It's official: Maryland is a NORTHEASTERN state! (Frederick, Crisfield: living, title)

[ialmostforgot]

I'm one of those people the quiz was inaccurate for, at least when it comes to the cities they chose. Maryland is very red on the map, though.

Yard sale? They could've said I was from Maine.

Y'all? They could've chosen Virginia, which would've been more accurate. But it's not as red there.

[ialmostforgot]

Originally Posted by sniffablecow

suprisingly, roly polies are quite generic. My friend from indiana calls them potato bugs, but anyone else I have met calls them roly polies. I just call them pillbugs because thats was what I learned in school in books and from teachers.

Interesting... "pill bug" sounds weird to me: how do they look like pills?

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by ialmostforgot

I'm one of those people the quiz was inaccurate for, at least when it comes to the cities they chose. Maryland is very red on the map, though.

Yard sale? They could've said I was from Maine.

Y'all? They could've chosen Virginia, which would've been more accurate. But it's not as red there.

I never worry about the selected comp. cities. For instance, "yard sale" is one the quiz regularly selects as a breakout map and compares your map to Raleigh, Richmond, or some other southern city.

The big take away is that the quiz pegged you nearly 100% as a speaker of Southern American English. Your heat map fades really quickly once you hit the mason-dixon and the Ohio River.

The quiz also seems to indicate you speak a version of coastal southern english, since your map fades quickly in places like Texas and SW Ohio, where my map is still pretty orange because of the highland south dialect influences in those regions.

Do you speak BEV? This would explain why the quiz can't seem to lock down a definite geographic "hot spot' for you, but knows you speak a Southern dialect more like the coastal south than the mountain south.

[sniffablecow]

Originally Posted by westsideboy

I never worry about the selected comp. cities. For instance, "yard sale" is one the quiz regularly selects as a breakout map and compares your map to Raleigh, Richmond, or some other southern city.

The big take away is that the quiz pegged you nearly 100% as a speaker of Southern American English. Your heat map fades really quickly once you hit the mason-dixon and the Ohio River.

The quiz also seems to indicate you speak a version of coastal southern english, since your map fades quickly in places like Texas and SW Ohio, where my map is still pretty orange because of the highland south dialect influences in those regions.

Do you speak BEV? This would explain why the quiz can't seem to lock down a definite geographic "hot spot' for you, but knows you speak a Southern dialect more like the coastal south than the mountain south.

It's weird becuz all of us had red in Maryland, but I was the only one who got a a result where I live, or atleast where the cities are. Plus, how can someone with Yonkers as a city listed still share the red area of someone who got Deep South cities? Lol

[sniffablecow]

Originally Posted by ialmostforgot

Interesting... "pill bug" sounds weird to me: how do they look like pills?

Well, when they are standing still, not doing anything, in a normal position, they look kinda like a pill.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by sniffablecow

It's weird becuz all of us had red in Maryland, but I was the only one who got a a result where I live, or atleast where the cities are. Plus, how can someone with Yonkers as a city listed still share the red area of someone who got Deep South cities? Lol

The cities don't matter guys. I wish the quiz got rid of them. It's just "Did you know yard sale is also common in Winston-Salem?" "Did you know people in New York call them sunshowers too?" bits of information The heat map is the results of the quiz, not the city comps, which weren't right for any of us. One of mine was Little Rock. Never been there, never known anyone from there.

Do you have family in New York, or family with roots there? If so, that's why it is showing up. If not, we do have a quandary. Likely one we can solve.

We all came up with Maryland though because the quiz is damn good! The reason other spots on the map still light up is because the test isn't designed to play 'enry 'iggins and place you within 10 miles of where you were born, the test is designed to show where dialectal traits similar to the one you speak are present.

So, on the surface, you wouldn't think New York and central MD would have much in common. But if you have don't have the caught/cot merger. If you say "you guys." If you call sun and rain a "sunshower" etc., you are going to share those traits with not just your fellow Mid-Atlantic transplants, but with people from northern dialect regions too, and thus the heat map will reflect that. Again some of those questions are diagnostic. If you answer "hoagie" "been with the same vowel as in" and the cot/caught merger is complete., you are going to glow deep red in the Midland part of PA. Those three questions are enough to peg someone as having that dialect.

if you have any doubts, look at how quickly your heat map died to white and blue when you hit Western Maryland and the Mason Dixon aside from I-83 cooridor. Not only did the quiz correctly ID you as a Marylander, it knew nearly 100% that you didn't live in the parts of Maryland that have PA like Midland speech.

I think you were the poster that claimed to have no accent, right? If so, the map shows you do indeed have a very distinct dialect. If you were 100% middle American, your map would glow red in Kansas and Nebraska. It doesn't. 25 questions were enough to place you on the east coast, likely MD, although New York couldn't be ruled out completely.

[ialmostforgot]

Originally Posted by westsideboy

I never worry about the selected comp. cities. For instance, "yard sale" is one the quiz regularly selects as a breakout map and compares your map to Raleigh, Richmond, or some other southern city.

The big take away is that the quiz pegged you nearly 100% as a speaker of Southern American English. Your heat map fades really quickly once you hit the mason-dixon and the Ohio River.

The quiz also seems to indicate you speak a version of coastal southern english, since your map fades quickly in places like Texas and SW Ohio, where my map is still pretty orange because of the highland south dialect influences in those regions.

Do you speak BEV? This would explain why the quiz can't seem to lock down a definite geographic "hot spot' for you, but knows you speak a Southern dialect more like the coastal south than the mountain south.

I have an accent that only black people have, but I don't speak BEV. The questions of the quiz wouldn't have indicated that, anyway.

I'm wondering which words I use other than "y'all" and "yard sale" would make those places further south so red. Is it "tennis shoes"? "Crawfish"?

It would be interesting if there is a quiz that is about pronunciation instead of words.

[ialmostforgot]

Took this quiz
Results: What American accent do you have?
It's not professional, but I thought it would be interesting to share the results.

The issue with this one is that the questions were mostly about the caught/cot merger. I think I got "Inland North" because I said that the second vowel in "about" and the vowel in "loud" are different. I don't say "aboat" like Tez does; The two words are "abah-oot" and a compressed form of "layoud" to me. Either way, I don't think they realized that Canadian raising happens in the tidewater.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by ialmostforgot

I have an accent that only black people have, but I don't speak BEV. The questions of the quiz wouldn't have indicated that, anyway.

I'm wondering which words I use other than "y'all" and "yard sale" would make those places further south so red. Is it "tennis shoes"? "Crawfish"?

It would be interesting if there is a quiz that is about pronunciation instead of words.

Sorry for my ineloquence. You're right, the test doesn't ask about specific grammatical features that would indicate a BEV speaker. My gumshoe hypothesis is that the test would be less accurate for many black folks because features of their dialects would be interpreted as generalized Southern by the quiz.

There are a few pronunciation questions, but the test is more like what Kurath did in 1949, looking for regional word usage. So, yes, I think tennis shoes (my term too) and crawfish (I say crayfish) probably did skew your map into the south. Yard sale too, which is kinda cool as I never thought it was a regional term.

[westsideboy]

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: North Central

86%

"North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.

80%
The West

75%
The Midland

63%
Boston

33%
The Inland North

13%
Philadelphia

12%
The South

9%
The Northeast

Hmm.....this test missed by a mile with me. It's all about vowel mergers, so I am not sure which ones I have that would make me sound like a North Dakotan. I will add that a specific local dialect in my county, the George's Creek dialect, is occasionally mistaken for a Canadian accent. My grandma said things like "aboot' for about, 'haus' for house, "serl" for soil. I never thought I sounded like much her, but maybe my vowels do. We have some weird ones out here.