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It's accurate if you think carefully about the questions and answer it how you actually say things, not how you think you say them. This can be tricky because when you read a word, the pronunciation in your head might be different than what comes out your mouth. I had this issue with the Mary, marry and merry question. I had to take a few minutes to think about how I really pronounce the words.
Well, that one's a little bit hard, but very few people still have the distinctions. I have merry as different while Mary and marry are the same, which is apparently the rarest of all possible combinations.
Also, a lot of the quiz is about word choice rather than pronunciation. What you call a median or a highway or a rotary (showing my biases!) doesn't say anything abour your accent and is probably much more easily influenced by the first time you heard a word for a (sometimes obscure) concept than an accent is. I had seen rotaries before I lived in Massachusetts, and called them traffic circles then, but Massachusetts really drove rotary into my head, so now they're rotaries. Since I don't drive now, and rotaries are basically unheard of in the NYC area anyway, it's not likely that will change.
Fun little quiz that pinpoints your American dialect. Not a surprise but I sound like I'm from the surrounding NYC area/suburbs. The pinpoint on the map says my dialect is most similar to that found in Yonkers/Jersey City
We usually go inside by foot rather drive-thru. It's a nice place either way it seems.
One can go in and get some munchies and a glass of beer (other non-alcoholic beverages available).
Again for me completely inaccurate and that might be because I spent part of my childhood overseas (2 years in England and then in countries where English was not the first language). So it is possible I absorbed other pronunciations not typical to the places that I have lived in the USA.
How is it going to be completely accurate if you spent part of your childhood overseas? I wouldn't expect it to be, unless your time was only spent there prior to the age of two or three, before these nuances actually infiltrate your language.
It's not like you just move to the NE and you start saying things differently. Many people I know who have moved to NY still say pop instead of soda or hoagies instead of heroes---and these are people who have been here for awhile.
I took the quiz a few times to see what happens. There are a few versions/questions.
I say Mary and Merry similarly. Marry is different. It was tricky because if I read them carefully I'll annunciate and the pronunciations are accurate (as in standard English accurate). But I had to think of how I say them out loud in a sentence to hear how I actually say it. I said "Merry Christmas" and "Hello Mary Jones" and "Did they marry?"
Also, I think if you are raised in a house hold with parents/family that have accents that might influence how and what you say.
This is true. I grew up with a friend whose father was from the Bronx, (I remember him asking her, "Hey, Dahlene, you got fie dollas?") and a mother from Virginia near the North Carolina border whose family had been there since the 1600s and had that old, genteel, Southern accent. She pronounced a lot of words differently from the rest of us.
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