Take our American accent quiz to see if the way you pronounce things and the words you use can help us guess which U.S. region you're from. What do you call food that you buy at a restaurant but then eat at home? What do you call the long narrow place in the middle of a divided highway? What do you call the kind of spider (or spider-like creature) that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs? I thought cot-caught mergers were a minority. BTW, the map either took a long time to load for me, or it didn't show until I (randomly) clicked where it should have been. 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. For example, it asked me what I call the animal often known as a crawfish. Since the questions were random and I thought I might get some different ones, I took it again, and it once again put me in the deep South, triangulated between Mississippi, Birmingham and Columbus GA. For now, K-NN = a lazy algorithm = stores the data it needs to make a classification until its asked to make a classification. freakishly accurate for us. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to take the dialect quiz if you havent already (and take it again even if you have). I think I broke the system I got through the whole survey, but no summing-up map appeared at the end. The rest of my (long) life has been spent in the mid-Atlantic east coast states. It does not. In K-NNs case, it needs data like the yellow and purple circles in our chart above in order to know how to classify the star. What, nobody else hears that? Aunt = ah (c'mon, that's not a midwestern pronunciation) That's not one of the choices, nor is "Devil's strip", which DARE says is common in Baltimore; and the thing itself is so rare in Manhattan, where I lived in my linguistically formative years, that the concept was without a term. Or maybe this app's method for combining evidence is suboptimal. Reporting on what you care about. In that case, the regions which show up as "most like Australia" are probably just those with the highest proportion of Commonwealth immigrants in the population. For a New Yorker of my age, the absolute dead giveaway would be "sliding pond", a localism for a playground slide. I'm an RP Briton who's lived in the US for a long time (30+ years, and yes I am still largely RP). I assume this is very similar to yours. Below are the dialect maps, displaying what terms and pronunciations are used, and where they are used. I had no idea before this that anywhere in the USA used "lorry", "roundabout", or generic "lemonade". What do you call the night before Halloween? Do you feel your results accurately reflect your language background? Pretty accurate I guess my family is basically north Georgian for several generations, but I seem to have picked up some coastal plain Southernisms here and there too. AVG 1.1: Membership in a Speech Community Segment; LA 1.5: Questions We Have ; HW 1.1: Reflect and Implement; HW 1.2: Honoring Language Difference; HW 1.3: Everyday Ethical Decisions; HW 1.4: Read the Wright Book, Ch. You can read more about Josh Katz's project to determine "aggregate dialect difference" from Vaux and Golder's survey data on his website. I think "traffic circle" somehow exposed me for what I am. This hypothesis can be falsified (or not) with reference to the map I provided. Using these results, a method for mapping aggregate dialect distance is developed. Here, laziness means that an algorithm does not use training data points for any generalization, as Adi Bronshtein writes. Bert Vaux The project is a slick visualization of Bert Vaux's dialect survey, and lets you look at maps of the results of 122 different dialect questions, either as a composite showing the variation across the country or each individual dialect's prevalence across the country. I guess if I'd taken it to be a passive-knowledge question, I probably would have checked "mischief night" as being what I think of as the default term used by those who have occasion to refer to it. by Bert Vaux. Pantyhose are so expensive anymore that I just try to get a good suntan and forget about it. Please update your browser to view this feature. Katz authored the Times version of this quiz in 2013 as a graduate-student intern during his studies in statistics at North Carolina State University. Please upgrade your browser. I wonder how much "devil's night" weighed, the only place I ever heard that term was Detroit (where I lived my first 21 years). In DC, where I now live, the term for the strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk is "tree box" . (But I guess if the British Isles were included in the survey I would probably end up somewhere in the ocean.). survey you should be able to find your own response on the map in a little while! There is one more thing we need to tackle before diving into the ideas and math behind K-NN. How do you pronounce and ? Self care and ideas to help you live a healthier, happier life. Defining Needs and Strengths, LA 2.3: Getting to Know a Second Language Learner, LA 2.4: Providing Evidence / Collective Expertise, HW 2.3 Read the Definitions of Program Models, Session 3: Current Realities: ESL Programs and Practices, LA 3.2 Programs and Practices in My Local Setting, LA 3.4 Supports and Constraints for Makoto, LA 3.5 Communication, Pattern, & Variability, HW 3.4 Knowing My Second Language Learner, LA 4.1 Critical Research on Input: Jigsaw Reading, LA 4.2 Feedback About Knowing my Second Language Learner, HW 4.3 Promoting Oral Language in the Classroom, HW 4.5 Classroom Observation and Analysis, LA 5.1 Feedback About Knowing My EL Student, LA 5.2 Role of Interaction in English Language Development, LA 5.3 Negotiating Meaning Through Interaction: Gallery Walk, LA 5.4 Classroom Parables of Cultural Interaction Patterns, Session 6: Stages of Development and Errors and Feedback, LA 6.1 Video Segment 7.1 on Stages of Development: Pattern, LA 6.2 Charting Treasure: Mapping Stages of Development, HW 6.3 What does it Mean to Know a Language, HW 6.4 Variability in Learning a Language, Session 7: Proficiencies and Performances, LA 7.4 Getting to Know English Language Learners, Session 8: Displays of Professional Development, AVG 8.1 Classroom Strategies: Action as Advocacy, LA 8.1 Examining Displays of Professional Development, https://open.byu.edu/understanding_language_acquisition, https://open.byu.edu/understanding_language_acquisition/hw_1.6. Click here to take the quiz and see your own. The New Yorker has published a rather delicious parody of the dialect map. Self care and ideas to help you live a healthier, happier life. Dialect Quiz. An online test I took some years ago placed me in Boston on pronunciation alone. So the fact that you don't say *y'all* doesn't that weigh against you that much for being from the South. What word do you use for gawking at someone in a lustful way? This is as you described, but keep in mind the question listed is the one with the most weight for the likely areas, not the only question. ", Would you say "where are you at?" at the University of Oslo. Similarly, I was torn between "traffic circle" and "rotary" since I rarely encounter these road features near my home in New York (where I think "traffic circle" is used) but often do when vacationing in Cape Cod (where they are called "rotaries"). The first time through the test put me within 50 miles of my Bay Area home in San Rafael, CA. The colors on the Its foundation was the supervised machine learning algorithm K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), which is, as my graduate-school TA told us, a machine learning algorithm used to predict the class of a new datapoint based on the value of the points around it in parameter space. We will dive into the idea of machine learning and the ins and outs of the specific K-NN algorithm in a later post. What do you say when you want to lay claim to the front seat of a car? For research purposes, data without directly identifying information is made publicly available. (I tried posting this comment a few days ago, when the post was fresh, but it never showed up). The maps are regenerated periodically so if you have just taken the Boston Urban: There are a few sub-dialects in the Hub, . and see your own. I am from Ontario (specifically, west of Toronto), and live in Ottawa. (Don't include terms that aren't in your natural vocabulary but that you might use to accommodate someone who you think uses a different form.). What do you say to call for a temporary respite or truce during a game or activity? The quiz puts me solidly in the midwest, where I spent exactly 4 years for college and 4 years later for a job. Take this quiz with friends in real time and compare results. The survey was not advertised in any way, and was open to all takers on the internet. Teachers have discussed factors impacting language usage and are prepared to participate in an activity where they will reflect upon their own usage and dialect. What do you call paper that has already been used for something or is otherwise imperfect? I lived all over the States and overseas up until the age of 13 yrs when my dad finished his military service and retired in N California's SF Bay Area. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux . as in "skate through with no problem." My husband, who grew up north of Cincinnati but moved to Rochester in 1968, came out as southern Ohio or northern Kentucky, so his was correct. Cathy ONeil, a.k.a. What do you call a public railway system (normally underground)? pegged me 10 miles away, northern nj. All in all, the Dialect Quiz was relatviely accurate in my case, at least with the . According to the results of the dialect quiz based on the Harvard Dialect Survey, New York (New York), Anaheim (California), and Aurora (Colorado) were identified as the most probable regions of my residence. What do you call a narrow, pedestrian lane found in urban areas which usually runs between or behind buildings? What word(s) do you use in casual speech to address a group of two or more people? The tech involved in the Times quiz includes R and D3, the latter of which is a JavaScript library used for tying data to a pages DOM for manipulation and analysis, similar to jQuery. The map pinpointed me to Arlington, VA, which is off by about 5 miles from where I live. These maps show your most distinctive answer for each of these cities. That doesn't make me southern, does it?". (e.g., "I might could do that" to mean "I might be able to do that"; or "I used to could do that" to mean "I used to be able to do that"), He used to nap on the couch, but he sprawls out in that new lounge chair anymore, I do exclusively figurative paintings anymore. Have you ever told someone to "shut the lights"? The above map (where you learn that the northeast pronounces "centaur" differently from everyone else) is from NC State PhD student Joshua Katz's project "Beyond 'Soda, Pop, or Coke.'" When you are cold, and little points of skin begin to come on your arms and legs, you have-. Can they have bad days? Allman, B., Teemant, A., Pinnegar, S. E., & Eckton, B (2019). A Medium publication sharing concepts, ideas and codes. Essentially, all supervised machine learning algorithms need some data off of which to base their predictions. The graphics intern who created the mapping algorithm, Josh Katz, was hired for a full-time. He created a survey he gave to his Harvard students to determine the influence of geographic location on language. University of Virginia, P.O. Our academic experts can create an original essay on any subject for $13.00 $11/page Learn More. You may be asked to log in using your Google or Facebook account or to create a free account with the New York Times. So whatever it's doing, it seems to be doing it consistently. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vauxs current website. But how can an algorithm be lazy? Let me back up NJ/NYC in saying that nobody in New Jersey talks like a Soprano. In contrast to the original word maps of . What do/did you call your maternal grandfather? It's a pity they mix pronunciation and dialectal items. ", Modals are words like "can," "could," "might," "ought to," and so on. What about speakers who use "you," "you two," and "you guys" for singular, dual, and plural respectively? Boston born, MD raised, NM college (and PhD), says /y'all/ (a cromulent word), tried it several times, haven't gotten it "right" yet. The only requirement is honesty. What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket? The quiz was based upon the Harvard Dialect Study, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. Let k be 5 and say theres a new customer named Monica. What do you call the long sandwich that contains cold cuts, lettuce, and so on? I've never ever watched even any part of any episode of The Sopranos, not even on advertisements or discussions about the show. Your home for data science. but if you go directly to the Harvard Dialect Survey Dialect Survey Maps and Results you can also get the specific answer breakdowns for each question asked. most similar to Monica in terms of attributes, and sees what categories those 5 customers were in. most often pronounced with two syllables (car-ml). The survey is available under the I was looking forward to seeing the results, too! (It basically tells you how likely people from a certain area are to respond . There were no questions about final rhotics (non-, in my case, but linking 'r' and occasionally intrusive 'r') or the added 'y' in 'due', which are both firm features of my idiolect. What do you call the game wherein the participants see who can throw a knife closest to the other person (or alternately, get a jackknife to stick into the ground or a piece of wood)? See the pattern of your dialect in the map below. There were a few others where I suspect my present-day usage might differ from my childhood usage but I find it difficult to be absolutely certain so many decades later. As far as I ever heard, "devil's night" was the only name for the night before Hallowe'en in Southern Ontario as well. If you are unprepared to encounter interpretations that you might find objectionable, please do not proceed further. 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. What do you call the little gray creature (that looks like an insect but is actually a crustacean) that rolls up into a ball when you touch it? Certainly wrong would be a deep red spot in one spot with blue everywhere else. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from. Came out as Alabama. I suspect 'sneakers' is gaining ground. It sounds to me like it is accurately says you talk like a lot/many folks from the Maryland/Delaware area, but also lots (but not as much) similarity with many folks from both St Loius and northern N. Jersey. My top three cities were in Southern California, and I did grow up on the west coast (albeit farther north, in Oregon). (Ignore the k-values for now.). Here's my map, or at least one version of it: The "specific cities" feature is a bit random mine are "Baltimore" and "Saint Louis", both attributed to the fact that (like a large minority of other Americans) I lack the caught/cot merger, and "Newark/Paterson", attributed to the term "mischief night" for the night before Halloween: "Mischief night" is one of those phrases that I've heard around, maybe when I lived in northern New Jersey for a while, though we had no such concept when I was growing up (since mischief took place on Halloween itself). I have done several of these in the past and I often got placed in middle America (I live in Atlanta and am an Atlanta native, and our area is pretty homogenized and de-Southernized, so this makes sense). Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map. Youll need your answers later! How do you pronounce the last vowel in the word "cinema"? What do you call the drink made with milk and ice cream? There are a bunch of quizzes out there that purport to tell you what American dialect you speak. But I don't find it that surprising. Something for everyone interested in hair, makeup, style, and body positivity. Plus I think in the typical usage of my peers growing up we didn't say "hoagie" uniformly instead of "sub"; rather we used the former to refer to a specific subset of the broader category referred to by the latter. What do you call a rack you dry your clothes on in a house? The heat map accurately concentrates on the West but the city choices are just weird. I've taken both, and got the same results. Copyright 2011 ProjectImplicit All rights Reserved Disclaimer Privacy Policy, https://research.virginia.edu/research-participants. The earliest quiz of this type to be widely disseminated online was the Harvard Dialect Survey, conducted in the early 2000s by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. What does the way you speak say about where youre from? Does that make me part New Englander? The following questions were inspired by two nationally conducted surveys: Bert Vaux's and Scott Golder's. You were obviously a Brit from your accent, but you were also clearly very used to using American idioms. I got Boston, Yonkers, and New York. Some southerners may consider y'all to be non-standard, for example, and therefore give answers like you or you all. It tried submitting again, but it says it's a duplicate. Bert Vaux. There was also a moderate similarity with the dialects of coastal states. But there seems to be a problem, either in the interpretation of the answers or in the method of combining them, as indicated by the fact that my final map has got a lot of orange and red below the Mason-Dixon line, despite the information that I'm not a y'all speaker. Cot & caught = different What is your general term for the type of rubber-soled shoes that one typically wears for athletic activities or casual situations? It may be a distinctive usage a 'Where'd ja learn that? Project Implicit uses the same secure hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPS) that banks use to securely transfer credit card information. What do you call this long green herb that is used as a garnish or in soups, salads and stir-fry dishes? Both are interesting to look at and very informative. I found several of the questions hard to answer. What do you call an unattended machine (normally outside a bank) that dispenses money when a personal coded card is used. 2 thoughts on "Fascinating Dialect Quiz from NY Times based on Harvard Linguist" Dennis Orzo says: December 30, 2013 at 11:29 pm. Some funny ones here. This put me where I live now (and have lived for the last two-decades-plus) not where I grew up, but I answered the questions in present-tense and (to take the one which was pretty obviously supposed to be a "tell" for those of us who grew up in the Delaware valley) I don't present-tense say "hoagie" because I assume I wouldn't be understood. What do you call an artificial nipple, usually made of plastic, which an infant can suck or chew on? 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. I was born in Ft Benning, GA but spend very little time in the South but my parents were from Chattanooga, TN and Columbus, GA. All soft drinks were reffered to as 'cokes' in my family and I think that I spoke Southern American English when I was a kid. The quiz is designed to pinpoint the quiz-taker's exact region, based on the words he or she uses. The UWM Dialect Survey Website Powered by WordPress.com. I suspect also there are some phonological "tells" that are hard to ascertain via this sort of quiz, because you can't just phrase them as "rhymes with X" versus "rhymes with Y." (It belongs to the genus Allium and lacks a fully-developed bulb. My map placed me in Denver and Aurora, Colorado, a place I've visited exactly twice in my life, and Minneapolis/St. Note: This site is designed for adults, aged 18 or older. Tennis was never a foreground sport in North Dakota. Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map"), NYT 12/21/2013. I guess that works on word choice rather than accent. Click here to take the quiz What do you call a drive-through liquor store? H/T to the Harvard Dialect Survey and The New York Times for the data. [Harvard/University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee] Dialect Survey. But I don't know how you would reliably elicit that in this sort of text-based format. Though I obviously know about y'all, I'd never use it except as a joke or quotation or imitation, and similarly for you'uns and youse. Stay tuned for all of this in Part 2! These are the results from all current and previous dialect surveys conducted Oh well. Results in a smooth field of parameter estimates over the prediction region. Even if only one percent of New Yorkers answer a question the same way we do, that could still be bright red on the map if the corresponding figure in Texas is one in a thousand. But the real usage distribution of such alternatives may not emerge accurately from answers to questions like this. How do you pronounce the -sp- sequence in "thespian" (the word meaning "actor")? BYU Open Textbook Network. [(myl) Yes, the 25 questions that you get are clearly a random selection from a larger set. I grew up in and around Hamilton, Ontario, and when I was 23, I moved to Kingston, also in Ontario, where I've lived for the past decade or so. The answer was always Boston-Worcester-Providence, which is accurate although in fact I sometimes find Rhode Islanders hard to understand. What do you call the insect that flies around in the summer and has a rear section that glows in the dark? In responses to the Harvard Dialect Survey, the word caramel is. What do you call the miniature lobster that one finds in lakes and streams for example (a crustacean of the family Astacidae)? results of 122 different dialect questions. Tried three times, both when logged in and not, and a map never came up. Teachers will compare their own usage and dialect with that of other across the nation and within their own colleague group within the class. How do you pronounce the word "sandwich"? The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website. University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and is hosted by the Maybe it hasn't been mapped yet. Obsessed with travel? About the Creators. Marius L. Jhndal, Three of the most similar cities are shown. How Birth Year Influences Political Views, The American Middle Class Is No Longer the Worlds Richest. How do you pronounce the name of this small British quick bread (or cake if the recipe includes sugar)? The following questions were inspired by two nationally conducted surveys: Bert Vaux's and Scott Golder's Harvard Dialect Survey, and Burt Vaux's and Bridget Samuels' UWM Dialect Survey. pronounced car-ml by people in the Northeast only. As Rochester is pretty close geographically to Toronto I was impressed. If you'd like to find out, there is a 25 question quiz provided which if fully answered will then create your Personal Dialect Map. One Morton Dr Suite 500 However, when I found out that you lived in Texas, I was actually a little puzzled, since you didn't seem to speak the kind of American English that one would learn living in that part of the country. It was such a hit that three years later Katz published a book about it. Answer the 25 questions regarding your language usage and pronunciation. 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. Something for everyone interested in hair, makeup, style, and body positivity. About This Quiz. Vaux and Golder distributed their 122-question quiz online, and it focused on three things: pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax. It wants to charge me money and I won't pay. Not at all. ", or the possibility exists that you did give common answers and some of your orange areas have plenty of common American speakers and the most weight questions really isn't that much more weight at all. The takeaway: Even the simplest, everyday things might be called something completely different just miles from where you live. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by . "I know it as some sort of southern thing that I associate with southern words. Maps based on survey responses to questions like this were published in the Harvard Dialect Survey in 2003. The point of performing K-NN on a dataset like this is to predict whether the star, our new input, will fall into the yellow-circle category or the purple-circle category based on its proximity to the circles around it. Of course, things are never that simple, but well reserve the complexity of K-NN for a later post. I took it three times, with about half the questions changing each time. (The dialect quiz used to be hosted on his site but was always facing server issues, so it's great that the Times agreed to host it Katz is now an intern for their graphics department.)
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