My Dialect

I took the quiz over at the New York Times and I’ve got to admit that its pegging of my dialect isn’t far from the mark. My bottom line results are illustrated on the map above.

I think I can see the complicating factors. I don’t have a “St. Louis A”. I have a number of Southernisms in my speech. For example, for me the plural of you is “y’all”. I have some Ozarkisms in my speech. And I have some Britishisms in my speech.

When my wife took the test it pegged her correctly as a Westerner but her most likely cities were Boise, Reno, and Salt Lake City, odd for a woman who spent her first twenty-two years in California—both Los Angeles and San Francisco, which itself might point to the result.

20 comments… add one
  • steve Link

    I think they must weight some questions a bit. It looked like my answers were placing me all over the country, but the sandwich question (hoagie) and Halloween (mischief night) were so specific to tiny areas it got my are down for where I live now pretty well. Interestingly, it placed me as similar for almost every area I lived, even if for just a short while.

    Steve

  • I think there’s an age issue that needs to be considered as well. Old folks (like me) have slightly different dialects from those of the younger generation.

  • ... Link

    Well, that was a lousy predictor for me. I’m either from Jackson Mississippi or upstate Louisianan, or I’m from the area of Lubbock and Amarillo in Texas. I’ve never been close to any of those places. The ones that placed me in Florida may as well have put me in half the country. And a few other specific questions placed me solidly in Michigan or the mountain states. I HAVE been to Michigan, for all of three days on a business trip (and let me tell you, Ann Arbor is a GREAT place to visit in late January!), and I have flown over some of the mountain chains that get to the states I’m allegedly from out west, but this thing really blew it with me.

    I’m not willing to dig deeper, but I wonder how much of this does averages of a region, and for WHEN. Some of my responses obviously put me in the South, but most of peninsular Florida is no longer the South, even if most of it was when I was growing up, or at least much more so than today when it is basically a mix of the Caribbean and Mexico, with a lot of New York City thrown in, and a small number of rednecks left behind from the great North Carolina Exodus.

  • ... Link

    And by the way, I sound nothing at all like a Texan or a Cajun.

  • ... Link

    The survey placed my wife in the Colorado Springs Denver corridor. I believe she once had to switch flights in Phoenix Arizona, which would be closest she’s ever been to being in Colorado.

  • PD Shaw Link

    Me:

    Overland Park (KS); Aurora (IL); Fort Wayne (IN)

    I’ve lived in different parts of Central Illinois most of my life, which is at about the center of the triangle formed by these three cities. Central Midland dialect with a Northern influence. My map shows higher comparables with Chicago than Dave’s.

  • PD Shaw Link

    Ellipses, I bet Florida has a tough dialect to map. Here is a dialect map which does appear to show some continuity btw/ Northern Florida and Northern Louisiana and Eastern Texas. (They are both placed in the Southern periphery) But Central Florida is actually placed in the Midlands (the region from Pennsylvania to Nebraska).

    http://aschmann.net/AmEng/#LargeMap4Right

  • CStanley Link

    Mine was quite close to two of the locations where I grew up.

    I found it interesting trying to answer some of the questions. I chose “boulevard” for instance, but could have picked “neutral ground” because that’s what I call the strip of grass in the middle of streets in New Orleans. When I am there, or speaking to someone from there, I use that term because that is what they are called there. Similarly, I picked up some terms like Hoagie when living in New England but now it’s a sub. As I’ve moved around, some of the regional words stuck and some didn’t, but I have no idea why (it doesn’t seem to correlate with length of time spent in each place.)

    I didn’t check but I suspect “crown” for pronunciation of “crayon” must be a Philadelphia thing. I once planned a childrens’ program with a friend from Philly and while we were discussing supplies she kept saying that she was going to order the crowns. I assumed she was getting paper crowns for the kids to color so each time she mentioned it I’d say, “yes, OK, and crayons.”

  • PD Shaw Link

    @CStanley, I supressed some of the words I picked up in New Orleans like Neutral Ground. That’s the term that first comes to my mind, either because its the first time I recall that strip being named or because of evocative stories I heard associated it. Since I no longer live there, I don’t use it.

  • CStanley Link

    Same here, PD, except I find it funny when I think of it, that when I am in New Orleans I automatically switch back.

    Re: FL dialect- when I lived there I never figured out, is the native pronounciation “Flah-ri-duh” or “Floor-i-duh”? And “Ahr-rinj” or “”Oar-rinj”? This is the big dialect controvery in my home, with me in the first camp and hubs in the second (he likes to do an exaggerated imitation of my enunciation.) I suspect my version is a northeastern artifact but there are so many transplants there that it’s hard to determine what the nativists would call their home state.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I think I also suppress using the word “wash” for a different reason. My natural tendency is to pronounce it “warsh” when its a noun. These days I say “do the laundry,” probably to avoid my wife making fun of me. I wonder if a man’s natural dialect can only be discovered three sheets to the wind, or out of sight of a woman he wants to impress.

  • CStanley Link

    Well if you want to fully express your dialectical hodgepodge you could go make groceries to get the laundry detergent before you do the warsh.

    I once argued the point that “making groceries” was a really odd construct since one doesn’t actually make them, but the other person countered by saying that the items become groceries when you purchase them, therefore you have made groceries. 🙂

  • ... Link

    Re: FL dialect- when I lived there I never figured out, is the native pronounciation “Flah-ri-duh” or “Floor-i-duh”? And “Ahr-rinj” or “”Oar-rinj”?

    The second is closer to correct in both cases. The first pronunciation is characteristic of New Yorkers who have moved here and taken over, especially on the SE coast. There are some pols from that area that drive me crazy, as they pronounce the state name as “FFFFFFFFLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH-ree-duh”, taking about six seconds to enunciate the word, and then speak about about 3000 words a second for everything else. (No, I am NOT talking about Spanish speakers, but rather native English speakers that moved here when they were about 40.) People shouldn’t be elected to office for areas whose names they can’t pronounce correctly.

    But there aren’t many real Floridians left. People like me have parents from elsewhere. My father-in-law was a true native though. But as a young man he had actually worked to suppress his accent. But every now and then he’d tell me how things got mispronounced. For example, his home-town was Bunnell. I had always heard it pronounced “bun-NELL”. The correct pronunciation was a more clipped “BUN-ll”. Southern but clipped, seemed to be the rule, but I can’t say for certain as we didn’t talk about it that much.

  • ... Link

    I actually got some pleasure out of the poll, just to be clear. My wife contends that I am not Southern, and never lived in the South. She contends that I grew up in Suburbia instead. There is some justification for this, as she moved to Orlando in 1990, and left at the end of 1994, only to return in 2000. She still laughs at me for talking about how all the damned sprawl used to be orange groves. But she just doesn’t get how much the area changed just from the time of my birth in 1968 to the time when she moved here.

    So, seeing that I was showing up as though I were from Jackson MS was quite pleasant, because I got to show her that and say, “SEE!?” Sweet (though inconsequential) vindication!

  • CStanley Link

    That’s pretty much what I suspected, ellipsis. And that prolonged “flah” syllable is exactly the way my husband mocks me, although I swear I don’t do that.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I retook the test and came up with the same three cities as Dave the second time around, though generally the coloration is the same. I only made one conscious change: the name of a liquor drive through. But there were different questions mixed in (highway, roundabout, you guys) that seem to have pushed my map a bit westward.

    CStanley, I’ve never heard of “making groceries.”

  • CStanley Link

    Ah, it’s another NO colloquialism so I thought it would be familiar to you. There was a Schweggman’s grocery store ad campaign that used the phrase. I think it’s fairly ninth ward, though a lot of the natives in my Algiers neighborhood used it.

  • PD Shaw Link

    CStanley, I lived in the Garden District. If you look closely at the dialect map I linked to last night, it places the Ninth Ward in the same dialect region as Greater New York City. One of my NY transplant friends swore the New Orleans accent sounded like Brooklyn. I thought the tendency to drop the “th” sound for “d” sounded like Chicago (“da Bears”).

  • CStanley Link

    Yes, my parents were from Brooklyn and were often mistaken for native New Orleanians.

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