How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk:What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
About This Quiz
Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website.
The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you.
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LMAO Mike!
Hummm... a transplant are you????
jwc,
If you're happy, I'm happy!
Jackson, Montgomery, Greensboro - kinda figgers.
So is that right, 1st?
LOL John! I never realized that before. We call them sneakers. In England, trainers.
Even though I left the area in 1980 at the age of 22, I guess I've retained the NY/NJ lingo. My results were Paterson NJ, New York City, and Yonkers, NY. Uncanny. I grew up right in the middle of those points.
It almost got me... For a while I did not think I was born in the US from looking at all of those deep blue maps....
It put me near Rochester and Buffalo, but the red in the map just about covers the whole state, so it is close.
The Question that did it:What do you call the type of shoes worn in gym class?
The answer: Sneakers.
Do you pronounce cot and caught the same?
different (I thought everyone pronounced them different ly )
Having been raised mostly in Mississippi/Alabama and Georgia - right on the nose
Verified from Philly.
My map hit me, right on the dot, as well. Louisville is on the cusp of the big red area around Chattanooga, etc.
We call 'em, tennis shoes, cokes, and say y'all. No difference between cot and caught.
Nice ... my map pretty much nailed my roots ... NYC & its suburbs . But I often had to decide between 2 choices where they were equal .
For one reason or another I was unable to access the site from here (I'll try again), but rest assured if you could here my voice you'd know right away, I am a nasally sounding New Englander.
Hey Mike, Perrie, Fish and all, have had tech difficulties for a bit but I am back in the fray, glad to see you guys have maintained your sense of humor.
Hey, this quiz says I'm from New Yawk.
WTF??!!??
Wow that is really cool Mike. I think that it is really hard for most of us to loose our accents after a certain age.
LOL Brolly, You know once you live upstate, pretty much the same accent to us downstaters.
I had no doubt Mac! You are Philly!
Dowser,
Dang! I never even thought aboutcot and caught being pronounced the same way.
My Aunt Jenny, who is a Brommy (meaning coming from theBirminghamarea) from England, twists her mouth up into such a funny contortion to say the word water, which NYers say as wader. What comes out of her mouth is waaaadder. Hey.. what happened to our T?
I'm confused Mike.
We call small streams creeks and what we get in out necks cricks. Is that your meaning?
Fer sure, Petey. Me too!
Ditto Luther! Good to see ya back!
And I got one of my best cats from a this lovely New Englander from New Hampshire. He told me, "He's a lovely cat he is. Shame 'bout it. Going to havta put him down t'day."
See Jon, you can run, but you can't hide!
Yep! You can get a crick in your neck from looking at the creek funny.
LOL! I can say each word, and can't hear a difference... Better than oil and all, I guess!
There was a candid camera thing years ago, asking people the difference between oil and all. It came out "awl". This dear man was explaining that you put "awl" in the car, but when you were done, that was "awl" there was! Funny!
I don't think China wants anyone to read the NY Times. I've tried Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox to open the link to the quiz and nothing works. Actually it's been a long time since I was able to open a link to the NY Times, but then, considering that Honest Reporting has named the NY Times the 'Most Dishonest News Source of the Year', I'm really not interested in reading that rag anyway. Just sorry I can't take the quiz.
Good one Marsha!
Didn't know about that one either Dowsey! LOL! I'm learning a lot from this.
Awww... I wanted you to take the test. I was curious how a Canadian would fare.
You guys...apparently I am a Northerner living in Southern California
It seems that we all tend to keep our original accents, even if we lose them just a bit.
Hey Emma,
Are ya? I know at least 6 people like that.
Not from the US...LOL...Sounds about right.
Interesting test and it's very sensitive.
I took it twice, once reflecting the terms and pronunciation used by the people in upstate New York, where I live now, and once using the terms I am familiar with from downstate near NYC, where I am from, and the results actually reflected the difference.
I'm one of those that have lived all over the United States in states/cities such as Florida New Jersey, Kansas, Chicago, and San Francisco being in the mix. As such the study had me as red over a majority of the country. It selected Colorado Springs and Fresno California as two likely locations. I would call Kansas City as close to a childhood home as anything.
Fun study.
My hubby tried that and found the same thing. That was why I thought it was so interesting and worth bringing it to the site.
It doesn't have to make sense... Idiom atically speaking
Fly,
So the test was wrong? You are the first one. You must pick up dialects very easily.
I suppose ... but I would think there would be some obscuresense that would correlate with itto at least a minimal degree. Like when we were kids and it was thundering, and we used to say god is bowling. I'm trying to correlate rain on a sunny day with evil and spouse abuse .... it's not coming together for me.
Hal,
Believe it or not, those are regional expressions. I know if you never heard them, you would think that they were made up, but they are not.
In Baltimore (they call it B'more) they call a patio the lanai... which is actually a Hawaiian word. Go figure?
Why else would it rain on a sunny day?
I moved to the DC area from NW Ohio - the biggest languageadjustment I had to make was calling carbonatedbeverages "soda" instead of "pop".I hear that in some places inNew England they call it "tonic". I don't drink that garbage anymore so it doesn't affect me, butwhen mykids and parents visit they always laugh about how confused the cashiers arewhen they order a pop.
LOL...this has me pegged for sure! Put me smack dab in the middle of Michigan with the emphasis on the Detroit area! Seeing as how I've lived on the west side, southeast area and central part of the state over the years I guess it shouldn't be a surprise!
That was fun, thanks Perrie!
We always called them Sun Showers, but I think Liquid Sun is kida clever. I don't get the wedding thing at all, and I had no idea the devil was married.
Poses the question, "Who in hell would marry the devil?" (I have a couple of ex's that think that's what they did, and although it didn't happen in hell, they both told me that's where I should go)
Well, I lived in NY for about 12 years in all, Arizona for 4 years, Georgia for about 20, so I am a mish mash. Some here think I have a northern speech, in the north, they thought I was nuts when I asked if a person had a dawg, they had no idea what I meant. There is so much difference in descriptive words and speech patterns everywhere in the USA.
BUT.... the good thing about it is, I can understand pretty much all of it and translate for the trus southerners if I have to.
I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and haven't lived there for 25 years but the quiz pinned me right to Cincinnati.
I am pretty good at knowing when to call something soda vs pop. But it's the whole sub, hoggie, grinnders, heros, etc, that confuses me.
LOL Jerry, I doubt you are a devil, but maybe devilish....
Yeah, I don't get that reference either. But then again, in Cockney peaches and pears are the stairs, so one can never tell where this stuff comes from.
Glad you liked it Uppy! I had a blast doing it and thought it was worth it!
So what changed between the first and second time of taking it Gene?
EG,
You are truly the "Every American" or you traveled a lot!
Leotie,
Dawters, Dawgs and Cawfee... no big whoop!
When I worked in Brooklyn, slowly I began to pick that up over my Long Island accent. I was the but of a lot of jokes , so I tried my best to keep it in check.
Pat,
Yeah, I think given your deep roots, this was pretty much to see if the quiz works... and it did!
It's always been called that here Hal. In fact, as a child, I was taught that if you stick a pin in the ground you could hear her yells.
Egilman,
If you're ever over my way, my door is open to you.
Put me in the Rochester, NY area and the Midwest. I grew up in Upstate NY so that was very close. Lived in St Louis area for several years, too, so I guess I still have some words from both areas that I use, even though I now live in S FL.
Me?! I'm Devilish?
I'm not the one that spent New Years eve posing as Kathie Griffin.
I once taught a course in homiletics atN.Y. Youse in Manhattan.
Salt Lake City, Buffalo & Newark...
Been in the Seattle area for more than 40 years, Southern California before that, and various places over seas before that...
Hmmmm...
Interesting point.
Looking at your map, its clear that South-westerners don't have much of a "blue" speech pattern at all.
But it looks like there are also some other differences withinin the South-west.
While the South-west is all sort of orange, LA (I assume that's LA-- the area across from those islands) is yellow. But not far away, on the CA-NM border and the middle of the AZ-NM border, its a fairly dark reddish-brown.
I would also imagine that if a person spent a lot of time living in each of two different areas, their speech might be sort of a combination of the two...?
Of course they don't make sense to you-- because you're not from areas that use those expressions! (People that live in those areas would probably think the expression you use doesn't make sense-- or at least they would think it strange). I think "Sunshower" probably makes the most sense (after all, it describes a case of both sun and shower at the same time.).
But you could also argue that it makes no sense-- sun is fire, and hot. Shower is the opposite-- water and chilly. So it has to be one or the other-- not both! So you could say that logically "sunshower" makes no sense either..
Of course the issue here is that they are idiomatic expressions-- the words used often have no factual relationship to the situation described.
Oh well-- I suppose what's sauce for the Goose is sauce for the Gander! (Or perhaps not --perhaps the opposite is true: "One man's meat is another man's poison" after all!
)
Wow-- that's a lot.
Having been to so many places-- did you have trouble deciding which answer to pick for a lot of questions? (Because you might have wanted to pick two or three answers for a question because you were exposed to 2 or 3 different accents or expressions?)
I suppose what's sauce for the Goose is sauce for the Gander!
Where I live, we say what's grease for the goose is grease for the gander.
I have lived in Illinois my entire life and this test was spot on! When I go down South to visit my siblings they say I talk funny ,even tho they used to talk the same way I do. lol
A guy walks into a butcher market and says; "I want two gooses ...er .... ah, .....I want two .... aah ... goose, ...... gooselings?"
"I'll tell ya what ,.... gimme a Goose and then gimme another one."
('snot off topic Perrie, it's a Long Island joke)
I fall about three Hundred miles or a little more below where I'm from still mid west. Guess I'm sinking towards the equator. Stationed in the south and west most of my twenty year military career.