Have I posted this before? How Y'all, Youse, and You Guys Talk. People enjoy dialect quizzes and seeing how well they match up with what they'd expect. Mine came up as I thought, with Boston, Providence, and Worcester coming up as my closest hits. There must not be a city in NH that qualified as big enough. I'm surprised Portland, ME didn't make it.
My strongest regional distinctive was "bubbler" for "drinking fountain." That means either coastal New England or a section of Wisconsin along Lake Michigan. If that seems an odd combo, it turns out that Bubbler was originally a brand name of an early model, invented in Wisconsin. But the New England mill cities were the first places that installed city water, which was a prerequisite for drinking fountains at the time.
6 comments:
I got Minneapolis-St Paul, Madison, and Boston! The first two are accurate as I grew up in north central Iowa about 20 miles from the Minnesota border. My regional distinctives were 'kitty-corner' (MSP, Madison) and 'sneakers' (Boston). That could be something of an idiosyncrasy.
Screwed up that comment. I got Salt Lake City, Fresno, and Seattle. Potato bug for small grey bug that curls into a ball was the most distinctive answer.
I choose "you guys" even though I often use "y'all" or "you all". I adopted those as I like them better, but "you guys" is definitely the most common in my neck of the woods.
It seems to me that many (maybe even each) of the questions have at least one answer that is interpreted as highly regional-specific, and that these instances are over-weighted in the analysis. I was raised in the Yankee NE but have lived in Texas for over 40 years - and yet this relied on 3 questions to place me in Philadelphia, where I've never lived, not even close. Reincarnation maybe>?
Jackson MS was the surprise for me as it was based on my choosing "frontage" road. It's apparently an outlier in the south for that usage. How they decided that my selection of "y'all" pointed to Birmingham AL and Memphis TN is confusing as it points to most of the southern states. My second choice would have been "you guys" as that's what I said until at least my mid-20s.
What's really fascinating is accents. I eventually learned to understand what I think of as the soft southern Georgia accent, as in "Wuz the wadah wahm?" I never understood older family members from parts of Tennessee and northeast Alabama. Even though I now live in northeast Alabama, Huntsville should not be confused with any other part of the state in any cultural way. The most common accents I hear are midwest, western, or southern California.
I wonder what the result would be if you tried to answer with the 'old movies' Transatlantic accent idiom?
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