Dialects of American English

Would you like to help a UK linguist better understand American dialects?

https://www.dialectsofenglish.com

Watch the map beside your answers. It will be interesting however, when the test is finished, it won't show your street address or anything . In fact, the map has only to do with the answer to one question at a time. Red for your choices; blue is for everyone else.

Steve
who was delighted to realize that he knows the answer to the very first question: the zip code where you grew up. (the US only had zip codes for a little over 2 years before he moved away!)

Pretty accurate! A couple things I did not have a word for or mine wasn't listed. My family is notorious for making up nonsense words and funny "pet" names. We have our own language, lol.

journey11 said:

Pretty accurate! A couple things I did not have a word for or mine wasn't listed. My family is notorious for making up nonsense words and funny "pet" names. We have our own language, lol.

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we do that here too. Mom is a notoriously bad speller/dyslexic and will just make up stuff as she goes. often it's funny. i'm a well trained dyslexic as long as i am not tired i can keep my gremlins in line and type real words. handwriting is a whole different ball of kittens.

i think that areas where i grew up changed quite a bit over the years so could be speaking quite different dialects now.

my trips around the country have been interesting. in TN where i boarded at a flop house for a week i could barely understand one in ten words from one guy, but he was fun to listen to (old retired sherriff) at least what i could understand. between lack of teeth and plug of chaw we juiced out a few conversations...

I absolutely delight in differences. Not contentious ones but honest to goodness differences .

My dad's family was from the South. Even with my evident Western drawl, I could easily recognize the differences. Grandma Pearl's parents were from Kentucky but she was born and raised in Texas. Grandpa Henry was born in Arkansas. They sorta met half way in between, and that was OK .

(BTW, both of the sets of great grandparents might have been considered "carpetbaggers" but I'm unsure of how broad this definition goes. Grandfather's family was from Tennessee back to prehistory but left for points north decades before 1860. Then, they returned ...)

I was academically trained by linguists. This was just about as nutz as me majoring in a social science but, I had already made a change from history - not seeing any future in it .

Anyway, I had already experienced quite a lot of hearing loss so - linguistics ? What I especially appreciated was how precise the research was, how little contention there could be to their ethnographic contributions. Kind of a, "So, you don't believe it? Here, listen to these recordings."

Ha! But yeah, there are family differences . Just imagine what those might have been if you were studying sign language in communities without schools. Heaven Help me, I didn't do that!

@flowerbug , I thought that you were about to say that the Tennessee guy had a heavy mustache or beard. Whoa, they may as well resort to waving their hands at me because I'm not gonna figure out what is being said . Accents, I might be better at than most. First, because I'm interested in the thinking behind the words but also because I learned to relax and realize that there was more to communication than just spoken words .

Steve

I took the quiz some of the slang words were not familiar to me. It was interesting to say the least.

Did you wonder, @Collector ..

. if he just might have slipped some overseas English slang in there?



digitS'

digitS' said:

Did you wonder, @Collector ..

. if he just might have slipped some overseas English slang in there?



digitS'

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Yes some of the terms that had 7 or more choices I had not ever heard some of them. Enjoyed the survey though:

I have always enjoyed studying linguistics. It goes right along with cultural anthropology, my hobby since age of 13.