Dialect map

[telophase]

U.S. based. Quiz that asks you 25 questions about your word usage, and then shows you where your dialect seems to come from. It thinks I'm generically Southern: http://nyti.ms/1jFM0rz Toby took it and it pegged him as north Texas. Neither of us has the stereotypical Texas or Southern drawl, although it seems we ahve the dialect. :) People tend to say "You don't sound like you're from Texas!" but that's ebcause they don't realize that the drawl they're thinking of tends to come from the more rural areas of tehs tate and urban Texans are a bit more Midwest-y.

There was one guy at a museum I used to work at who said "I knew you were from Texas! There's a little lilt at the end of your sentences!"

Didn't have the heart to tell him I picked that up in Denver.

Comments

[nethilia]

Most people don't think I'm Texan unless I'm actually there, tired, say specific word chains like dubya*, y'all or djeet** or start deliberately drawling my speech patterns. But once at my old job I was on the phone with someone from the south and during the course of the call I slowly slid into my accent--it was wonderful for reassuring people on the phone. Those around me said the way I said "bubble wrap" startled them because they really hadn't heard my accent before.

* As in the letter.
* "Djeet yet? We got food on the stove."

ETA: I selected feeder road and the map is like "goddamn you're Houstonian."

[yhlee]

I probably lost my accent from lots of moving but yeah, people in (say) Boston who didn't know I'd ever lived anywhere near the South (I was born in Houston and lived in Texas for eight years), or had managed to forget it because my accent is otherwise pretty Vanilla What You Hear Newscasters Use, would double-take when I'd suddenly "y'all" at them.

I'm currently in Baton Rouge and the local term seems to be "service road." What they're servicing I'm not sure, but hey.

[gaudior]

Hah! It says I'm from Boston! I mean, it doesn't think Wisconsin (where I grew up) or New York (where I was born) are unlikely, but it did peg that I'm most likely to live where I live.

Yay!

[hunningham]

Damn. My accent has faded so much in the past twenty-plus years since I left home that it's barely there anymore and I'm now just a middle-class middle-england British person like all the rest. I used to be so Ulster that I was well-nigh incomprehensible and while I don't miss all the "Whaaat.." I do feel that I've mislaid an important part of my identity.

[chisotahn]

Huh, through the test I was getting a lot of unclear/apparently not common in the US answers (I grew up in Europe so I tend to have some random evidently European quirks that I don't notice until someone calls them out) but in the end it correctly pegged me as Northern California. Cool!

Accent

[mustangsally78.livejournal.com]

I came out straight up Philly - which makes sense because I grew up 12 miles into Jersey from Philly.

Yo.

[seajules]

These things usually get me wrong because they're trying to pinpoint a single area. This one gave me three equal probabilities, two of them probably the largest cities near my hometown (and one of which where my mom spent much of her childhood), and one of them coastal California. I'd say that's as accurate as such a quiz is likely to get.

[viridian5.livejournal.com]

I'm really surprised at this test putting me as New York, Yonkers, or Newark/Patterson because online tests are usually way off, plus my mom gave me some speech idiosyncrasies of her own and I've often been told I don't have a New York accent (back when that still meant something). *g*