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It has me pegged for the west coast or Alaska: Fremont, San Jose, or Anchorage. Actually that’s not too bad. I grew up in Austin and I grew up with a lot of media influence. No one would ever mistake me for an east coast southerner.
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Interesting to see something from here show up on the front page over there.
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Huh. Here’s the Times’ map for me:
Not a bad guess for someone who has split most of his life between Montreal and Ottawa. I did live three years in Hamilton (whence Buffalo, maybe) and one year in Philly (at the tender age of 7), although there seems to be more of a dialect blush around Harrisburg/York than Philadelphia. I probably got the big hit around Rochester because they speak Canadian there. 
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Accent-wise things start getting more homogenous the more you go West. Maybe they got you on preferred vocabulary.
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I think that between the mining, military, and recreational tourism of the place, Colorado is probably the most generically connected of the 'Muricas.
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yes, based on the things it said stuck out, that must be it.
i never thought about it that way, but you’re probably right!
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Here’s mine:
It got the cities all wrong, but the right spot on the map is practically the same shade as the spot it picked, so same difference, basically. One thing I noticed about my map is how much of it is pretty solidly red/orange, especially compared to some of the others in this thread. It’s like this quiz is like, “we’re pretty sure you’re not Cajun1, but beyond that it’s a bit of a toss-up.” 
Another thing I found interesting was that several of the questions had different answers depending on my age. For those, I tried to stick with my first/earliest answers, since I figured that was closer to the intent of the quiz. For example, when I was a kid we called them “tennis shoes” but as an adult I always refer to them as my “running shoes”. On the other hand, when I was kid I remember people saying “pop” for the sugary soft-drink, but I deliberately called it “soda” for some reason that escapes me now. Probably for the same reason that as I kid I never would have said “y’all” (it was definitely “you guys”, which, as an adult, I’m not supposed to use because of it’s gendered connotation unless I’m specifically addressing a group of literal guys), but as an adult I do use the term “y’all”, although to be honest it’s a bit of an affectation.
And when I was a little little kid we used to catch lightening bugs and put them in a glass jar and my grandpa would poke holes in the lid with his pocket knife for us, but as a slightly less little kid I learned to call them fireflies, so those words are basically interchangeable for me. Or at least they were, until today, after which I will henceforth and forevermore refer to them as “peenie wallies” because why wouldn’t you. It’s clearly the superior term.
1. Everyone from the boot-tip of Louisiana is Cajun, is my understanding.
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Wow, spooky:
Apparently the question that screams Detroit is calling the night before Halloween “devil’s night.” Grand Rapids pops up because I selected “drinking fountain,” although I tend to use that interchangeably with “water fountain.” And pronouncing “cot” differently than “caught” indicated Toledo.
I’m suprised it didn’t ask the “pop/soda” question. That’s mainly a Midwest thing, or so I’ve heard.
Edited to add: I just took the UK version, and unsurprisingly, “I’m not from around here.” As an Anglophile, I recognized many of the slang terms it used, but I don’t use them in conversation. My hot zones were Wales, Bath, Killarney, and Galway.
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I got the question about the night before Hallowe’en as well, and I have to say the list left me scratching my head - I had never heard any of these expressions before. Where I come from, it’s called “Mat Night”, presumably because the poor lowly doormat was traditionally the target for most of the mischief.
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Honestly, “peenie wallies” makes me think of Penew Nekhet…
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funny – even living in Denver at the time, back in the 1970s, we called it Devil’s Night – i think it was because it was in the news a lot then, or something. plus it sounded cool to us kids. i had the pop/soda question, too, and i do recall using “pop” when i lived in Denver and then somewhere along the line switching to “soda” – but never every “soda pop.”
and “peenie wallies,” wtf – i need to know where this comes from. that was a definite first for me. they’ve always been roly-polies, or sowbugs (for the softer-bodied kind) to me.
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I first perceived a similarity of accent between Northern California and Lake Michigan while listening to Jerry Brown (No. Cal.) debate Pete Wilson (So. Cal.) on the radio.
Since then I have suspected it must have something to do with the history of the railroad business, and with Chicago and San Francisco being connected to each other very early.
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Didn’t get the 'soda/pop" question, so I’m sort of interested to see if my response would have been in the list: the St. Lawrence Valley has always been “soft drink” territory.
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See, my problem with that question is that I use most of the terms it gives more-or-less interchangeably. Sometimes it depends on context, but it’s usually just a matter of what feels right in the sentence. But there’s no option for that, and no context, so I just end up picking whichever one happens to seem good at the moment…
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Do people who read a lot use a number of different terms for things, even if they’ve never left their home town?
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It’s possible… though usually my reading habits as a kid just means I tend to use idioms that other people either don’t recognize or tend to mis-recognize. 
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I was wondering about that too. For a lot of the items in the lists, I knew what they were from reading.
I think it also matters how multicultural it is where you are. I’ll code switch to more British terms if I’m talking to someone with a British accent, for example.
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