![]() One answer, verge, put me completely outside the US (I must have picked that up in England for some reason). Many but not all of my answers were consistent with my Chicago-area home ground, + Michigan in recent years. I think I broke the system - I got through the whole survey, but no summing-up map appeared at the end. ![]() (The dialect quiz used to be hosted on his site but was always facing server issues, so it's great that the Times agreed to host it - Katz is now an intern for their graphics department.) And for background on how Katz's heat-map versions of the Vaux and Golder maps became so popular, see my LL post, " About those dialect maps making the rounds…." You can read more about Josh Katz's project to determine "aggregate dialect difference" from Vaux and Golder's survey data on his website. Two syllables, where the second rhymes with dawnįor me, these are both true. In the crayon question, two of the options are: The rest of my (long) life has been spent in the mid-Atlantic east coast states.Īunt = ah (c'mon, that's not a midwestern pronunciation) The quiz puts me solidly in the midwest, where I spent exactly 4 years for college and 4 years later for a job. (But I guess if the British Isles were included in the survey I would probably end up somewhere in the ocean.)ĭo you get different questions each time you take the survey? I'm pretty sure I didn't get the "night before Halloween" question when I took it. The website decidedly indicates that my non native English is proper to one specific region. It makes it even more random what result a furriner like me gets. It's a pity they mix pronunciation and dialectal items. You've likely visited the NYT site previously this month, maidhc. Does that say anything about where I'm from? It wants to charge me money and I won't pay. Or maybe this app's method for combining evidence is suboptimal… Some southerners may consider y'all to be non-standard, for example, and therefore give answers like you or you all. Those are positive markers of geo-social identity, while choices like you all and you are mostly negative markers, in the sense that their interpretation depends mostly on NOT having made the other choices.īut the real usage distribution of such alternatives may not emerge accurately from answers to questions like this. ![]() Though I obviously know about y'all, I'd never use it except as a joke or quotation or imitation, and similarly for you'uns and youse. One issue might just be the way of asking the questions. 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. 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. I haven't been able to find a description of the algorithm used to combine information from the various maps. "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. 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". 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 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 original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. 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. 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.
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