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Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Differently From Each Other
- tokenadult 13y agoThis interesting set of maps is an example of how presentation can triumph over content. The pretty maps total to not a huge amount of information on dialect differences in the United States, a topic that has been posted about here on HN before, but their sheer prettiness prompted me to share the link to my Facebook wall, whereupon Facebook showed me on my home page that five of my other friends have already shared the same link. It's often easier for pretty pictures to go viral than more informative paragraphs of text. The underlying survey that gathered the data http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/ http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/ is, I think, something we have also discussed before here on HN. The link from the survey home page that is supposed to lead to the faculty webpage of the principal investigator appears to be a dead link. He is now at a new university, http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/staff/bv230/ http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/staff/bv230/ still working on linguistics research.
- anigbrowl 13y agoI disagree about the quality of the information presented herein. As someone whose day job involves recording sound for film (necessarily including lots of dialog) and who is not American, regionalisms in accents are both challenging and fascinating for me, and a frequent topic of discussion between myself and the actors I work with. On smaller films there isn't usually the budget for a dialog coach and since I listen to people for a living that aspect of production often falls in my lap. I found these maps extremely informative and and they helped to clarify some perplexing edge cases (eg people from Missouri sound southern in general, but on some words they exhibit marked differences from their near neighbors).
- antoko 13y agoNot to put words in his mouth but, I think the GP was referring to the information density rather than the information quality itself. Likely as the comparison he was making was to the presentation quality. I think you are both capable of being correct... but then I must think that because I agree with both of you :)
- ghaff 13y agoWhile I'm not an expert in the topic, the visualizations would seem to be drawn from a fairly substantial data set--over 30K respondents. http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_all.html http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_all...
- mc-lovin 13y agoIt's really unfortunate that the data is presented at such a high level of aggregation. It would be so much better to have individual level data (perhaps with personal info such as age, etc. removed) so other people could do their own analysis (e.g. clustering). I don't want this to be interpreted as criticism of Bert Vaux and his colleagues: there is incentive in academia to not share data, since you get credited for the uniqueness of your work, and get no credit for collecting data used by others. I just hope the situation changes.
- RK 13y agoWhat is the difference between "cray-ahn" and "cray-awn"? Note that I pronounce "dawn" = "don". Also, I say crayon as "crown", which either isn't very popular, or they just chose poor colors for the heatmap.
- wambotron 13y agoDawn and don are the same for me, too. I pronounce crayon as "cray'n" -- pretty much exactly as you could pronounce "prayin'"
- johnchristopher 13y agoWhat about "down" then ? As in "Don said dawn gets him down".
- wambotron 13y agoDown is different, sounds like crown/town/clown/gown for me. Don/dawn sound like the "a" in father for me. Down sounds like the "ou" in "Ouch!"
- anigbrowl 13y agoIt would help if you mentioned where you're from, and where your parents are from.
- lotharbot 13y ago> "I say crayon as "crown"" From what I understand, this is common in Kansas. Are you (or at least one of your parents) from there?
- RK 13y agoYou got me there!
- pasquinelli 13y agoi think it's that cray-ahn rhymes with ann, and cray-awn rhymes with lawn. i'm a cran guy myself.
- Zikes 13y ago#21: What do you call a drive-through liquor store? I'm in Arkansas, and I've always heard these called "Baptist Windows".
- usea 13y agoI'd have answered "daiquiri shop" since that's the only kind of drive-thru alcohol place I'd heard of before.
- robodale 13y agosoutherners talk funny
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- loganfrederick 13y agohttp://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6#seriously-alabama-and-mississippi-that-is-terrible-19 http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest... I have never known anyone to use the third phrase.
- mindcrime 13y agoI'm pretty sure I've at least heard that "devil beating his wife" thing once in my life, somewhere... but in terms of routine, daily life, I know of no term for that phenomenon that's common place. shrug
- russelluresti 13y agoFrom Texas here - I've heard someone use it. Though their version was "God is beating his wife" instead of "the devil". I heard it as a kid, from my neighbor's dad, when my friend and I were outside playing and it started to rain while it was sunny.
- rglovejoy 13y agoMy mother would say that "the witches are getting married".
- nthitz 13y agoWell unless you live in one of those green regions, that is kind of the point.
- usea 13y agoI live in Louisiana. I have heard it from several people. Also, here is a localized scene from a video game that uses it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk024-oaFv4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk024-oaFv4
- whatsreal 13y agoI have always heard it referred to as "a monkey's wedding." Though I think that came from my dad who grew up in apartheid South Africa, so it might be racist...
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- joelandren 13y agoLink to single page version: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest...
- dripton 13y agoThey left the Pittsburgh "yinz" off question #7.
- Vivtek 13y agoSome natives of Bloomington, Indiana do that one, too.
- mindcrime 13y agoSome people in North Carolina use what seems to be a subtle variation from that... it comes out "you'uns". It's been a while since I heard anybody say that, though. I think it's more of a country thing.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoI was kind of surprised that they left out yinz. I was going to mention it, but I figured someone else already did. There was a show on regional accents on PBS and they compared western PA to the Galapagos Islands of regional accents. I mean get aht!
- mindcrime 13y agoThe one about "What word(s) do you use to refer to a group of two or more people" is missing an option or two. I often use "you lot" or "you kids". To be fair, the latter is more of a joking thing, like parting from a group and saying "you kids be good" or whatever. The "you lot" bit is, I'm pretty sure, something I picked up from watching British television. Most people in my neck of the woods say "you all" or "y'all". Some use "you'uns".
- mig39 13y agoIn Newfoundland, Canada, we say 'ye' when we mean more than one 'you.' Roughly equal to 'y'all' I think.
- breadbox 13y agoI was also surprised that "you folks" wasn't on the list. I've used "folks" as a less gendered version of "guys" most of my life, and I thought it was more common than it apparently is.
- mindcrime 13y agoI've mostly always treated "guys" as gender neutral myself, even though it may be technically incorrect. I'll sometimes say "you guys" to refer to either a mixed group or even an all woman group. I do use "you folks" as well, somtimes. Not often though. Can't really say why.
- zwtaylor 13y agoAdditionally, there are still areas in Philadelphia where "youse" is more than acceptable.
- duairc 13y agoWe also say "yous" in Dublin. Other parts of Ireland generally say "ye".
- antoko 13y agoSo literally no one at all uses the correct "you" ? I've used various different alternates as I've aged and moved locations but I'm fairly certain "you" (with a silent parenthetical (plural) ) has remained my default throughout. youwse / you lot / your lot (northern UK) guys (used as non-gendered) (bay area) y'all / you all (Texas)
- Azulsky 13y agoFor #15 the Louisiana term is Poboy, despite the best attempts by Subway to convince us otherwise.
- m_myers 13y agoI thought a Poboy had fried food, not cold cuts.
- usea 13y agoI have lived in Louisiana my whole life, and I've always considered po-boys and subs to be different things. A po-boy uses french bread.
- Azulsky 13y agoWell there is always the argument over what a proper poboy is, and what the texture of authentic french bread is.
- dbbolton 13y agoHaving never heard the phrase before, "the devil is beating his wife" really stood out to me.
- russelluresti 13y agoI am firmly on the side of "y'all".
- Zikes 13y agoOne of my foreign friends was teasing me about how English doesn't have a word for "a group of people" whereas many other major languages apparently do, and I replied "sure we do, it's y'all".
- nosecreek 13y agoI'm in Canada where y'all doesn't get used much, but when I was learning Greek we used y'all as the English plural "you".
- Zikes 13y agoSounds like validation to me.
- vacri 13y agoI think you mean 'for addressing a group of people'. We have plenty of words for groups of people. And we have ways of addressing them, they just take more than one word: "you -foo-". It's like the infinitive in English is two words, (to -foo-) but in most other euro languages it's only one.
- LargeWu 13y agoMy wife spent about half a year in North Carolina for work, where "y'all" seemed to translate to the singular "you", while "all y'alls" was used to refer to "you" plural.
- tzs 13y agoI have used y'all for as long as I can remember (although not exclusively...it is mixed in with "you guys", "you people", and others according to whichever sounds best in that particular sentence), even though the farthest I was ever away from the West Coast for my first 47 years was just outside Yosemite in California, and I knew nobody who was from the South or spoke with any obvious Southern influence. I think I must have heard it on TV and picked it up. Anyone else here use it despite no Southern connection among friends or family?
- mieubrisse 13y agoAs a Chicagoan, I've never paid the slighted bit of attention that, apparently, literally everyone around me doesn't say "sear-up" as I do. No clue how that came about, with no family ties to the east coast whatsoever.
- mindcrime 13y agoI find that I pronounce some words differently, depending on context (who I'm talking to). Also, I've altered my pronunciation of some words as I've aged. But, FWIW, when I say "syrup", by default it comes out like "sear-up" for me, but it sometimes comes out as "sir-up". Not really sure why. I'm from North Carolina, but never really paid much attention to how other people say this.
- mhartl 13y agoIf you look at the concentration of blue in the Bay Area, you can see that they need to add a city to "What is 'the City'?": http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6#most-of-america-realizes-that-new-york-really-is-the-city-20 http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest... Hint: It's not San José.
- rayiner 13y agoIt wasn't a game of "which of these does not belong."
- mhartl 13y agoMy point was that everyone around San Francisco calls it "the City" (even those in more populous San José), so they would have done well to add it to their set. In contrast, people around, say, Los Angeles don't typically call it "the City", so leaving out LA is not a relevant omission.
- rayiner 13y agoPeople around Sioux Falls, SD call it "the city" doesn't mean it should be added to the chart.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoDoes anyone actually say Los Angeles? Maybe in Louisiana whose abbreviation is LA?
- CatMtKing 13y agoYou know, I'm a little surprised that Socal doesn't have a similar concentration around LA.
- epoxyhockey 13y agoLA is just called LA, though people do say downtown LA. I've only heard of San Francisco being referred to as the City by West Coasters.
- kyubic 13y agoReminds me of a dialect map that was done in Shiny: http://spark.rstudio.com/jkatz/DialectMap/ http://spark.rstudio.com/jkatz/DialectMap/
- dghughes 13y agoOh those Cajuns causing trouble, hello from The Maritimes. I would say crayfish just as it's spelled. I have no idea what it is in Acadian French I'm not French but I know a lot of Acadian people. It would be funny if the name came from little lobster, maybe "petite homard"? Not even close to crayfish.
- lindauer 13y agoIt's from the Old French crevis or modern French écrevisse, having something to do with crabs, not lobsters. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=crayfish http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=crayfish http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crayfish#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crayfish#Etymology For what it's worth, it is also spelled, not just pronounced, "crawfish" in Texas and Louisiana.
- dghughes 13y agoA guy I work with, Terry, an Acadian went to France and he said that the people there understood him as if he was from France and his friend from Quebec they could barely. understand. The French from France asked Terry when he left and what village he was from Terry kept trying to tell them that he never was from France he had always lived here in the Maritimes they didn't believe him they thought he left France maybe ten years ago.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ape4 13y agoI call those rubber soled shoes for gym class "running shoes".
- jlgreco 13y agoMost of these pronunciation ones either sound exactly the same to me, or I use interchangeably like the two pronunciations of the word "a". ...hmm, I wonder if "a" has any geographic breakdown.
- bostonvaulter2 13y agoHmmmm, I didn't realize that "sneakers" instead of "tennis shoes" was a north eastern thing.
- TillE 13y agoYeah, I genuinely had no idea about that one. I know "trainers" is the British thing, but I thought everyone in the US called them sneakers. That's the term used by zappos.com and rockport.com, for example. "Tennis shoes" is not a category. I'm also slightly terrified that the vast majority of the country cannot distinguish Mary/merry/marry.
- vwinsyee 13y agoI'm having a hard time trying to pronounce one or more of Mary/merry/marry in any different way... how would one do that?
- abrowne 13y agoFor me, from Minnesota, they're all the same: vowel like in "made" [eɪ]. I think the others have vowels like in "bed" [ɛ] and "bad" [æ]. These vowels aren't allowed before r in my dialect.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- digisth 13y agoNYC native here. Mary - mare-ree Merry - meh-ree Marry - mah-ree
- D9u 13y agoI'm disappointed that my part of the USA is ignored by these maps. Hawaii has its own form of the English language, sometimes referred to as "Hawaiian Creole," but more commonly known as "Pidgin." So, wow, laulau! Mo bettah da map include us, eh!
- goodcanadian 13y agoFor the language pedants, it is almost always called "pidgin," but it is technically a creole which means that it was formed out of mashing several languages together, but it has become its own full fledged stable language. I am not really a local, but I did live in Hilo for 5 years. I know a lot of words with Hawaiian, English, Japanese, some other European language origins.
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- azernik 13y agoHuh. Despite having grown up in California, I tend to fall into Northeastern patterns for a lot of these things. Possibly an issue with the data, or possibly I'm a weird case - immigrant parents, and grew up in neighborhood that's heavily American Jewish (which I assume correlates with Northeastern dialects).
- dangrossman 13y agoI didn't know "hoagie" was quite that localized to my area.
- telecuda 13y agoI thought the same thing. But then again, I waited in line at the grand opening of Florida's first Wawa because I missed them so much.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- k8si 13y agoA lot of these stimuli would have been better if they'd used pictures instead of "How do you say [misleading/too specific definition of term that requires some thought to arrive at a word for]. For example: present a picture of someone holding a paper grocery bag with an arrow pointing at it, then ask "What's the word for this item?" Doesn't work for all of them (e.g. you can't draw a picture of a moot point?) but I'm just sayin'.
- nijk 13y agoFYI, Bert Vaux taught Social Analysis 34 at Harvard, the gen-ed linguistics class that was very popular with undergrads. Most students took either that class or Economics 10 (Macroeconomics / intro to capitalism) as their social studies requirement for graduation.
- jmhain 13y agoI almost spit out my drink at the map about "The city". I mean, really, what did they expect?
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoWell, in the bay area, "the city" means San Francisco. It took me a while to figure out they weren't talking about NYC when I lived there.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoWhen I was living in Mississippi as a teenager, I remember making runs to a place called Daiquiri World across the river in Louisiana. It was (a) a drive-thru liquor store and (b) the drinking age in Louisiana was 18 at the time. The south could be a really strange place.
- deevus 13y agoIn Australia (at least where I grew up), we call "water fountains" bubblers. I can't speak for the rest of Australia though, since in Newcastle we use the phrase "ripping off" which means "making fun of" in addition to "charging too much". In cities as close as Sydney, the phrase is "ripping into", whereas the Novacastrian[1] version makes no sense to them. [1]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Novacastrian http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Novacastrian
- tzs 13y agoNote: this post contains words some may find offensive. I'd like to see something similar for children's songs. By "children's songs" I don't mean songs adults sing for children, but rather the songs children sing among themselves. There are many variations of these songs, and it would be interesting to see how they vary regionally. For instance, when I was a kid, we had: He's Popeye the sailor man He lives in a garbage can *He eats all the worms *And spits out the germs He's Popeye the sailor man There are many variants of the lines I've marked with asterisks: He pees like a fountain And poops out a mountain They turned on the gas And it burned off my ass He catches all the lizards and eats all their gizzards He sleeps with his granny And tickles her fanny He likes to go swimmin' With bare naked women Same goes for other children's songs. There's the "Joy to the world/the school burned down" song, for instance. In ours, the principle ended up hanging from the flag pole by his dick. In others he's hanged by his neck. Ours didn't mention the janitor, but some others have him shot in the head. There are also variants in things like "eeny meeny miny moe". Every parent in my neighborhood taught the next part as "catch a tiger by the toe", but every kid said (when out of earshot of adults) "catch a nigger by the toe". Where did that come from? I can't recall any adults using that word in my California suburban neighborhood and have no idea where we kids got that for eeny meeny miny moe. I suspect we got it by whatever mysterious mechanism we got our versions of songs. (Speaking of eeny meeny miny moe, I'm guessing that I'm not the only one here who figured out ahead of time the rudiments of modular arithmetic, and used that to my advantage whenever I saw that an eeny meeny miny moe was going to take place...anyone else want to admit to massively cheating at eeny meeny miny moe?) Another thing about children's songs. The lyrics are sometimes more sophisticated than you would expect from children of the ages that sing the songs. Who writes these songs?