New dialect survey

[Jonathon]

Remember that dialect survey from several years ago that went viral when it was featured on the New York Times site with heat maps? Well, the linguist who created it has updated it and added heat maps of his own.

You can take it here.

[Tante Shvester]

I was surprised at how narrowly some of my answers pinpointed me.

No one but folks from a tiny speck on the map centered on my hometown call the night before Halloween "Gate Night".

[rivka]

I had a few "people really say that???" reactions, but mostly I recognized the things I don't say as regionalisms I have heard before.

I really got a kick out of the options that said, essentially, "well, A and B, but A and B have this difference". And much of the time, it was my preferred choice for the questions that had one.

[Ela]

How come it didn't give me a region at the end? It just said, thank you for participating.

[rivka]

It didn't for me either, but many of the specific questions had regional maps off to the side, after you picked your first option.

I wonder what the regional map for "aid car" (v. ambulance) looks like.

[Ela]

Yeah, I tried to click on the first map, but it wasn't really working for me.

[Jonathon]

I was also a little disappointed that it didn't show an overall region that I was most likely from at the end.

[Ela]

I figured out how to look at the maps. Interesting to see what they think is typical. For example, intentionally not going to school was called "cutting" when I was a kid in NY, but "skipping" in Miami. They think the expression "skipping" is a midwest thing entirely.

Maybe I should go back through and give a Miami zip code to give them more data points.