_verge"So interesting. I think part of the reason New England lacks a word for it (they list a couple, but I’ve never heard them) is that there’s not room for any real plot between sidewalk and street like what’s shown in the Wikipedia pic. The space tends to be a foot wide at most, of no use when snow is plowed. (I want to cry thinking of the end of summer, but I’m happy for you/you all/y’all/youse.)
So interesting. I think part of the reason New England lacks a word for it (they list a couple, but I’ve never heard them) is that there’s not room for any real plot between sidewalk and street like what’s shown in the Wikipedia pic. The space tends to be a foot wide at most, of no use when snow is plowed. (I want to cry thinking of the end of summer, but I’m happy for you/you all/y’all/youse.)
I’m Spanish and my best match is Honolulu :D
SC @ 3. Yup, I live somewhere on that arc +/- 500km, but then again I’ve mentioned the specific country I live in, so that narrows it down some to about 50% of the land area of my country. Come knock on my door and I’ll buy you a coffee! :-)
It pegged me dead to rights in the deep south. Amusingly, my PNW native friends seem to believe I have no accent whatsoever. You’d think use of jargon/dialect would be a giveaway.
I’m always bemused by the Mary/Merry/Marry and Cot/Caught examples. Like, how many vowels do we need? I remember as a kid being thoroughly befuddled by dictionary pronunciation guides. Bother = ˈbŏthər but father = ˈfä-thər. WTF is the difference?
I figured it out much later when I had a boss from Chicago. Her distinction was sharp.
Oh, I was teasing those of us in the US for metric failures. Sadly, I and the vast majority of USians would’ve put it in miles.
I would love to (…well, not the coffee, which I hate, but tea would be lovely :)).
Apparently I’m from Seattle, Spokane, or Minneapolis…
It’s not the first time I’ve hear the east/central Canada dialect is pretty close to those.
Tea, sure you’re on! I was chatting to an online friend who lives in Chicago the other day (I’m going there soon). He gave the distance from his apartment to my hotel in km, then said that was the first time he’d ever done that.
I kinda laughed, but then my country adopted decimal currency and the metric system in the late 1960’s, so I was taught a mix of imperial and metric weights and measures and still remember seeing lots of pre-decimal coins around. I still have trouble instantly relating to heights in centimetres.
Sheesh, when even stuff like that (I was less than 5 at the time for crying out loud) affects your thinking at that level, is it hardly surprising that people struggle overcoming ingrained ways of thinking about gender, peoples rights, world peace….
This shit (all of it) should be simple, but it’s actually hard and people are just so focused on getting by…
Are you near Madrid? There’s a demonstration:
http://rojavanoestasola.noblogs.org/post/2015/09/07/madrid-concentracion-en-solidaridad-con-kobane-y-contra-la-represion-del-estado-turco-martes-15-09-a-las-19h/
OK, as soon as I’m employed! :)
You’ll have a ball. I can get recommendations if needed.
The sad thing is that we – my generation – learned it in school; unfortunately, we learned both – had we just learned metric, we’d be in better shape. I know there are articles and books about why this is, but the transition never happened. There are many quaint aspects of my local culture that I respect, but this antiquated nonsense has to go.
* By the way, one of the funniest things about Castle (a California production) is how they give distances in miles, which no one in New York does – everything is in blocks. Also, people don’t talk about the “Hudson River” – it’s the East River or West River.
I always imagined you from Ski Country. I assume it has its own dialect.
Hrm. It might. Hard to tell when you’re from there…
New question for quiz: do you consider the word ‘melt’ and the phrase ‘El Niño’ to be unsuitable for polite company?
(They are warning us it may be a cruel joke of a season coming. Strong El Niño years don’t tend to be good for skiers in the East. Still. Always hopeful.)
Grand Rapids, Rochester, and Buffalo.
But actually, I’m Californian. I just don’t fit in.
For me it’s Providence, New York and Yonkers based on ‘bubblers’ and ‘sneakers’.
Tho’ I’m actually from the deep, deep South – Australia.
Born in Northern California and moved to the New York City suburbs at the age of five. In my early 20s I moved to Los Angeles and have lived here over 40 years. My three most similar cities are Stockton and Santa Rosa CA, and Reno NV.
What I call rubber-soled shoes depends on what sport they’re designed for. There are tennis shoes, running shoes, gym shoes etc. That has to nothing to do with regional terms and everything to do with my athletic history.
My result is Wichita, Kansas, which is quite accurate up to 8500 km.
But seriously, for many of my answers I received a nice view of a blue map as a reward :)
I’ve taken that quiz before, and it usually pegs me pretty accurately with New York City and vicinity.
Re “West River”: I grew up in NYC (Lower East Side of Manhattan, near the East River), I have family there, and I’ve never heard anybody refer to it as the West River. It is the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan (and further north), the East River on the east side of Manhattan. I did have a Boston- based interstate bus driver “explain” once that it “used to be” the East River but was “changed” to the Hudson. It is most definitely considered two rivers, one on each side, rather than a single river with Manhattan in the middle; perhaps that was the error made in the film.
San Francisco, Los Angeles or Providence. In other words…
“?????”
Not really surprising, since I spent most of my life in the South East corner of England, and the rest in Ireland and Australia.
I’ve spent a mere three days in the USA.
It got me pretty close, mid-North Carolina as opposed to the bit of upstate SC where I actually live. But what I see on the map is that it seems darkest EXACTLY where I do live in SC. I had no idea I fit in so well.
Yes, you’re right about “West River” (don’t know what I was thinking – felt wrong when I was typing it). But I don’t recall anyone saying “Hudson River” in the city, either. West side, the river. But maybe it was just my circles, or I could be wrong (I used the greenway for a long time and never knew it was the “Hudson River Greenway,” so maybe I just wasn’t paying attention :)).
Ha! It got me exactly right….Detroit.
I was initially surprised to share dialect with Floridians but then I remembered where Canadians go to retire and it made sense that everyone in Florida calls it “pop” not “soda” and pronounces “caught” correctly.
Also, the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road is the boulevard.
Amusing dialect story from my neck of the woods: NW Ontario is the only place in the English-speaking world that uses the word “shag” to mean a combo bridal shower/stag (although it has morphed to include any fundraising party with alcohol, prizes and music). Considering shag is a slang for sex in the rest of the English-speaking world, you can imagine the shocked looks you can get from newcomers when you offer them a “$2 shag ticket for your sister, who is getting married and looking to raise some cash.”
I was all over the US word to word, but in the end, they pegged me pretty closely. I’m often unsure how things are used in the place where I “came” from (probably because we landed there when I was 10 and had already learned all these things). A couple of them were problematic like frontage/access/service road because I use those interchangeably, and about equally, and that wasn’t a choice.
“Nature strip” is what we call it in Orstrayliar.
SamBarge,
And sometimes, a shag might be held at someone’s camp, but never at a cottage!
Another unretired Canadian somehow located right around Miami/Fort Lauderdale. Go figure!
Screechy Monkey – Cottages are for rich, Toronto folk.
I’m with Learie: in Canberra it’s not the road verge, it’s the “nature strip”. I’d only call it a verge if it’s a country road and there’s no actual footpath.
Interestingly, I get New York and Baton Rouge as my two closest cities.
It pegged me to Springfield, MA, Providence, and Philadelphia. Two of which I’ve lived in, and one of which my friend’s father lived in, which is probably where I picked up “mischief night.”
But I was disappointed, though, perhaps without good reason. I know that calling sub sandwiches “grinders” pegs me as a new Englander, just as “yinz” would have marked me as a Pittsburgher. Several of there questions were obscure bits of vocabulary that have very narrow usage.
I’d have been more impressed if it used subtler aspects of phonology. Like pronouncing R as V, like they do in Cranston RI and nowhere else I know of. R-dropping, flattened vowels, intervocalic T as a flap or a glottal stop, inability to distinguish pin from pen when spoken aloud, doubling syllables in words like writing payun…
They could have done a good job without resorting to vocabulary. Feels like a cheat.
I meant to comment on this part and forgot. Yes, me too, 100%. I’ve trained myself out of a number of weird words and pronunciations. I grew up saying bow-kay instead of boo-kay (for bouquet) and cue-pawn instead of coo-pawn (for coupon), for example. And I now say “soda” instead of “pop,” because the latter is kind of silly.
One kind of funny example is “middle school.” When I went to college out of state, I found that “middle school” sometimes confused people who had gone to “junior high,” so I trained myself to say “junior high” instead. Of course I didn’t know that “junior high” was on its way out. Pretty much everyone in America goes to “middle school” now. That one still trips me up. I guess I need to actively un-train myself.