Southern. Which is weird, considering I was born and raised in Pennsylvania.
I guess it must be those redneck central PA speech patterns that threw off the test results. 
Neutral
Grew up in the midwest; live in the midwest; parents are from the Plains (…I call it the south).
My accent can vary a lot depending on whom I’m around, if I spend any amount of time with them.
I got Philidelphia?? Northeastern…never been to Philidelphia…must be all the international living I’ve been doing:)
I got Canadian. Born and raised in Alberta.
FTR, I’ve never heard anyone say “aboot”.
Southern.
Same result, and for the same reason (except for the “still reside” part, though I still live in the region).
Well, it got me right. I mean, I’ve lived in Georgia for thirty years, and my family has been in North Carolina for over two hundred years. So the quiz scored me as…
Neutral.
Which makes sense. You don’t get your accent from your parents, you get it from the kids you grow up with. So since I was born in Cleveland and had lived in Kentucky, Florida (ugh) Pennsylvania and back in Northern Ohio all by the time I was fourteen, my accent is a mishmash of all of these. (I did have a pretty strong Cleveland accent when I moved to Atlanta at 14, but it quickly got smoothed out into the General American/ever-so-slightly Southern phonology that I have today.)
There is a recognizable New York accent that is not the stereotypical “Toidy-toid and Toid”/Fran Drescher squawk. I can’t describe it, but I know it when I hear it. One dead giveaway is talking about standing “on line” at the bank or for movie tickets. That seems to be a very localized usage; every time I hear some one use that word that way, I ask if they are from NYC. So far, the only one who wasn’t, was from Yonkers.
"Neutral
“Youre not Northern, Southern, or Western, youre just plain -American-. Your national identity is more important than your local identity, because you don`t really have a local identity. You might be from the region in that map, which is defined by this kind of accent, but you could easily not be. Or maybe you just moved around a lot growing up.”
Actually, all three of the places I lived before my 21st birthday - southern MI, Chicago northside suburb and Des Moines - are a little north of the area shown on their map.
Interesting that the first four questions were all about the cot/caught merger…
Those are all one-syllable words. (Except when I was on the boat, talking on the radio - then “four” had two syllables.)
Neutral. I think that’s because I spent more of my childhood watching TV than talking to people. Actors and national news anchors usually have neutral accents.
I took the test.
I got “Northeast New England.”
And I am Canadian.
ETA: I wonder why? Why am I not Canadian? Sniff.
Neutral. Not surprising, as I was born and grew up in Cincinnati. From time to time, a bit of hillbilly sneaks in–Cincinnati is on the border with Kentucky, after all, and my family on both sides ultimately hails from Kentucky and Tennessee.
Neutral, which is unsurprising. I grew up in Baltimore, but I’ve spent almost half my life in Nevada, New England, and Australia. I had to lose the Baltimore accent if I wanted anyone to understand what the hell I was saying.
It comes back fast, though. My SO says I sound like a completely different person about an hour after we get to Baltimore.
Neutral, which is accurate. I grew up in Upstate NY and spent a few years in CT, West Hartford, befote moving to San Francisco where I’ve lived for the most part since 1979.
I grew up at ground zero of Inland Northern; the city that is supposedly the place where the Northern Cities Vowel Shift got its start. It’s a place where the accent is strong across all social groups and classes; the blue collar Joes and old money both have the fleeyat eea (flat A)
Inland Northern really starts to become pronounced after high school, and I spent most of those years outside of my ancestral homeland. I lost most of my Buffalo accent through the years, but it rears its head from time to time. IMHO, it’s the least pleasant American English accent.
Wrong.
My ‘accent’ is nothing like the Chicago or Cleveland accent. Either the quiz uses incorrect methodology, or else I interpreted the choices incorrectly.
As a native Southern Californian, I’ve always believed my accent is neutral. It’s certainly different from the results of the quiz. I dated a girl from Saint Louis, and she said ‘You have a surfer accent.’ I was like, ‘Chya, as if!’ A few years ago, a friend said I had an English accent. Nope. I think his perception arises from my syntax. I tend to construct my sentences less casually when I’m speaking, than do some people; though I do have a tendency to be a bit of a chameleon when I’m in a group.
Not surprisingly, the quiz pegged my accent as Southern. But that’s hardly Henry Higgins territory, and Southern US accents are as varied as any other region’s. I have a “soft” coastal Georgia accent, which people sometimes mistake for English. (Like Johnny L.A., I’m formal-ish in my speech, mainly because I love the precision of the language. That contributes to people’s impression, I think. But get a couple of beers in me, sitting around the bonfire and shooting the breeze with my “homies,” and suddenly I sound a lot less proper, and a lot more like Bo and Luke Duke’s homely sister that no one mentioned in polite company.)
My husband - also a native south Georgian, born and raised about 20 miles from me - has the accent that everyone immediately pegs as Good Old Boy/Redneck, and his mother’s accent is even thicker than his. This surprises me, because no one in my family went to college until my generation, and only one of my grandparents even finished high school; whereas Tony comes from several generations of MDs and dentists. I always figured that more education and more travel would have blunted the accent…
I’ve done these types of quizzes before, and they always get it wrong. I’ve listened to that accent archive site, and I sound like I’m from southern Missouri. But I’m always placed as midwestern or neutral.
And, when I take this quiz, I’m guessed as having a Western accent. Why, I have no idea. I do in fact say stock and stalk differently, although it claims I don’t. Stalk has an L sound in it.
I recently did some Tennessee Williams and was told (by several Americans) that my accent was very good. Being English, I was quite proud.
So I tried to do the test for my Mississipi/Tennessee Williams accent, but it came back “neutral”.
I am thoroughly upset. :mad: