https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html
Some states have accomplished levels of alcoholism previously unimaginable.
I don't know if it's alcoholism of car brain, but holy shit it was a shock when i first learned that.
Wait till you hear about the drive through frozen daiquiri spots in New Orleans. After the revolution this is going to be a top priority
They both sound straight out of the 1920's esp pop, I genuinely thought it was a joke when I first heard people use those. And coke is how we refer to coca cola, why would you call a sprite "coke"
Same reason people say Kleenex, or Saran Wrap, or Band-Aid
My grandma said coke for any soda.
Do you want a coke
Sure, what do you have?
Root beer and sprite
That was a real conversation she would have with people. Deranged.
Guess you can look at it in terms of what a lifetime of consuming American media does to the European brainpan
spoiler
To be completely honest, I have heard of drive-through liquor stores. There was no :what-the-hell: option though
That does track, though. If you were going to pick up a bunch of Americanisms from watching US media they'd all be from LA or from a very specific class of white New Yorker, since they make pretty much all the media.
And half of Florida are white New Yorkers and their kids so that being red makes sense too
They're all over Texas, too. I guess it helps with the rootin', tootin', mass shootin', and cattle rustlin'.
But then how are you supposed to get judged by people in the checkout line for fidgeting with a bottle of Bailey's?
No and fuck you for suggesting
Mods pls ban this user for personal insults
Apparently my dialect is so obvious that this quiz correctly guessed where my mom's side of the family lives
Lmao same. It got it down to the exact geographic area and city that my maternal grandparents are from and she grew up. It's like, not a large city either.
I learned mid-atlantic specifically so my origins could not be discerned by voice pattern analysis
So now you speak like an old-timey newsreel?
These are all different kinds of sandwich. Like yeah a sub and a hoagie are vaguely the same thing, but if you get a hoagie in Philly it's not going to look like a sub anywhere else. A lot of these questions are a weird. If I'm on the turnpike I call it the turnpike. If I'm not on the turnpike it's not a turnpike, is it? There are like fifteen different names for mountain lions and I use most of them. I don't know how to answer a lot of these questions because I use a bunch of different terms interchangeably.
On reflection, though, i guess that makes some kind of sense, because I've been everywhere and lived in pretty much every region of the US except the Deep South and the scary part between Seattle and Minnesota.
The mountain lion one pissed me off, like I figured they were talking about mountain lions, but there were several real North American wildcats on that list. We have panthers!
The problem with "panther" is it refers to a bunch of different cat species.
I thought the bread question was weird cause we call the bread a hero. It’s called a sub when the sandwich shop isnt around here, and a hoagie when some one brings it from Philly. No one calls it a grinder
"What do you call a drive-through liquor store?"
A terrible idea. Those are real? Also this dumbass test thinks I'm from fucking Fresno. California delanda est
This thing says I'm from New Jersey.
I'm southern. I say y'all.
I grew up in Hawai'i, quite a while ago now, before TikTok or whatever got everyone under 30 to steal "y'all" from black people.
One time I was hanging out with like 15 people at school and one of the new girls said, in her essentially normal sounding General American/Ohio/Generic accent, "hey do y'all have any lip balm?"
Literally every person froze, fell silent, and turned and looked directly at her. After about 5 solid seconds a girl said "WHERE... ARE YOU FROM." She was so fucking weirded out, darting her head every which way, "uh.. uh...S-S-South Carolina, I-"
Yeah it's just a normal word to me. The term that does make my ears perk up is "your guys's." Like "hey I'll need your guys's help later"
Ha yeah "guys's" isn't super normal for me but it's also not that abnormal- due to the lack of "y'all" some people say it. Many people prefer to say " guys' " or "I need all you guys to" etc.
New York, Jersey City, Yonkers.
Non-native English speaker who has never been to the US. In school they kind of tried to teach us British English but most of my pronunciation probably comes from watching American film and television.
New York, Jersey City, Yonkers.
this is basically standard US english that you'd get from the internet, or watching 90s + 2000s television
It's not really standard . That area tends to maintain the marry-merry-Mary distinction, which the overwhelming majority of Americans don't do. It maintains the cot-caught distinction, which was previously the standard but is the minority in young people these days and on its way out in a lot of the country. You also have the short-a split so that words like "had" and "ran" aren't rhymes with "bad" and "man", which is generally not even marked in dictionaries.
You also have the short-a split so that words like “had” and “ran” aren’t rhymes with “bad” and “man”,
this is wrong
Feel free to elaborate, but having two phonemes in words with historic short A is a common feature in the area. Doesn’t mean every speaker has it.
Same, but for some reason i got Ft Lauderdale, Orlando and Pembroke Pines.
I always get weird scores on these, because I adopted various things from a grandfather that moved across country. My grandfather, and therefore I, used the word "crawdad" and that throws off everything else in these quizzes. Crawdad/crayfish/etc. seems to get a large amount of weight.
I also say crawdad, but I think that's because it was in a folk song I learned in elementary school
I am apparently from Michigan's upper peninsula. I am not from Michigan's upper peninsula.
