When traveling overseas a common question is “where are you from?” When I’ve answered “Pennsylvania,” I’ve received everything from blank stares to “oh, are you from Pittsburgh or Philadelphia?” On the one hand when I say “x hours southwest of NYC” and they say “oh, that must be Pennsylvania” I feel like I’ve been talking down to them, while on the other when I say “Pennsylvania” and I get a blank stare I feel ethnocentric for expecting them to know every geographic detail of my home country.
About how familiar are non-US citizens with the names and relative locations of the states? Obviously there will be lots of variation, but if I told an average 20- or 30-something in your country I was from state X, how much would that mean to them? I’ve posed this question to several foreign friends, and am interested in what the SD community has to say.
I suspect most would be able to point out New York, California, Texas and Florida on a map, (HI and AK are gimmes), but what about Michigan? Would they be able to recognize Alabama as being part of the South? Would they be cognizant of all the derisive things we say about New Jersey (deserved or not)?
Most Canadians are probably more-or-less familiar with all 50 states, and most have probably tried to name them all at random drunken parties at some point in their lives! There’s one no one remembers, though. Many have also visited one or more states as well. I’m not sure I’d know what “x hours SW of NYC” would mean, because I’ve never really thought about the distances before and it seems like a silly way to introduce where you’re from.
Well, most Israelis at least know that Minnesota is in the north. They generally aren’t aware that it’s often almost as hot here in the summer months as it is there, but then, most people from the southern US aren’t aware of that either.
I’ve got several friends on facebook from the Philippines and they know where Arizona is. The Grand Canyon probably helps as well as the location near Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Most Panamanians are going to know where New York, Florida, California, and Texas are. Many upper and middle class Panamanians have been to the US (many go to college there); poorer Panamanians often have a sibling, uncle, or a cousin working there. They may be hazier on where Arkansas or Idaho are.
Hmm, I could probably name them… and make a decent guess at half the capitals. Might also be able to place them on a map, apart from the stupid rectangular ones in the middle… that’d be more by a process of elimination.
…I could say the same about the entire world… with the possible exception of the 'stans, can’t for the life of me remember the order. And some parts of the former yugoslavia are quite tiny and annoying.
In Hong Kong, the average Joe on the street would likely know where California, Florida and New York are. They would have heard of a few other states, but they may not have a good idea where they are. Some people, of course, are worldlier than others, and may have travelled around a bit and would know more. However, it would be rare for someone who has never lived in the US to be able to name all 50 states.
If what I’ve read on the Internet is to be believed, apparently there’re even Americans who don’t know New Mexico is one of the 50 states that people who live there sometimes have trouble ordering stuff over the phone. :smack:
In a recent thread there was a mention of a Welsh author who mistakenly had an American character being from Dakota. The author was apparently unaware that North Dakota and South Dakota are two seperate states and not just two halves of the same state.
In a previous thread on this topic, a few non-Americans said that they had thought New England was a state.
For anyone who would like to test their prowess at naming the states based upon their location, you can do that here: http://www.sporcle.com/games/states.php
I’d recognise the names of most if you said 'em to me, but I wouldn’t be able to list them or to place them all. I can manage the more famous ones though.
I asked my gfs filipinovfamily members if they knew how many states there are, one of them knew there were 50, the others ad lower numbers.
I think in general most foreigners will know california and new york. I had to explain to them that washington borders canada, and that my hometown chicago is over 2,000 miles from where I live in Seattle. I think they were surprised America was that big. I also had to explain Alaska is part of america but not contiguous.
These people were all college students or college graduates. I have a very hard time with philippine geography!
Remember, non-Americans have no particular reason to be aware of the geographic location of most of the states. Someone might be wholly unable to locate, say, Montana or Alabama on a map might still be aware of Alabama as a state in the deep south, with all the stereotypes of racist attitudes that that evokes, and of Montana as kind of empty, except for some cowboys here and there. And they might know more; they could talk about bus boycotts in Montgomery, for instance, yet still be unable to locate the state. After all, its location is not actually the most important thing about it. The knowledge that non-Americans have of the various states might be more or less extensive, and it might be more or less accurate, and it might be more or less outdated. But in most cases it’s not likely to revolve around geographic location.
A few weeks ago I was on the quiz site Sporcle and became obsessed with getting all 50 US states, so now I know them off by heart. Before that I would have been able to name maybe three quarters of them and place about half on a map.
I’d say I have a more intense interest in the US than the average Australian so I’d guess most could probably name half? That’s just my estimation, though.
To be honest, I wouldn’t except my countrymen to nail more than a dozen states on average; it’s not exactly a major part of the geography curriculum… kinda like the Swiss cantons, they’re mentioned at some point… but it’s not considered vitally important. The only reason US states are retained better than cantons is most likely due to the fact that you can’t avoid hearing them mentioned from time to time if you follow popular culture at all.
I might have an unfair advantage compared to them; having driven down most of the I-95 a couple of times… oh and the fact that I sort of lived in the US for 4 years.
My BFF, at say age 30, would have been in trouble to name five States. But then, this is a woman who had never learned any traffic signs other than “stop” and “yield” until she started studying for her license. In the Spanish sentence, “she travels like luggage, without seeing anything.”
The students in my grad class in Miami, when one of the teachers thought he’d get a laugh by tacking a blank map of the USA to an exam on quantum chemistry for extra credit, turned out to be better at filling it than the teacher; we all got 40 or more states right, and pointed out that his drawing had missed two of the smallest ones (Maryland and RI). But we’d all been thinking of going to the USA for years, so we’d been paying attention.
Most people fall in between. There are many people who, watching a movie, will believe the invented parts and disregard or disbelieve those which are real; there are many who, like my BFF, can watch ten thousand movies set in the USA and never learn that there is a state called New Mexico; and then there are those who can name a lot of the states but get lost with “all those square places”. They’ll know there is a state called Utah, but… where does it go? Somewhere in the square sea.