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North American Regional Dialects and Accents (2016)
- ambar123 9y agohow come
- excalibur 9y agoThe level of detail on this is astonishing. Great job!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- swamp40 9y agoNext up - an AI that can pinpoint the region where you were raised.
- jhbadger 9y agoThere was a quiz in the NYT a year or two ago that did an astounding job of this without any AI -- it suggested two places for my upbringing based on what words I used "pop" vs "soda", whether I pronounced "pin" and "pen" the same or not, etc -- and the two suggested places happened to be where I grew up and where my parents grew up (which probably influenced my speaking by copying them as well as my peers).
- adwi 9y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/...
- bllguo 9y agoWell, that's a decision tree! An algo that arguably falls under ML :)
- nerfhammer 9y agoSeemed to me like it was some sort of bayes classifier. Either way, clearly classic ML.
- Splines 9y agoThat would be fun to use. Talk to an AI for a minute and have it figure out where you're from. Kind of like an audio based 20 questions. It would also be entertaining to try and trick it.
- santaclaus 9y agoSuper cool -- I don't think I've ever heard caught != cot or dawn != don. This map seems to depict the west as much more homogenous than it actually is. Angelenos sound very different than Portlanders, for instance (moving south along the west coast seems to correlate with more modulation of pitch and more vocal fry).
- mac01021 9y agoWhere do you live? I grew up in Eastern CT and the only people I've met for whom "caught" == "cot" or "dawn" == "don" are from working class families in Boston.
- ethbro 9y agoIt's different in eastern VA (where I get most of my accent from), but I have heard them equate out in more rural GA.
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoI'm from Indiana. I think most folks there (including myself) say caught = cot and dawn = don.
- fnj 9y agoWhat other possible way is there to pronounce it?
- mac01021 9y agoI think in most of the USA, "bot", "lot", "cot", "not", and "father" all share the same vowel, while "bought", "lost", "caught", "nought", and "fought" all share a different vowel. The following wikipedia article discusses the two phonemes and how they are merged in many dialects of english, and contains audio samples of the same guy pronouncing both words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger#North_American_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger#Nort...
- 9y ago
- MayeulC 9y agoInteresting map, it makes me want to make a poster out of it. Since the map is (as far as I could see) a raster, does anyone have any recommendations on engines that can overlay information on maps (preferably open, ranging from svg + inkscape to a custom osm visualizer). I am just asking for curiosity's sake, nothing professional in mind here.
- Raphmedia 9y agohttp://aschmann.net/AmEng/index_collection/AmericanEnglishDialects.png http://aschmann.net/AmEng/index_collection/AmericanEnglishDi...
- maxerickson 9y agoProbably QGIS if you are doing something data driven and want a big image as output (especially if the source data has geographic coordinates associated with it). There are a few open map engines, I guess mapserver and mapnik are 2 of the more prominent ones, and now there are several implementations using OpenGL (aimed at tiled vector maps in browsers). But that is all more at the toolkit level rather than the application level. For simple stuff, using leaflet to draw on top of OSM tiles is a nice solution.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoMy god. Of all places to include on there my hometown is on that map. See: south of Toronto and south of Guelph. Number 683. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Dover,_Ontario https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Dover,_Ontario --- Great share! Thank you!
- bungie4 9y agoSee ya on the 13th
- maxerickson 9y agoYou left off the 'eh'.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoMaybe so. But I've been transplanted to Toronto the past number of years. Off topic: if you haven't seen Letterkenny yet, please watch. It is rural Southern Ontario. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4647692/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4647692/
- madengr 9y agoThe ones I find fascinating are those of Chinese ancestry in the deep south, like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypj7J2y-bPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypj7J2y-bPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NMrqGHr5zE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NMrqGHr5zE
- Pharylon 9y agoThe Ocracoke Brogue has always fascinated me. A tiny, dying dialect that sounds nothing like the rest of the American South. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7MvtQp2-UA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7MvtQp2-UA
- js2 9y agoI was raised in Miami, parents from New Jersey. I don't have an accent. (edit: I mean "General American with no obvious southern, northern, eastern, or western features.") But there's still some tells like "soda" vs "pop" and you can pry "y'all" out of my cold dead hands. My wife and I had been living in Atlanta a couple years when I was speaking over the phone to a coworker in Syracuse, NY. Toward the end of the call she told me I had a lovely southern accent. Hung up the phone, called my wife, "Honey, it's time to move." :-) Fun fact: I'm told that in Dallas, TX "y'all" is singular, the plural of which is "all y'all."
- Pharylon 9y agoOf course you have an accent, everyone does. What you mean is you have an generic American "TV accent."
- ethbro 9y agoThrough personal study, I've come to the scientific conclusion that "generic American TV accent" means the person is from Iowa or Kansas more often than not.
- js2 9y agoMy poorly made point was that I didn't have anything distinguishing me as being from the south growing up, but that I picked up an accent (at least to a Syracuse person's ears) while living in Atlanta. It surprised me given I'd only been there a couple years and that you don't hear southern accents very often in Atlanta in any case.
- vram22 9y ago>point was that I didn't have anything distinguishing me as being from the south growing up, but that I picked up an accent (at least to a Syracuse person's ears) while living in Atlanta. It surprised me given I'd only been there a couple years That tends to happen a good amount, I think. I've seen it happen to me (subconciously picking up the use of certain accents or local words), after moving from one region of India to another, say between central / northern / southern parts, and also to other people (Indian colleagues) when we went to Malaysia. Within a few weeks, some of them were adding -la (pronounced lah) to the ends of their sentences, which is a thing that local people do there.
- jasode 9y agoReddit[1] made me aware of 2 specific examples: "pin" == "pen" : http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/81929757765/cather-wren-catherine-fangirl-and-the-pinpen http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/81929757765/cather-wren-... "soda" vs "pop" vs "coke": http://popvssoda.com/ http://popvssoda.com/ All the examples I've seen overlap closely with the Southern belt of states. For a more HN-flavored survey, I wonder if there's a clear regional boundary for "tuple". I've heard it pronounced "too-pull" (sorta like "pupil") and "tuppel" (like "couple"). Don't know if that's an East vs West coast thing or a Cambridge/Oxford/England vs MIT/Stanford/USA thing. Maybe it's just random based on who you heard it from first. (But let us stay away from discussing "gif". There are standards of civility here.) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_most_southern_us_english_speakers_make_no/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_m...
- Pharylon 9y agoOn the "soda vs pop vs coke" question, as a child I would have never used any of those words. Here in Western NC, we said "soft drink" for sweet carbonated beverages. People my age (late 30s) and older still do, but the younger generation has picked up "soda."
- santaclaus 9y agoI'm from Durham, NC and for 22 years hadn't heard 'coke' refer to anything other than, well, a coke (I always said soda or soft drink). It wasn't until I moved to NY that I learned of the 'coke' for soda stereotype about southerners! (Don't get me started on 'law'yer vs 'loy'er, though...)
- FroshKiller 9y agoIn the Piedmont, we said "drink." Growing up, I knew what "soft drink" meant and understood the distinction, but nobody among my family & friends used that phrase. Also never heard anyone call anything but a Coke a Coke, which is a really common stereotype of Southern English.
- 9y ago
- taneem 9y agoI will be curious to see if people belonging to different internet subcultures develop their own accents. Already different groups of people are quite isolated in terms of the video and audio they consume everyday (vloggers and podcasters).
- Raphmedia 9y agoThe "Youtube Voice" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-linguistics-of-youtube-voice/418962/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-l... https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/aepn94/the-rise-of-youtube-voice-and-why-vloggers-want-it-to-stop https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/aepn94/the-rise-of-youtub... However, much of the internet is written and not spoken. So we gets new ways to write (doge, memes, 4chan green text, etc.) but not really new accents.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoNice links, I would have never thought of it that way. I've also noticed a certain way of speaking that seems really popular in the "video essay" crowd. For example if you search for 5-15 min videos analyzing a movie, they almost all speak exactly the same way.
- chiph 9y ago> Hey guys! What’s up? It’s Julie. I've really grown to hate this intro, plus the whole "bouncy" style of pronunciation. To me, it sounds a lot like "I'm trying too hard to get attention", like that of a 2 year old repeating "dad. dad. DAD."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- andrewla 9y agoAlso of interest is the "Harvard Dialect Survey" [1], which gives direct questions and highlights the regional variances. My favorite is "standing on line" vs "standing in line" -- I had never even heard the "on line" variant until I moved to NYC, where it is ubiquitous. Apparently now there's the "THE CAMBRIDGE ONLINE SURVEY OF WORLD ENGLISHES" [2], apparently by the same individual, but I've only just started looking at it. [1] http://dialect.redlog.net/maps.html http://dialect.redlog.net/maps.html [2] http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/cambridge_survey/ http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/cambridge_survey/
- arethuza 9y ago"Do you say pop or soda?" There is no option for "ginger".... not impressed ;-)
- smcl 9y agoI've also heard coke or irn bru being called "juice" :D
- ethbro 9y agoWhere uses "ginger"? That's a new one for me.
- maxerickson 9y agoI don't know if it is what the other poster is talking about but Michigan is weird in that a relatively large number of people drink ginger ale as a soft drink, particularly Vernors.
- RightMillennial 9y agoJust for the record to prevent any potential confusion: we Michiganders don't call pop "ginger". We do like our ginger ale though (particularly Vernors, but Canada Dry isn't bad).
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
- clarkenheim 9y agoWould love to see an attempt at one of these for the British Isles.
- jackhack 9y agoNot exactly a written map, but I think you'll enjoy. "A tour of the British Isles in accents" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mzWkuOxz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mzWkuOxz8
- arethuza 9y agoThat might be quite tricky - I suspect the regional variations aren't quite as strong as they used to be but where I grew up (a small fishing village in North East Scotland) it was possible to identify people from a farming rather than a fishing background due to them having a different accent even though they lived perhaps 1km away...
- arprocter 9y agoAgree with you there - drive an hour in the UK and the accent and slang could be completely different (e.g. Manchester to Liverpool), whereas in the US you could easily still be in the same state.
- jamiek88 9y agoJeez, Liverpool itself has several distinct accents, so does Manchester or at least Greater Manchester. You can't drive 10 miles without new accents in populated areas more like!
- cassowary 9y agoIt's done a bit differently, but there's an app on phones "The English Dialects app" you can install that will give you some specific features and how they distribute in Britain and Ireland. It will also try to guess where you're from, if you're from those parts. It does heat maps of features, rather than trying to group bundles into discrete areas. This is probably more accurate, because it shows you were features are strong. Sometimes they'll correlate with others, sometimes not.
- germinalphrase 9y agoIf you're intonthis stuff, the Dictionary of Regional American English[0] is pretty great. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_American_Regional_English https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_American_Regio...
- pklausler 9y agoMy favorite is the Californian use of the definite article when identifying numbered roadways, e.g. "I took the 5.". Here in Oregon, a general (and I must say unfair) disapproval of transplanted Californians exists, and that use of the definite article is a "tell" that the natives have learned to look for.
- mcmoose75 9y agoThat's more specifically a Southern Californian thing- people moving from Northern California to SoCal find it strange.
- irrational 9y agoHuh, I'm not a Californian by any means, but now that I think about it I say "the 217", "the 26", etc. Have I been corrupted by Californians that have moved to Oregon?
- davidw 9y agoYes - we do not say that in Oregon. Right: "I drove out 26 to John Day to fill my elk tag". Wrong: "I drove down the 5 to that new Sushi-Yoga place". Here's an article that purports to explain why: https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-5-the-101-the-405-why-southern-californians-love-saying-the-before-freeway-numbers https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-5-the-101-the-405-why... And yes, it's definitely a Southern California/LA thing.
- Aardwolf 9y agoA bit misleading for the region sizes though, the map's projection doesn't preserve area very well... Canada is much more huge than in reality on it!
- jccalhoun 9y agoI was an english major and took an intro to linguistics class. On the first day the prof had us introduce ourselves and based on the accent he guessed where we were from down to a part of the state. I don't remember much of anything from that class but that was pretty cool.
- api_or_ipa 9y agoI'm surprised they lump most of English speaking Canada together. Vancouver, Calgary/Edmonton and Toronto (Torono) have, IMO, pretty distinct accents.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoNot only that but there's a pretty clear continuity of dialect _over_ the US Canada border in many places. Drive into upstate NY from Ontario and there's a pretty clear cultural and linguistic continuity in many respects.
- asveikau 9y agoIf you listen closely to older people in San Francisco, the accent situation is a lot more complex than I've heard anyone acknowledge. - There's what I've sometimes heard called the "Mission accent", which can easily be mistaken for New York or Boston if you're unfamiliar with it. Rs get soft or disappear and vowels get very east coasty. I heard the origin of this is from decades ago when the Mission was an Irish neighborhood. - There's an accent which to my DC area ears sounds kind of southern, almost like the Ozarks. Maybe that has similar roots to the one described here as pin=pen in the San Joaquin Valley, but I'm not too familiar with those parts. - Nancy Pelosi came from Baltimore and has the accent to boot (I heard a lot of people talking like her in my DC area childhood), but her speech patterns don't sound too far off compared to older San Franciscans. I presume that's a phenomenon from the "pocket of Midland accent" that I've seen on this and other maps. I think most of this is probably dying out in younger people. (And of course most 20s-30s types you meet in SF are from somewhere else.)
- Balgair 9y agoMany of my in-laws are from the East Bay, so I have something of a window into these issues. The 'southern' accent of the Valley towns is from their Okie migrant ancestors. As many fled the Dust Bowl, they carried their accents into the San Joaquin Valley and the Salinas Valley too. I've spent a bit of time out there in construction (SJ and Salinas Valleys) and most of the time those guys have little discernible accent. However, if you get them very angry or very drunk, it's nearly a southern accent. I've no idea where they get it from, as I've had a fair few glasses of wine at the holidays and can't recall hearing the southern brogue, but they all seem to slip into it when they get rear-ended on 5.
- jorblumesea 9y agoI think accents themselves will become a relic of the past, given the prevalence of mass media and the internet. Millennials will probably be the last broad generation to have any hint of an accent.
- primo44 9y agoI think that was the expectation a few generations ago, once TVs were in most people's homes, but it didn't happen. I recall seeing a headline for a study a couple of years ago that said that regional accents were actually getting stronger.
- ekimekim 9y agoAs an anecdote: I have a friend who grew up in Sydney, AU. Never left the country. He has a distinctly american accent. He attributes it to too much TV.
- BjoernKW 9y agoEver been to the UK? There are some accents that for many American English speakers wouldn't be intelligible. I doubt those will disappear within a generation. There's a general tendency of accents merging or becoming more similar but new accents develop out of that as well. I think you underestimate the effect everyday speech has on people. Take the Dutch for instance. They're famous for almost universally speaking English very well. The main reason for this is that in the Netherlands foreign language films, TV series etc. come with subtitles instead of a dubbed version. Still many still have a recognisably Dutch accent. Then there's another phenomenon that in language history so far has only happened to English: There are more non-native speakers than native speakers. So we might very well end up with something like a universal, worldwide English accent. It might just not sound like any of the native English accents at all.
- jamiek88 9y ago> There are more non-native speakers than native speakers That is a wonderful point that I've never thought of before. You can really envision a lingua franca that is English but not American English or British English but Global English. Second and third generation English speakers who live in a non-English speaking country as a majority of English speakers - will they be like how English is used in India or something completely different? Fascinating.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoFirst audio sample is of a woman in Alabama describing a tornado. I know HN hates humor but I couldn't help but laugh at the irony.
- freehunter 9y agoWhy is it ironic? Alabama gets many tornadoes, so it makes sense that an audio clip describing a tornado is from a place that receives tornadoes. It's like saying it's ironic that someone from Buffalo NY is describing snow... they get it quite often. It might be ironic if someone from Alabama was describing snow, though.
- dblohm7 9y agoI am surprised that the Canadian English block is so large. Having lived in both places, there is a definite difference in accent between Western Canada and Southern Ontario. EDIT: The stereotypical "out" and "about" pronunciation is much more prominent in Southern Ontario.
- sandworm101 9y agoWhen i am in the us everyone thinks im from california. Regardless of studies, BC, cali and alaska share a west coast accent. Thats one of the reasons hollywood likes to film in vancouver.
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoActually the 'aboot' thing that people stereotype about Canadians is more prominent in the upper midwest US than it is in most parts of Canada. I do hear a difference between western Canada and Ontario (I'm from the former and live in the latter.) But there's also a known dialect difference between central and southern Alberta (former settled by English/Ukrainian/Germans the other by American immigrants). Rural Ontario, well, that's another story.
- poulsbohemian 9y agoHad a professor in college from the UK. I was completely confused listening to his accent all semester, as I could never place it. I'd worked with a group of people from all over -- Southhampton, Liverpool, London, etc -- so I knew the different accents. Finally one day I broke down and asked him about it. Turned out his dad had been in the military and he'd never lived in any one place for very long, so his accent was a jumble. I am a born and raised Cascadian. That said, years ago I heard Californians call it "the 5" and thought it was brilliant, so I started using it. Friends in both Oregon and Washington give me the stink eye for adopting this foreign style of speech, but it's all in good humor. Just to really mess with people, I really like to say "cheers" in place of "thank you" too. Adds some international charm to their day.
- pc2g4d 9y ago"Cascadian" Of the Republic of Cascadia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_(independence_movement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_(independence_movemen...
- nohat00 9y agoI call BS on the "don"/"dawn" isogloss on the SF peninsula. If it ever did exist, it certainly doesn't anymore. There are no cultural or social groupings along that isoglass that would justify how that line is shaped. Where your parents are from and your socioeconomic status to have way more influence on whether or not you have a "don"/"dawn" distinction than whether you are from San Mateo or San Carlos.
- strgrd 9y agoI think it's interesting that this is a map of almost exclusively caucasian accents (as the note on the left explains, information on the distinct African American Vernacular English dialect is not included, partly because the geographical variations of AAVE are largely independent of 'white' dialects). Googling around, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent map out there for AAVE.
- kingkawn 9y agoIf by interesting you mean regular ol racist crap; I concur.
- NathanCH 9y agoIt's so easy to be racists nowadays that anyone can be racist accidentally for little to no reason at all. Cool!
- GuiA 9y agoIt is my observation that there are, broadly speaking, 2 definitions of "racism" floating around in the USA these days. The first is mostly used by people who have lived in a fairly homogeneous environment (ie mostly people of their race & cultural background, which in the USA happens to be white and christian), and it is a very strict one. Murdering a black person while shouting "all black people must die!" would undeniably be "racist" under that definition, and so would a law that says there must be separate facilities for white people and people of other races. However, that definition does not encompass much in the way of acts that do not blatantly qualify as racist. The second definition, used mostly (but not only) by people who are not of the dominant racial or cultural background, defines racism as a broader system of interconnected pieces (some historical, some cultural, some legal, etc.); some of them which might not appear strictly racist at first, but when observed within the broader scope of the system they function within, contribute to a general systematic alienation of the population based on racial or cultural features, or in other words, "racism". People who function with the second definition might find the linked article "racist" in that sense, because while it is a well documented article, it presents a picture of the US that is lacking many speakers of American-English, the vast majority of them non-white. Of course, that map is a flawed representation in the first place - dialects are not distributed neatly along smooth lines as depicted. But it is flawed in a way that totally erases the existence of many speakers of American-English (unless one wants to make the argument that these communities do not speak American-English, which I think most HN readers can see as absolutely silly). The map, like any other map, is a flawed representation; but it is one that, under this definition, could be said to be flawed in a racist way. This does not mean that the author is racist; merely that the work was produced within a dominant homogeneous socio-cultural context, that many take issue with. The USA is currently undergoing a deep identity crisis, where the hegemony of the cultural majority is being challenged by people who identities have been ignored over the centuries (some due to genocide, some due to slavery, some because they were just poor immigrants at the bottom of the totem pole, but whose descendants are very much native to the USA and are confined to ghettos, etc), and who are now able to express themselves due to the new forms of media that have emerged. Many people living outside of the US (and many within) do not have much of an understanding of this situation, either because they have not been exposed to it sufficiently, or because they outright deny it (for one extreme of it, see Steve Bannon's reaction when an interviewer says that all Americans except for Native Americans are immigrants [0]). A similar phenomenon is also happening with the notion of "sexism". [0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bannon-rose-60-minutes-interview-immigration-2017-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/bannon-rose-60-minutes-interv...
- pc2g4d 9y agoThis doesn't strike me as "dialect" so much as "accent". There seems to be nothing lexical (nothing about the words you use) and only matters of pronunciation are covered. But it's a great map, and I'd love to work on this type of thing somehow!
- kbutler 9y agoThis is more interesting and readable to me: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html?_r=1& http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/... also http://discovermagazine.com/galleries/2013/june/regional-us-language-dialect http://discovermagazine.com/galleries/2013/june/regional-us-...
- mattnumbe 9y agoThere's a good radiolab episode about American dialects http://www.radiolab.org/story/yall-youse-yinz/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/yall-youse-yinz/
- burntrelish1273 9y agoThere was a more general 2005 documentary with interviews by Robert MacNeil of the NewsHour called Do You Speak American? http://www.pbs.org/speak/ http://www.pbs.org/speak/ Also, I have serious doubts about the "differences" in SF Bay Area upper and lower peninsula pronouncing "on." Source: 40 year resident.