Thank you! It got me broadly as Inland North all right, but flubbed the specifics. It compared me to Minneapolis/St. Paul, Grand Rapids, and Buffalo. I’ve never been to any of those locations. I tried to answer the way I remember everybody around me speaking when I was growing up in Cleveland. I’ve made some changes since then. Crayon now with 2 syllables and caramel now with 3. Where I grew up, each was missing a syllable. I’ve skewed my native dialect a lot by reading too many dictionaries, too many books in general.
The quiz nailed me solid - Long Beach/Irvine, CA. Apparently, “frontage road” is a tell for Southern California.
The test put me in the South, somewhere between Memphis and Birmingham. I’ve never lived anywhere near that region; I spent my first ten years in Texas, and five years of my adulthood in western Kentucky, but the majority of my life in St. Louis. My friends tell me I have an accent, but it’s unplaceable.
The quiz was mostly right for me. I grew up in the Midwest, including several years in Chicago, and now live in Maryland. It got all of those. It missed by putting me in Upstate New York, where I have never spent much time.
A few features of my speech:
- I do not have the whine/wine merger. I pronounce a sort of '‘h’ sound along with the ‘w’ in “what” or “wheat”. My kids think this is weird
- I also don’t have the cot/caught merger. Not that I say either word very often, but they are definitely different
- I have brought the short o vowel backwards a bit and rounded it, so ‘dog’ is more like ‘dawg’
The quiz suggested Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and Overland Park (in Kansas). The first two were pretty close. I grew up in Kokomo, Indiana, which is about midway between Indy and Fort Wayne. Overland Park is the puzzling outlier.
On the other hand, I sometimes think that my use of language may be distorted somewhat by the fact that I read a lot, and have been known to adopt terms that I learn in books. For example, I chose “frontage road” for the question about a small road next to the highway. But I only know that term because I read it somewhere. I never heard anyone use it growing up, and as far as I know people around here don’t have a particular term for that concept.
I have the full Mary-merry-marry merger–can’t hear a bit of difference between any of the three. On the other hand, I do not have the caught-cot merger. I also don’t say “warsh” for “wash,” although my mother did.
I have consciously adopted a few terms that I’ve heard on British TV shows. I’ll talk about the “bin men” instead of the “garbage men,” for example, or use “bloody” as a mild oath. But those are affectations, and not part of my natural dialect.
Meh. The closest the quiz could get to my hometown was a whole half hour away. Trash.
Generally a fairly standard Midwestern/Great Lakes. Spending six years in a fairly cosmopolitan college town (Madison, WI), and then moving to the Chicago area, largely got rid of most of my Green Bay accent and speech patterns, though it still comes back a bit when I spend time back up there.
There’s a lot of this going on in my own idiolect (SE Louisiana, near New Orleans). What grade-school teachers called “short a” comes in two forms in my dialect/idiolect:
- /æ/ or Hari_Seldon’s lax “a”
- /eə/ or Hari_Seldon’s tense “a”. Note that this is a diphthong – specifically, a centering diphthong. The vague similarity to “ay” (so-called “long a” or IPA /ej/) comes from the sharing the first element, /e/.
So for me, almost all words ending in stressed “-ass(e)”, “-ast”, and “-ash” (either monosyllables or words stressed on the last syllable) use /eə/: pass, grass, impasse, fast, blast, cash, mash, etc. My idiolect drops this rule on two words: mass (all senses) and Scottish lass both use /æ/.
Along the same lines, mad (/meəd/) and mat (/mæt/) don’t use the same vowel for me. Similar for cab/cap, bag/back, and many other words. A voiced final stop takes /eə/, an unvoiced final stop takes /æ/.
The upshot of the /æ/-/eə/ thing is that my vowels in the pairs hair/had, pair/pad, air/ad, etc. are very similar to one another. Also, for me hair/hate, lair/late, care/cake, etc. have decidedly different vowel sounds though my grade-school teachers would have called both “long a” – hair is close to /heər/ while hate is /hejt/.
Also in my idiolect: Nine (/najn/ for most Americans) commonly comes out “non” (/nan/) in conversational-speed speech. There are a small number of other words that do this, too – five for sure. The first-person singular pronoun I commonly reduces to /a/ for me. My to /ma/, yep. But /aj/->/a/ is not a broad covering rule in my speech – I don’t say /ras/ for rice or /tat/ for tight.
Just did this – as a Canadian.
The result I got was that my dialect is closest to that of the US cities of Seattle, Washington, Portland / Vancouver on the Oregon / Washington border, and Honolulu, Hawaii.
“Frontage road” as in a road that runs alongside a highway? That’s what we use here in Chicago, too. Or is there another meaning?
No, that’s what it means. NYT seems to think that usage is most prevalent in the Southwest. That and “freeway.”
“Freeway” definitely. But frontage roads are the basic term for those types of roads and I don’t know what other ones could be used? Service road? From my googling, it appears to be most common in Texas, the SW, California, and parts of the Midwest.
Both “service road” and “frontage road” are used in the New Orleans area, but “service road” is much more common.
Hmmm. Signals are a form of communication.
My wife and I usually use chess clocks while playing. But if one is not available, fingers set on the table mean we are thinking. A slap on the table means the move is done.
We generally slap our ring finger down to make a sharp note that the move is done.
Two slaps means check mate.
Service road is all I’ve ever heard it called. Don’t think I have ever heard “frontage” road before.
The question in that survey that surprises me the most is that sneakers is just specific to the Northeast and tip of Florida (which is probably all NY retirees.) I thought that was such a common and standard word.
In my experience, a frontage road is public and runs alongside a major highway. A service road is usually for “official vehicles” and might be located anywhere. YMMV.
“Sneakers” is familiar all over the US thanks to nationwide media. It’s just not said all over.
Thinking about it, the local use of “tennis shoes” to mean “pretty much any athletic shoes that aren’t cleats” is kind of weird. I think this usage is fading gradually around here, though.
I lack the technical vocabulary to describe how I talk. Dad was in the army, so we moved around a bunch growing up (8 different states by the time I was 16). Then my mother married a man from Alabama, so picked up some of that as well. After that lived in north/central Utah for 30 years.
To my ears I sound mostly southern California, then generally western. On top of that I affect a “faux redneck” vibe, when I remember or am in the mood. Some “roundness” to vowels has caused some people to suspect (incorrecttly) I am from Minnesota.
That NYT quiz correctly showed Utah as the highest on the heat map, but suggested Boise or Milwaukee as also likely. Northern California is also a good match. I have lived in Boise, but not the others.
That’s a common signal (between 2 persons)
I believe “idiolect” means , How you talk. Or speak. Personally.
(Just looked, written language as well).
Don’t think slapping a table counts, any more than my ASL signs.
IMO
Urban neutral. I could be from Chicago, LA, Houston, or Charlotte, really anywhere. But if you catch me off guard or under stress then you’ll hear some southernisms leak in.
I’m a lifelong southerner but went to high school in this sort of suburban colony of transplants from all over. They were the wealthy higher-status people, so if you didn’t want to sit at the country-folks table, you lost the accent real quick. I probably speak in too much of an academic/intellectual register for this reason.
Losing the accent has mostly served me well in life. It’s really amazing how quickly people will get condescending and supercilious if any of the Southern leaks out at all. I mean, stereotypes about southerners exist for good reasons of course, and my own identity is very conflicted, but northerners are way too comfortable showing all their prejudice and insecurity when circumstances favor it.