The best "accent" questionnaire I've seen

[joew]

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html?_r=0

[joew]

Unsurprisingly, I ended up most resembling southeastern New England, with my most alike cities being Boston, Worcester, and Providence. I might have expected Portland to be in the mix. What surprised me was that the least alike were in Illinois and Michigan. I hadn't realized how different that area (including northern Ohio) is from eastern New England. Western Virginia is much closer in speech to me than the midwest.

[doctork]

No surprise, all my cities were southern: Jackson, Columbus (Georgia not Ohio), Richmond. Virginia is what I consider my "home state," but I've lived in NC, FL and LA. "Neutral ground" for that grassy thing down the middle of the road is distinctly New Orleanian, never heard it anywhere else, but I did acquire the term.

My least alike - New England and the Upper Midwest, all places I have never lived or spent much time in.

Other places I've lived in - CA, WA, AZ, CO - don't seem to have much regional accents, being as how so many people move in from elsewhere. Honolulu, New York City, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh all have distinct accents which I didn't seem to acquire despite many years there.

[booklady]

I am very Californian, with my three cities being Santa Rosa, Modesto, and Fresno. Since I spent my first 29+ years in Northern California, this does not surprise me. My least similar is southeast Louisiana. I've lived in Massachusetts for 27 years and Mississippi for 6 1/2 but my formative years were out west.

Californians, of course, don't have accents.

[gailkate]

I'm pretty much northern Illinois, but I wonder if any cities from MI were included. I'm strongly Michigan. I think Chicagoans have an accent that isn't mine. Like CA, MI speakers have no accent and pretty much speak pure educated English. I heard "youse" growing up, but it was always from uneducated speakers, probably Polish or German.

1. Are cot and caught the same? NO!

2. What do you call the grassy strip? In MN people say boulevard. As a kid, my neighborhood gang called it "tax grass," meaning it was public and no kid could tell you to get out of that part of the yard.

3. Gym shoes! that or tennis shoes, never anything else till Adidas changed everything.

4. Used to say "supper" for evening meal, now always dinner. Never dinner for noon meal.

5. Circle, roundabout or what?

I can't think of any more, too sleepy. Someone else will have to remember the rest.

[jspnrvr]

Midwest here. Rockford, IL, Omaha, NE and Wichita, Kansas.

[BoatBabe]

Ha! That's funny. My most similar cities are Reno, Boise and Minneapolis/Saint Paul.

The only one I clicked "other" on was the easy high school or college course. They didn't have the right word available. It is "bonehead," as in, "I didn't score high enough on the pre-test so I had to take a bonehead math class."

[doctork]

I think Michiganders have that flat "a" sound like Ohioans, plus they seem to say "pop" instead of "soda." Pittsburgh is quite midwestern in nature despite being located in an east coast state. Distinct accent there, one notable feature is they say "yinz" instead of "youse" or "you guys" or "you all."

I've only a modest linguistics background, but I think most of our accents are established by the teens, and after that, you really have to work at it to "lose" an unwanted accent, or master a new foreign language without a distinctly American tinge. For the normal person (non-genius, no gift) to have any hope of acquiring unaccented fluency in a foreign language it's best to begin in the early school years, by age 6 or 7. And if you begin to learn a foreign language after 12 - 14 years of age, you'll almost always have a "foreign accent."

Booky I agree with you, Californians don't really have much of an accent; their speech is recognizable by phraseology and usage. Have you ever watched one of the SNL skits "The Californians"?

[booklady]

Jul 22, 2015 21:57:31 GMT -5 doctork said:

Booky I agree with you, Californians don't really have much of an accent; their speech is recognizable by phraseology and usage. Have you ever watched one of the SNL skits "The Californians"?

I saw only the one that was part of the 40th anniversary special. It seems to me when Californians, southern Californians in particular, are skewered, it tends to be for a sort-of Valley Girl inflection. I do think the southern Californians also have more dramatically different words and style than people from the rest of the state.

I thought it was interesting that lots of people in Mississippi can't stand Californians, yet the TV news anchors and broadcasters in Jackson all work hard to lose their Southern accents and speak like us, not Midwesterners or any other region of the country. Interesting.

[doctork]

Yeah, SoCal, lots of Valley Girl talk. Elsewhere in California, not so much, though it did seem that most of California talks about the freeway as "the 10," "the 405," etc.

I've considered this, and think that it is easy to say "the 10" or "the 5" but not so easy to say "the ninety-five" or "the three-ninety-five," so in the east, they don't. They say "95" or "the beltway" or "the inner loop" or "the outer loop."

I suspect the local anchors in Mississippi aspire to jobs in The Larger Markets (NY, LA, Chicago, Boston) so they try not to sound Southern. Northerners seem to assume (often wrongly) that because you talk Southern and sound dumb, you are dumb; this can be a serious mistake when speaking to smart Southerners who will then use the information you foolishly just gave them to whup their ass.

Now, most of my time in CA has been in the Bay area or Monterey/Big Sur and most of my (Southern redneck) relatives didn't dislike northern Californians. They objected to LA-area "Hollywood types." Even San Diego was OK in their book, probably because of the large Navy/Marine military presence, and many of my relatives served in the US Navy.