Not surprising since I first learned English in Northern New Jersey and studied in Boston. The takeaway: Even the simplest, everyday things might be called something completely different just miles from where you live. At the end it gave Baltimore, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro. Website for Research Participants: For the Aussies and Brits shocked that they got New Jersey, let me assure you as a northern New Jerseyan who lives in New York, that pretty much nobody here talks like a Soprano (ESPECIALLY in Jersey) or the other stereotypes, with the occasional exception for Staten Island and some older folk. 2 thoughts on "Fascinating Dialect Quiz from NY Times based on Harvard Linguist" Dennis Orzo says: December 30, 2013 at 11:29 pm. If accent had been a bigger factor, I think the similarities would have be smaller, especially in the case of Detroit. Due to . pronounced car-ml by people in the Northeast only. Want to get your very own quizzes and posts featured on BuzzFeeds homepage and app? Check it out! Project Implicit uses the same secure hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPS) that banks use to securely transfer credit card information. The project is a slick visualization of Bert Vaux's dialect survey, and lets you look at maps of the results of 122 different dialect questions, either as a composite showing the variation across . However, when I found out that you lived in Texas, I was actually a little puzzled, since you didn't seem to speak the kind of American English that one would learn living in that part of the country. We may earn a commission from links on this page. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. You may prefer to examine general information about the IAT before deciding whether or not to proceed. What do you call the insect that flies around in the summer and has a rear section that glows in the dark? Those are positive markers of geo-social identity, while choices likeyou alland you are mostly negative markers, in the sense that their interpretation depends mostly on NOT having made the other choices. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. two syllables, where the second rhymes with dawn. Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in . This was based on only a few new questions, including the "tennis shoes/sneakers" one. I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree. about your participation, or report illness, injury or other problems, I took it and ended up in North Carolina, which I've visited but never lived in, and wanted to change one of my answers so I took it again, but "an error occurred." The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes is run by Seemed a bit of stretch to me. What is your general, informal term for the rubber-soled shoes worn in gym class, for athletic activities, etc.? What do you call the little gray (or black or brown) creature (that looks like an insect but is actually a crustacean) that rolls up into a ball when you touch it? What do you call the meal you eat in the evening, normally somewhere between 5 and 10 PM? Maybe that means I'm especially well-behaved dialectally (or, more likely, that I haven't moved around much). My mother took it and it pegged her exactly in the city in which she lives (and, weirdly, a suburb) but not the city where she grew up, which disappointed here. Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map. Slow day at work today, 25 q test was quite accurate herefarthest off was Mississippi for an Arkansasan. There was also a moderate similarity with the dialects of coastal states. I have no idea of the origins of this expression. Caffeinate yourselfA whole array of Breville espresso machinesfrom manual to super-automaticare on sale for 20% off. How do you pronounce the vowel sound in the word ('parent's sister')? What do you call a traffic intersection in which several roads meet in a circle and you have to get off at a certain point? In the crayon question, two of the options are: two syllables cray-ahn The Florida panhandle also showed moderate similarities. It can't just be Sopranos, Southside Johnny and Bruce. Ignore what you hear in LA-produced movies and come see for yourself ;). How do you pronounce the past tense of the verb "eat"? To my surprise, every time I took the quiz, it classified me as being from some town or another never more than ~15 miles from where I actually grew up. How do you pronounce the word "sandwich"? Allman, B., Teemant, A., Pinnegar, S. E., & Eckton, B (2019). [(myl) Yes, the 25 questions that you get are clearly a random selection from a larger set. Each question in the quiz presents some dialect options. Marius L. Jhndal, Even if only one percent of New Yorkers answer a question the same way we do, that could still be bright red on the map if the corresponding figure in Texas is one in a thousand. One answer, verge, put me completely outside the US (I must have picked that up in England for some reason). The above map (where you learn that the northeast pronounces "centaur" differently from everyone else) is from NC State PhD student Joshua Katz's project "Beyond 'Soda, Pop, or Coke.'" And that was a little weird because some of her answers weren't in accordance with the midwest city she lives in now, but that city where she grew up. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you. What word(s) do you use to address a group of two or more people? If you have questions about the study, please contact Project Implicit It was such a hit that three years later Katz published a book about it. LA 1.4: Accents and Dialects - What Do You Hear? pegged me 10 miles away, northern nj. What do you call the kind of spider (or spider-like creature) that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs? ", [(myl) Unfortunately, the "aggregate dialect difference" web page won't load for me maybe the server is overwhelmed. The survey has a few other features like those, which tag you with particular not-necessarily-relevant cities. (e.g., "I might could do that" to mean "I might be able to do that"; or "I used to could do that" to mean "I used to be able to do that"), He used to nap on the couch, but he sprawls out in that new lounge chair anymore, I do exclusively figurative paintings anymore. In that case, the regions which show up as "most like Australia" are probably just those with the highest proportion of Commonwealth immigrants in the population. That doesn't make me southern, does it?". What nicknames do/did you use for your maternal grandmother? An online test I took some years ago placed me in Boston on pronunciation alone. IP addresses are routinely recorded, but are completely confidential. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux . Alas, since I began writing this post last week the abililty to take the Dialect Quiz has gone away, however, . What do you call the level of a building that is partly or entirely underground? (It belongs to the genus Allium and lacks a fully-developed bulb. What do you a call a store that is devoted primarily to selling alcoholic beverages? Lets use k-Nearest Neighbors. The quiz was based upon the Harvard Dialect Study, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. As an Australian, I thought I'd be off the map completely, but instead I'm clustered closely on New York, Yonkers and Jersey City. What do you call the auxiliary brake that's attached to a rear wheel or the transmission and keeps the car from moving accidentally? (Don't include terms that aren't in your natural vocabulary but that you might use to accommodate someone who you think uses a different form.). My map came up with Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Rochester and Providence. . When you are cold, and little points of skin begin to come on your arms and legs, you have-. In the chart above, there are two types of circles: yellow circles and purple circles. What do you call food purchased at a restaurant to be eaten elsewhere? What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the grocery store or supermarket? And I second what Mike Fahie said, "-ahn" and "dawn" rhyme for me, so the crayon question is ambiguous for me. About This Quiz. Not at all. Simone Giertz on Her Youtube/Design Career | Gizmodo Talks, Will Banning TikTok Solve Privacy Issues? Here's my map, or at least one version of it: The "specific cities" feature is a bit random mine are "Baltimore" and "Saint Louis", both attributed to the fact that (like a large minority of other Americans) I lack the caught/cot merger, and "Newark/Paterson", attributed to the term "mischief night" for the night before Halloween: "Mischief night" is one of those phrases that I've heard around, maybe when I lived in northern New Jersey for a while, though we had no such concept when I was growing up (since mischief took place on Halloween itself). What do you call a traffic jam caused by drivers slowing down to look at an accident or other diversion on the side of the road? Each observation can be thought of as a realization of a categorical random variable with a particular parameter vector that is a function of locationour goal was to interpolate among these points in order to estimate these parameter vectors at a given location, making use of a combination of kernel density estimation and non-parametric smoothing techniques. The New Yorker has published a rather delicious parody of the dialect map. Bert Vaux. The map pinpointed me to Arlington, VA, which is off by about 5 miles from where I live. It sounds to me like it is accurately says you talk like a lot/many folks from the Maryland/Delaware area, but also lots (but not as much) similarity with many folks from both St Loius and northern N. Jersey. The night before Halloween is just October the 30th. Take this quiz with friends in real time and compare results. The survey was not advertised in any way, and was open to all takers on the internet. Most recently, the project's added a dialect quiz. Do you say "vinegar and oil" or "oil and vinegar" for the type of salad dressing? I suspect it's harder to ask questions about accent and expect accurate responses, though. Dialect Quiz Well it seems to have targeted my area fairly well. Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. Knowing this, I wish to proceed. The quiz is designed to pinpoint the quiz-taker's exact region, based on the words he or she uses. Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map"), NYT 12/21/2013. Do you say "expecially", or "especially"? Website: https://research.virginia.edu/irb-sbs Knowing this, I wish to proceed using a touchscreen OR using a keyboard. For me, these are both true. Regional dialect differences in the United States are a . What do you call it when a driver changes over one or more lanes way too quickly? The UWM Dialect Survey Website Powered by WordPress.com. There are a bunch of quizzes out there that purport to tell you what American dialect you speak. I took it twice, and each time two of the three cities it picked as representative were cities I'd lived in. A cute interactive feature: "How Yall, Youse and You Guys Talk" ("What does the way you speak say about where youre from? Bert Vaux's survey has 122 questions probably Katz's survey questions are the same, more or less.]. The questions in Katz's quiz were based on a larger research project called the Harvard Dialect Survey, published in 2003 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder from Harvard's Linguistics Department (you can find a good interview with Vaux on NPR here). Which of these terms do you prefer for a sale of unwanted items on your porch, in your yard, etc.? The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. Well, they at least lie close to a great circle route from, say, San Francisco to New Delhi! The state and area I'm from was firmly red every time, so I wonder if the database doesn't include any cities in the area or something. Since I am a visual learner, perhaps a doodle will be more edifying: Essentially, if you have parameters (i.e. All in all, the Dialect Quiz was relatviely accurate in my case, at least with the . (As in: "We have milk, beer, apple juice, and four kinds of _____: Pepsi, 7Up, root beer, and ginger ale.") What do you call a drive-through liquor store? This put me where I live now (and have lived for the last two-decades-plus) not where I grew up, but I answered the questions in present-tense and (to take the one which was pretty obviously supposed to be a "tell" for those of us who grew up in the Delaware valley) I don't present-tense say "hoagie" because I assume I wouldn't be understood. Understanding Language Acquisition. My son, who grew up within 20 miles of where I did, got the same answers, but my daughter got Springfield in place of Providence. Be prepared to share your insights in a whole-group discussion. but if you go directly to the Harvard Dialect Survey Dialect Survey Maps and Results you can also get the specific answer breakdowns for each question asked. And, out of curiosity, what results are people for whom English is a second language getting? Despite this, I was surprised that the map put me solidly in a Montana/Wyoming/Colorado corridor, somewhere I've never lived remotely near. this may be a completely personal outlier.). We havent yet bridged the idea of training an algorithm, but we can still understand what Bronshtein means. https://research.virginia.edu/research-participants, I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree. Now we have the building blocks to move onto discussing things like training, how exactly K-NN works in practice, and, most importantly, how Katz used it for his dialect quiz. What is the distinction between dinner and supper? Pretty accurate I guess my family is basically north Georgian for several generations, but I seem to have picked up some coastal plain Southernisms here and there too. The survey has since been revised and expanded for a larger, lay audience. "It got me right! How do you pronounce the word for the type of drug that acts as central nervous system depressant and is used as a sedative or hypnotic? Selected legacy data from the previous Harvard dialect survey. These maps show your most distinctive answer for each of these cities. You can read more about Josh Katz's project to determine "aggregate dialect difference" from Vaux and Golder's survey data on his website. H/T to the Harvard Dialect Survey and The New York Times for the data. When you stand outside with a long line of people waiting to get in somewhere, are you standing "in line" or "on line" (as in, "I stood ___ in the cold for two hours before they opened the doors")? So the problem is, given a users attributes, whats your best guess for that users category? Teachers will compare their own usage and dialect with that of other across the nation and within their own colleague group within the class. @richardelguru: I have heard you on the radio a fair number of times. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by . Even then, it took a long time to load. So did anyone else take it? ", or the possibility exists that you did give common answers and some of your orange areas have plenty of common American speakers and the most weight questions really isn't that much more weight at all. study, ask questions about the research procedures, express concerns The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz and has since written Speaking American, a visual exploration of American regional dialects. Results in a smooth field of parameter estimates over the prediction region. You were obviously a Brit from your accent, but you were also clearly very used to using American idioms. Reporting on what you care about. Essentially, all supervised machine learning algorithms need some data off of which to base their predictions. We will also ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes or beliefs about these topics and provide some information about yourself. @Sally Thomason: I didn't see anything until I had run an (unrelated) Java update. Bert Vaux is an Associate Professor of . What do you call the long sandwich that contains cold cuts, lettuce, and so on? What do you call the end of a loaf of bread? I used to find them down by the brook all the time, when growing up in New Jersey. What do you call food purchased at a restaurant to be eaten elsewhere? What do you call the gooey or dry matter that collects in the corners of your eyes, especially while you are sleeping? Are comments moderated? The three smaller maps show which answer For some of you, it's an amazing thing that pinpoints your hometown exactly. Do you pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same? But you should care about it because it was a successful attempt at bringing data science into the homes of millions of Americans without regard to technical skill or intellectual capacity. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website. I've taken both, and got the same results. In 2013 the New York Times published Josh Katzs How Yall, Youse and You Guys Talk. You probably remember taking it, or at least hearing about it. Here, laziness means that an algorithm does not use training data points for any generalization, as Adi Bronshtein writes. Dawn & -ahn rhyme. There are lots of Canadians who spend their winters in Florida, though I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the similarities. Or maybe this app's method for combining evidence is suboptimal. What do you call the drink made with milk and ice cream? Still, it was a little freaky in how accurate it was. These are the results from all current and previous dialect surveys conducted There were times during the survey when I thought that I would have chosen something different when I was younger, like crawdad when I was a young kid and crayfish as an adult. What do you call the area of grass between the sidewalk and the road? What term do you use to refer to something that is across both streets from you at an intersection (or diagonally across from you in general)? WILSON ANDREWS Chair, Institutional Review Board for the Social and Behavioral Sciences Cathy ONeil, a.k.a. I care deeply about it because I am a language- and information science-nerd. What do you call circular junction in which road traffic must travel in one direction around a central island? The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website. Though I obviously know about y'all, I'd never use it except as a joke or quotation or imitation, and similarly for you'uns and youse. most often pronounced with two syllables (car-ml). So I wanted to see if I could take some of the data collected from these surveys and try to guess where YOU live. I guess if I'd taken it to be a passive-knowledge question, I probably would have checked "mischief night" as being what I think of as the default term used by those who have occasion to refer to it. The questions asked in this quiz are based off the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. the quiz was the most popular thing the Times put out that year. Below are the dialect maps, displaying what terms and pronunciations are used, and where they are used. I think I broke the system I got through the whole survey, but no summing-up map appeared at the end. I'm an RP Briton who's lived in the US for a long time (30+ years, and yes I am still largely RP). I wonder if this is the homogenizing effect of TV. What do you call the person who collects and removes rubbish from residential areas for further processing and disposal? As opposed to eager algorithms (e.g. How do you pronounce and , as in "I enjoying sawing wood" and "she saw it"? I think the idea is, you wouldn't have gotten reddish orange in NJ or MO, if there were not more than one question that had similar speakers from those areas. This term was absent from my TAs definition above, but understanding it will help us understand what exactly is going on when we run a K-NN analysis., and that term is algorithmic laziness. What do you say when you want to lay claim to the front seat of a car? NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. decision trees), lazy algorithms store all the training data they will need need in order to classify something and dont use it until the exact moment theyre given something to classify. However, these Universities, as well as the individual researchers who have contributed to this site, make no claim for the validity of these suggested interpretations. and In Kingston, I mostly consort with people from RMC and Queen's University, which see far more people from across the country and the world than from Kingston itself (though very few from the United States). That's not one of the choices, nor is "Devil's strip", which DARE says is common in Baltimore; and the thing itself is so rare in Manhattan, where I lived in my linguistically formative years, that the concept was without a term. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website. I suspect 'sneakers' is gaining ground. Syllabus: Understanding Language Acquisition. When I was a kid in North Dakota we wore 'tennis shoes' in gym, but we pronounced them 'tenna shoes.' Certainly wrong would be a deep red spot in one spot with blue everywhere else. The original quiz resulted in about 50k observations, all of which were coded by zip code. Surely Halloween is the night before All Hallows' Day. For now, lets tackle some of the jargon in my TAs definition. They ask "How would you address a group of two or more people." The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from. Accent/stress (7) Consonants (33) Syllable number (2) Vowels (34) Syntax & functional items (10) Negative polarity items (1) Prepositions (4) Website Powered by WordPress.com. Three of the most similar cities are shown. Sadly, no. The graphics intern who created the mapping algorithm, Josh Katz, was hired for a full-time. New Haven (the city in Connecticut where Yale University is located). The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. Obsessed with travel? Charlottesville, VA 22908-0392 (But I guess if the British Isles were included in the survey I would probably end up somewhere in the ocean.). Many but not all of my answers were consistent with my Chicago-area home ground, + Michigan in recent years. Oh well. It was the one that asked you things like What do you call something that is across both streets from you at an intersection? Answers you could choose included options like kitty-corner and catty-corner (the latter being the obvious right choice). Using these results, a method for mapping aggregate dialect distance is developed. Its foundation was the supervised machine learning algorithm K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), which is, as my graduate-school TA told us, a machine learning algorithm used to predict the class of a new datapoint based on the value of the points around it in parameter space. We will dive into the idea of machine learning and the ins and outs of the specific K-NN algorithm in a later post. results of 122 different dialect questions. University of Virginia, P.O. For now, K-NN = a lazy algorithm = stores the data it needs to make a classification until its asked to make a classification. mathbabe, gives a good example of instance-based learning with a grocery-store scenario: What you really want, of course, is a way of anticipating the category of a new user before theyve bought anything, based on what you know about them when they arrive, namely their attributes. In contrast to the original word maps of . Josh Katz narrowed 122 questions from the Harvard Dialect Survey into 25 questions to make the results more easily show more content The dictionary definition of phonology is, "the science of speech sounds, including especially the history and theory of sound changes in a language or in two or more related languages" (Phonology, n.d). A Medium publication sharing concepts, ideas and codes. On the next page you'll be asked to select an Implicit Association Test (IAT) from a list of possible topics . Does that make me part New Englander? For K-NN, parameter space would be everything between the two axes with the point we are trying to classify being the star. It may be a distinctive usage a 'Where'd ja learn that? AVG 1.1: Membership in a Speech Community Segment, Session 2: Who are Our ELLs? ), could you say you feel: How do you pronounce , as in "Abbas was a famous Shah of Iran"? So a fun game but hardly foolproof. How do you pronounce the word "schedule"? The test is based on a Harvard Dialect Survey that began in 2002. For a New Yorker of my age, the absolute dead giveaway would be "sliding pond", a localism for a playground slide. The map for the y'all choice seems plausible: But something seems to be wrong in the interpretation of not making this choice, or the method for combining choices into a final geographical pattern, or both. What do you call a narrow, pedestrian lane found in urban areas which usually runs between or behind buildings? By JOSH KATZ and This is as you described, but keep in mind the question listed is the one with the most weight for the likely areas, not the only question. I submitted a comment, but it's not showing up. That doesn't make me southern, does it? Personalized Dialect Map This quiz, based on the Harvard Dialect Survey, tells you where your personal dialect is located on a map. What do you call the act of covering a house or area in front of a house with toilet paper? To obtain more information about the What about speakers who use "you," "you two," and "you guys" for singular, dual, and plural respectively?
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