5 Likes
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.
6 Likes
I have a Home Counties / Southeast England dialect and accent but it’s muddied because I grew up in the US and had to learn my UK accent to stop being picked on in primary school for being “the American kid.”
I’m audibly not Northern (despite my father’s side of the family being from Derby) but I don’t really sound like I’m from anywhere more specific than that. I’m too posh for South London (where I spent my adolescence) but not posh enough to be properly from the Home Counties.
This quiz pegs me as coming from Oxford, which made me laugh initially because I don’t sound like I’m from there, given the accent is quite West Country to my ears.
Upon reflection though, Oxford is a melting pot of all of the different Southern dialects and even though my accent is completely different, the dialect is pretty close to what I actually speak.
9 Likes
Newfy accents sound very Northern Irish/Scots to my ears but blur into American (specifically New England-ish) as one gets further from Newfoundland.
7 Likes
Interesting to see something from here show up on the front page over there.
7 Likes
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. 
7 Likes
Accent-wise things start getting more homogenous the more you go West. Maybe they got you on preferred vocabulary.
7 Likes
I think that between the mining, military, and recreational tourism of the place, Colorado is probably the most generically connected of the 'Muricas.
6 Likes
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!
7 Likes
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.
10 Likes
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.
8 Likes
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.
5 Likes
Honestly, “peenie wallies” makes me think of Penew Nekhet…
1 Like
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.
7 Likes
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.
4 Likes
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.
5 Likes
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…
7 Likes
Do people who read a lot use a number of different terms for things, even if they’ve never left their home town?
10 Likes