Wow, this is cool. Try it out, especially if you've moved away from your childhood home.
I got Montgomery, Mobile, and Birmingham as my dialectical homes and Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, and Detroit (sorry Jack, sorry Iggy) as the places most dialectically foreign to me.
As a child my father was stationed in Montgomery the most, but the accent is pretty well suppressed at this point. Neat to know that sweet home Alabama is still lurking somewhere in my various language modules and whatnot.
It would be cooler if it occurred to them that I might not be from the U.S. originally. The road that runs beside the highway is called “collector lanes”. And this would be the key question: when you say “house”, do people giggle and say back “hoose”, for no apparent reason? (It doesn’t sound that way to me, since the diphthong is an allophone.)
LikeLike
So Chris, as a Canadian what were you told? My maps suggested that my dialect was from Buffalo, Spokane, and Seattle. My guess is that you would be quite similar.
LikeLike
I got Buffalo, Rochester, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Apparently ‘potato bug’ really had me pegged as upstate New York.
LikeLike
Like Christopher Hitckcock, I am also Canadian. But, when I took it earlier this morning, I got Newark, San Jose, and Honolulu. I think I broke the test.
LikeLike
Chris Hitchcock: I don’t think what they were asking about is what you would call “collector lanes.” What they are asking about is a road with stoplights or stop signs running next to a highway, from which you can access gas stations etc. (Look up “frontage road” in Wikipedia for discussion and for the difference from “collector-express system.”) I would be curious to know what you would call that.
Anyway, as an American with parents from St Louis who grew up in Toronto but has lived in Pittsburgh and then in the Midwest (South Bend and Chicago) I got a pretty reasonable mix of upstate New York, Michigan, and Chicagoland, with Chicago, Rockford and Detroit the “most similar cities.”
LikeLike
Eh Cogs, pour me a beer once whydoncha?
Delightful. Though born in the South my first ten years (I’m the only member of my extended family without a Southern accent), then to California and later 30 years in Wisconsin. Guess what? Milwaukee for me, eh nah? And so?
Made my day.
LikeLike
I would be surprised at how scarily accurate mine is (my state is the only red on the map and of the three cities named on the map, one I lived in until I was 10 and another I lived in from 17-23), except that between “soda” and “bubbler”, there’s no place I could be from other than Wisconsin.
LikeLike
Ah, good point. I still haven’t heard “collector lanes” anywhere but Toronto. Of the available choices, I went with “feeder road”, which it pegged as Southeast Texas. So I must have picked that up from living in Houston for 5 years. (I don’t think I’d even seen them before I moved there.) So when I picked “crayfish” instead of “crawfish”, it must have driven the algorithm crazy.
In Houston, an easy class was a “roll” (which wasn’t offered as a choice). It was a “gut” at Princeton (back in the 80’s) and a “bird” in Toronto. At Caltech, there doesn’t seem to be a word for such a thing.
LikeLike
People from the South Coast of Massachusetts/Providence area also typically use ‘bubbler’ and ‘soda’
LikeLike
This is so much fun. Remember the Super Fans from Saturday Night Live (Da Bears!)? Yeah, that’s how I grew up speaking. We always called this a Chicago or “Rust Belt” accent, since people from Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland all sounded pretty much the same. Evidently my “Rust Belt” way of speaking has changed very little despite having lived in Indiana, Philadelphia, and Texas. I was surprised to see that it has more in common with Southern dialects than with New England dialects.
LikeLike
Having been raised in southeast MA, I can second Anonymous Grad Student on ‘bubbler’ and ‘soda.’ As one would expect if we share these words with WI, they weren’t the ones that tipped the test off; the giveaway, rather, was ‘rotary.’
LikeLike
Yup, Providence was the third named city on my map. I’ve never been out that way, but I expect I’d feel at home.
LikeLike
New APPS 
Leave a comment