Ben and a bunch of his work friends took the
dialect quiz that has been going around lately, and it did a pretty good job of pinpointing where Ben is from:
 |
| Definitely from Northeastern Illinois! |
It was similarly accurate for most of his friends, so I decided to take it too. I was... surprised by the results:
 |
| Apparently I am definitely from Texas. |
It even tells you the five cities your dialect is the most similar too - mine were all in Texas. Four of my five least similar cities were in Michigan, and the fifth was in Wisconsin. So, I'm really not from the Northeastern part of the Midwest - which was a bit surprising since my mom grew up in Illinois and I thought I have a lot of her speech patterns.
Anyway, I thought maybe it was a sample size error, since I took the shorter, 25 question version of the quiz. So I spent an hour doing the longer,
140 question version, and once again was flummoxed by the results:
 |
| I guess that week in San Diego really rubbed off on me? |
This time my five most similar cities were all in SoCal (including San Diego and Fresno), four of my five least similar were in Louisiana, and the fifth was in Mississippi. So, I'm definitely not from the Deep South, except for the fact that I'm from Texas... At least my actual home state of Maryland is red on this one!
Ben thinks the fact that my results are so inconsistent and all over the place means that it has no idea where I'm from. I guess that's what happens when you grow up in between DC and Appalachia, have one parent who isn't a native English speaker, one from the Midwest but who was raised by an Irish immigrant, and you have lived in Philadelphia, NYC, Boston, and (briefly) San Francisco in the past several years.
Heheh, I took the 25-question version yesterday and it mostly nailed it - I had the most in common with New England and my first four of five "most likely" cities were all in southern MA or Rhode Island.
ReplyDeleteI did have a small amount of weird cross-contamination with northern California; not sure if that's from time spent living in Boulder (which I'm guessing is a bit different from the rest of the West dialect-wise) or Hawaii (a dialect which seemed to be straight-up missing from this survey! Maybe I should take the 140 question one...)
The 140 question one had some straight-up crazy dialect on it... apparently in some places, when it rains while the sun is shining, you say that the devil is beating his wife. What?!
DeleteHahaha, I'm halfway through the 140 question one at the moment. I'm always really excited whenever distinctly Northeast dialect appears in the options ("bubblers! rotaries!"). I imagine that someone somewhere is going "wtf? where the hell do they call a milkshake a 'cabinet'?" (Rhode Island!) And I think I'm spotting a few Hawaii snippets here and there even though it's not on the map...
Delete