This map is awesome. It links to a ton of audio files illustrating the variations.
I have a bit of interest in American accents, and interesting maps are my crack, so this is a win-win for me. But I am not clear what constitutes a “dialect” so maybe someone could clarify. I take it that it ignores accent and focuses on vocabulary/grammar, but that’s just a guess on my part.
I haven’t explored it much, but I hope Dopers with similar interests will point me to some cool stuff.
In the usual definition of dialect, it would include pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Items of pronunciation are mentioned on that page. I don’t know why you think that they aren’t including accent.
That has to be the ugliest web site I’ve ever seen.
Unimpressive, doesn’t have a sample of the Rochester hard A dialect.
I also wouldn’t consider jimmy Durante a good exemplar of a generic New York accent, he was pretty specialized in his stage speech.
The site itself is giving me a headache so I likely missed something, but is this map really conflating all of Canada outside of the far north and Francophone areas into the same dialect?
No. Atlantic Canada is distinct from the rest of Anglophone Canada.
Obviously, we can pick this to death. Looking at Canada, the obvious weirdness is that all of Atlantic Canada is lumped together, despite the fact that Newfoundland English is as different from the English spoken in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as Texas English is different from Brooklyn.
Secondly - and this is just a limitation of the map - in my experience, at least in Canada, dialect varies more based on differentiation between rural and urban. Discounting immigrants, an urbanite from Toronto and an urbanite from Calgvary sound the same, but a rural Ontarian and a rural Albertan sound different, with much more pronounced “Canadian” patterns. I think that’s true everywhere, though, and this map is clearly meant to indicate broad dialect areas. I think it is generally true to say that the dialect spoken in Kitchener-Waterloo is essentially the same as spoken in Edmonton unless, again, we’re discussing newcomers to the country, Francophones, or aboriginals.
That is awesome…I admit the website is poorly designed, but my fascination with the topic trumps that.
I thought for sure this was going to be a link to Burt Vaux’s dialect survey results.
Something for all dialect geeks to covet: Atlas of North American English. I keep meaning to visit my local university’s reference section to peruse it, as I haven’t got $750 to spare at the moment 
I’m also wondering about some of the non-English speaking areas.
[ul]
[li]I spent my childhood in Gillam, Manitoba. At the time the town was about 50/50 Native population / Hydro workers from Winnipeg (I am in the latter category, or rather, my dad was when I was born). English was of course very common there, and many (but not all) of the Natives could speak English. From what I understand now, there are slightly more Natives than Hydro workers (although both populations have been drastically reduced, for different reasons) and the Natives speak English more. I’d hazard a guess that much of northern Manitoba is like that[/li][li]I’m also wondering about labelling the area of Russia just across the Bering Strait from Alaska as “Russian speaking”, from what I understand, there’s very little difference between the Inuit on Big Diomede Island, and Little Diomede Island, I’d say that in the small area of Russia pictured, that “indigineous languages” dominate, as they do/shouuld (forget which was mapped) on the Alaska side.[/li][li]Hi, Opal![/li][/ul]
I found the dialect map confusing, and it seemed to glide over different speech patterns within regions. H.L. Mencken did a bang-up job with his American Language, which is still worth reading; and some of his observations of dialect and, equally important, word usage, is still valid.
FWIW: From my personal experience eastern New England generally sounds similar, unless one wants to get nit picky, which I can do. As a native I can tell a south shore dialect from a north shore one but one almost has to be born and bred here to catch the differences. Portland and Boston sound rather alike. Western Massachusetts has incursions from upstate New York, which in turn has New England aspects, while many Vermonter speak like folks from northern New York. Rhode Island is a world unto itself, dialect-wise, and I won’t even go there.
More FWIW: I worked for a company years ago that had a higher up management guy who was from Pennsylvania, where the company had its home office, and I swear, every time he came through the door and opened his mouth it was like David Letterman had spoken, yet he was a Penn native (central, I’m guessing, definitely not Phillie). Does central Penn=Hoosier. It does seem that much of the midwest got its accent more from Penn than any other part of the northeast. I can’t hear any trace of NY-NJ or N.E.
Can anyone explain why people from St. Louis often sound so different from one another? I’ve known people from St. Lou who sounded like they came from Dixie, while others sound vaguely Chicagoan. Many have no accent at all.
And there’s regional accents here and there - my wife is from the Ottawa valley, which has an accent about halfway between “standard” Canadian English and Nova Scotia English. Vancouverites stretch out “oo” and “ou” sounds, etc. etc.
Well, my wife grew in part in Salem, NJ and I in Philadelphia and she says the Salem dialect is quite different from Philly’s but they are clearly put in the same district (gray).
There is a dialect spoken along the borders of northern Minnesota and southwestern Ontario and Manitoba (including Winnipeg) that I think of as “Lumberjack brogue”. I never see it mentioned and this map does not show it but it is a faint brogue that is not identifiable as Scottish or Irish but is definitely different from the sounds you hear in Duluth, Toronto or Fargo.
It’s really hard to map language these days because we all move around so much, but this is a spectacular (and overly-colorful) effort.
If you look at the map (if you can without your head hurting) you’ll notice that St. Louis is the inersection of at least four dialect zones. The classic St. Louis accent is characterized by the o=ahr vowell sound (e.g., fahrk) which is close to the pronunciation found in the Ozark Mountains. There’s also a German influence from the mid- 19th century immigrants, typically s=z, leading to the inevitable crack about “warshing ahr hands in the zink.”
But it’s something you either have or you don’t. I’ve lived in St. Louis for more than 45 years, but I never developed the accent. My children, despite the examples of their mother and me, did.
Yup, Kinulu: the extent that someone acquires an regional accent is often a matter of (unconscious?) choice. I grew up in a suburb of Boston where there’s scarcely any regional accent at all save General Northeast (i.e. you can tell that a person isn’t from Illinois) but not at all typically Kennedyesque Bostonian or even close, yet it’s less than five miles from where some people do talk that way. My theory on this is that the older, close to Boston suburbs developed a “tradition” early on of not sounding Bostonian so as to not be socially-culturally-linguistically engulfed by the city, that this was a matter of class and maybe ethnicity, and it’s stuck. Yet I knew people growing up who did have somewhat of a “townie” accent, which I attribute to their being Catholic, having grown up in a parish, thus they picked up on the folkways (so to speak) of their fellow parishioners, many of whom did have an accent. I’ve also known people who grew up in the city who didn’t acquire an accent to any considerable degree, which I take as a family influence (i.e. “we don’t want to sound neighborhood”), so there are, locally anyway, often great variations within parts of the city, thus there are no graven in stone rules in these matters.
Observation (maybe inaccurate but WTF): New Yorkers from the “boroughs” tend to sound typically NYC and yet Manhattanites generally don’t. I’ve known many New Yorkers born and bred in Manhattan who sounded like they could have come from Pittsburgh (or Plattsburgh), Massachusetts or Maryland. Apparently this goes way back. Journalist and radio commentator Walter Winchell, a born and bred Manhattanite (Harlem), sounded like a city slicker but had none of the “erl, oil, terlet, toilet” way of speaking so common among New Yorkers of his time. Same with movie actor Jimmy Cagney. Hell’s Kitchen in his case, definitely city, you’d never mistake him for Brooklyn or the Bronx. His voice, his accent was, like Winchell’s, clear as a bell. He spoke fast but always clearly.
Fascinating thread, btw.