“Identity is what underlies most people’s retention of at least some of their local features,” said Clive Upton, professor emeritus of English language at the University of Leeds, “because ultimately what we say is who we are. These dialect markers are so ingrained into people’s sense of self that they tend to persist well after they move away from home. Education, gender, age, ethnicity and other social variables influence speech patterns, too. The way that people speak - the particular words they use and how they sound - is deeply tied to their sense of identity. The rubric, however, gives a more nuanced account: My inititial view was that you acquire your accent/pronunciation from the other children you go to school with, but I don’t know whether that applies quite so definitively to vocabulary. ![]() I had a linguistics professor in college, whom when he first spoke to me identified that I grew up in X county in X state, most likely in the south west part of that county.Of course, it also helps if you read what it says, which is The map shows places where answers most closely match your own, based on more than…respondents who said they were from Ireland or Britain. That is, he identified me down to a 10 mile by 10 mile square radius. This map is basically an 'are you from New Jersey' quiz because of exactly one question: Yes of course its Mischief Night, thats what I grew up calling it in Monmouth County. Turns out the science of dialects is pretty hardcore. ![]() Indiana is an amazing place for American dialects. In the north central to north west part of the state, you have the “normal” dialect that purportedly newsanchors study to have an “accent free accent.” (Kalamazoo MI and surround areas also claim this. It’s a hot button issue.) In the southern part of the state you have so many regionally defined dialects that many counties have 4 or 5 linguistically distinct dialects. The caveat, of course, is what you and I consider “distinct” is different than what a linquist considers distinct. In my particular case, I pronounce the word “pin” (or any other bi labial or labial dental explications proceeded by an “e” or “i” sound) as the word “pen.” Similarly “din” is pronounced “den.” This was much different than my brethren 5 miles north, who pronounced those words “correctly” but pronounced the long “o” in “roof” as something more akin to “ruff.A cute interactive feature: " 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"), NYT. Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. ![]() The "specific cities" feature is a bit random - mine are "Baltimore" and "Saint Louis", both attributed to the fact that (like a large minority of other Americans) I lack the caught/cot merger, and "Newark/Paterson", attributed to the term "mischief night" for the night before Halloween: Here's my map, or at least one version of it: The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you.įor more about the background, see Ben Zimmer's post " About those dialect maps making the rounds". "Mischief night" is one of those phrases that I've heard around, maybe when I lived in northern New Jersey for a while, though we had no such concept when I was growing up (since mischief took place on Halloween itself). The survey has a few other features like those, which tag you with particular not-necessarily-relevant cities. I haven't been able to find a description of the algorithm used to combine information from the various maps. But there seems to be a problem, either in the interpretation of the answers or in the method of combining them, as indicated by the fact that my final map has got a lot of orange and red below the Mason-Dixon line, despite the information that I'm not a y'all speaker. The map for the y'all choice seems plausible:īut something seems to be wrong in the interpretation of not making this choice, or the method for combining choices into a final geographical pattern, or both.
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