Whoa. It picked out “where I’m from” buy also mentioned somewhere I lived for 4 years.
Got me pretty good, highlighting from southern PA up through RI. I was born and lived until I was 13 outside Washington DC but I don’t think any of the questions would have picked up the difference between my Balmer Merlin elision and Philadelphia omission in speech.
Got me right. Boston, Worcester, Providence. I grew up on the south shore of MA and southern Maine.
That’s pretty cool.
The use of the contraction mayn’t, meaning “may not”.
I grew up hearing this regularly in the small dutch-american community my family was from in Wisconsin. Moving away from there to other places in the midwest and east coast, I only got confused looks when I used it.
Researching it a bit, I discovered it was mostly out of general use but had been popular in the 1800s, & was even used by Lewis Carroll in his writings. But it persisted in the US mainly in areas of dutch and some older german settlements.
I’ll still throw it into a conversation once in a while.
Aurora, Chicago, and Tucson for me. Well, the middle one is correct, and the first one is an exurb or suburb of Chicago.
For some of those question, I truly had two answers, but was only allowed to select one. Like I call them both “pill bugs” and "roly poly"s. I actually don’t know which is more common. And the second vowel of “pajama” is an “AH” to me (from a dialect that does not have the caught-cot merger), but the two examples were an “a” as in “cat” sound and an “aw” sound. So I had to pick the third, but I wondered if I was too strict in my parsing of that question and should have picked the second option.
But with 25 questions, it all works out. The one that stuck out to me is the “raining while the sun is shining.” Now I have never in my life heard an expression for this until I moved to Budapest, where it’s the one about the devil beating his wife. My girlfriend said that and I was like, what the heck crazy kind of Hungarian expression is that? And it turns out, if I remember right, that it’s used in bits of Texas here? Anyone here know this expression?
This. I also often use one or more of the terms on a given list; and a number of times I recognized multiple answers as being in common use even if I generally use one of them more than the others. I almost checked ‘other’ for the cat of many names; but eventually went with the term I use most often. – sometimes I actually call them ‘the cat of many names’, but that’s kind of a mouthful.
I got Newark/Paterson, Yonkers, and Boston; none of which I’ve ever lived in, or spent any noticeable amount of time in.
I’ll grant that I have spent most of my life in areas coded only a little less red.
And I discovered that although I don’t hear any difference in how I say ‘Mary, merry, marry’, I do move my mouth a little differently for ‘merry’. So I responded that I pronounce that one differently, even though I can’t hear the difference.
I get New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. I grew up in southern West Virginia, about 1o years in northern WV, and the last 30 in the Philly suburbs. I guess the NYC comes from too much TV and movies.
That NY Times dialect quiz got me right on for one of the three cities (Yonkers, NY).
For my ten-year-old son, amazingly, it pinpointed the very town where he was born (Overland Park, Kansas — we lived nearby for the first five years of his life). The other two towns it guessed for him are in California — surely reflecting the gradual “Californization” of some speech traits among young people in most of the US.
Note some of the 25 questions are different each time the test is taken — I guess they come from a somewhat larger bank of maybe 40 questions.
I got Yonkers, New York and Newark/Paterson - which is correct, since I have lived in NYC my whole life. What I don’t understand is how my most distinctive answer for all three cities is “sneakers” - I would have thought that 'hero" would have distinguished NYC from Yonkers.
Took it again and this time got Witchita Kansas, Lincoln Nebraska and Reno Nevada. Wow. Again, not even close. WTF. How do all of you get such accuracy I wonder.
Have you moved around a lot? Or, live in a different part of the country from where you grew up? If so, it’s possible that your word choices and pronunciation are a blend from different areas, and as a result, the test isn’t accurate for you.
Illinois first for about 25 years, Wisconsin 2 years, Georgia 2 years, California 35 years, and Texas for 10 so far. I expected a blend but surely some of the places I lived would show up in the blend, not a batch of spots I never lived.
Same. With “sneakers” being the most distinctive answer. And yeah some of them I had multiple answers. “What do I call the big truck that transports freight?” I don’t refer to it that often that I really use one term over another, semi, tractor-trailer, 18-wheeler all sound normal to me.
The site pigeonholed me easily with one question- what do you call the night before Halloween? I answered why, Devil’s Night, of course, and that answer was a big hotspot in Michigan and nowhere else. I forgot it was a term unique to Detroit and outlying areas.
That one puzzled me a lot. I had no idea that anyone had a term for the night before Halloween.
I’ve heard that some places have a term, and once @solost said it I recognized it. But if you’d asked me to name the term beforehand I’d have totally come up empty.
The only reason I even knew this was that “Devil’s Night” in Detroit is somewhat infamous for vandalism and looting, which sometimes gets covered in the national news.
Philly has mischief night. Never heard of the concept before moving in 1970.
This quiz always tags me as being from New Jersey because of the Mischief Night question.
They pretty much nailed it for me with Detroit, Toledo and Akron [why not Cleveland?].
That’s in spite of my living in or around NYC for 25 years. Good thing they didn’t ask me about Mary/marry/merry.
And as a kid, we called the night before Halloween “Beggars’ Night.” And we’d go out trick-or-treating on BOTH nights.