North American Regional Dialects and Accents (2016)

On the "soda vs pop vs coke" question, as a child I would have never used any of those words. Here in Western NC, we said "soft drink" for sweet carbonated beverages. People my age (late 30s) and older still do, but the younger generation has picked up "soda."

A particularly interesting part of this map is the difference in accents between parts of the south which had plantations and slaves, and the parts of the south that didn't.

I'm from Missouri. I was 30 years old when somebody pointed out to me that I pronounce the e's and i's in pen, pin, and dentist identically (and that others don't).

It really blew my mind that I had been doing something so obvious for so long without ever realizing it. What else about my speech (or, more scary, my morals) is so deeply ingrained that I don't even notice it? (Like the fish who asks, "What the hell is water?")

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-is-water

Are you from South Texas?

I was born in southwest and moved to the east coast as a teen. I spent 30 years pronouncing pen as "pin". Even when my wife pointed it out to me, I literally couldn't hear the difference at first. She had to slowly sound it out for me. It was weird to discover I'd been pronouncing it differently from other people.

My wife pointed out how I pronounce valve. I was saying it similar to the lady part, while she said it with the A like in the nickname "Al"

My intuition is always to pronounce it "too-pull", because that follows the standard rules for how to pronounce vowels in words that are of English origin (which I will explain later). However, since it is related to the Latin suffix "plus", meaning "more" (see: quintuple), I make a conscious effort to pronounce it "tuppel" as in couple.

To clarify what I mean by "of English origin", of course all of the words in English are inherited from some other language, be that Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, French, etc... I am specifically referring to words of Anglo-Saxon origin, which are not recent imports into the language.

Here is my understanding on the unspoken rules (at least, they were never explicitly taught to me) for how to pronounce English words that you have never seen before. Isolated vowels are to be pronounced in their short form when followed by two sequential vowels, and their long form when followed by one consonant and one vowel. That is, "VCC" is short, and "VCV" is long. For example, "pick" is not pronounced the same as "pike", because the vowel sound in the middle differs, even though the terminal "e" in "pike" is silent. Similarly, "bite" and "bit" only differ in the vowel sound -- a terminal "VC" acts as a "VCC" (except when it doesn't, like "put" vs "putt"... I never said there weren't any exceptions). Incidentally, this is why words with terminal "VC" frequently double the consonant when adding suffixes ("beg" -> "begging", "bed" -> "bedding", "cram" -> "cramming").

An observant person would note that "tuple" in fact follows the "VCC" form. Words or word-parts that end in "le" are frequently to be pronounced as though it ends in "el". For example, take the word "apple". There is unambiguously a vowel sound that occurs between the "pp" and the "l", so it's pronounced more like "appel". In the case of "apple", there are two consonants after the "a" even if you do flip the "le" at the end, so the "a" is short regardless. But if we reverse the "le" in "tuple", we get "tupel", which does follow the "VCV" order, so it seems like it should be pronounced "too-pull". However, we typically follow different pronunciation rules for words of foreign origin, and since "tuple" is of Latin origin, we pronounce it "tuppel". Compare the pronunciation of "avi" in "behavior" (Anglo-Saxon) to "pavilion" (Latin).

I am not a linguist in any sense, and so this is all my amateur reasoning about how English words are pronounced. When looking for Latin examples, I definitely ran into more exceptions than not, so take this all with a grain of salt.

This dataset seems easily manipulated:

http://popvssoda.com/statistics/TOTAL.html

Some pretty funny responses coming in near the top.

> "soda" vs "pop" vs "coke"

On my Father's side, my grand parents, great grandparents, and great aunts and uncles called them "dopes." It's an Appalachian term. I haven't personally heard anyone use it in probably two decades, and I've never heard my father or any of his siblings say it, but it was common among those generations when they were still alive.

While traveling recently, I was in Billings was discussing with a bartender about the local dialect and where various boundaries of production were and pulled up this map.

Both the pin / pen and the on / dawn / don differences between how I pronounced words and he she pronounced words were evident - it was rather interesting and being able to hear the difference.

Btw, its a bubbler. http://shop.wisconsinhistory.org/productcart/pc/Bubbler-Magn... and http://csumc.wisc.edu/wep/map.htm

While listening to A Way With Words ( https://www.waywordradio.org ) some time back I there was a woman calling in about a word (Pitch in) the caller didn't know and apparently everyone in the town knew. Turned out to be a local dialect word choice that the hosts were able to pin down to small pockets of townships in Indiana. The episode is https://www.waywordradio.org/regional-term-pitch-in/

I'll also toss in an older dialect survey with maps - http://dialect.redlog.net/maps.html

Actually I think the map shows the dominant dialect/accent, it doesn't deny the existence of others. The entire west half of the continent is one color, but off the top of my head I know at least five distinct accents you can find among white people here. My grandmothers we're both born and raised in Washington state and had distinctly different speech patterns. My father's mother's accent was almost British, but I can clearly remember my mother's mother talking about "worshing" up or going down to the "crick".

That's more specifically a Southern Californian thing- people moving from Northern California to SoCal find it strange.

Huh, I'm not a Californian by any means, but now that I think about it I say "the 217", "the 26", etc. Have I been corrupted by Californians that have moved to Oregon?

That seems to be a specifically southern California thing.

That's unfortunate because I'm pretty sure I and all of my Canadian friends/family use an article with a highway or freeway number.

This is how I can tell where a scriptwriter is from when watching TV or movies. In the Southeast, no one refers to the interstate or highways like that. But many series and movies set here insist on referring to the I-95 or the US-41.

How else would you say it?

For me it really depends on the highway. To take three different highways as examples, I'd say "395", "I90", and "the 405". --"the 395" wouldn't sound right at all, but neither would "405". And that's having grown up in Washington.

As a non-native speaker, that's how I would say it because that's how it would be said in my native language.

If someone told me "I took 5" I'd expect them to be talking about some kind of quantity and wait for them to finish the sentence.

Can a non-American native speaker maybe chime in how this works in other dialects? I'm wondering whether it's Californians who are the odd ones out or whether it's just uncommon in the US.

> Californian use of the definite article when identifying numbered roadways, e.g. "I took the 5.".

Huh, that's pretty standard here in the greater Toronto area (e.g. the four-o-one, the four-o-seven), in context it also works for TTC route numbers (the five-o-one, the five-eleven).

This is probably vestigial from before the interstate/numbering system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California_freeways#F...

> When Southern California freeways were built in the 1940s and early 1950s, local common usage was primarily the freeway name preceded by the definite article. It took several decades for Southern California locals to start to also commonly refer to the freeways with the numerical designations, but the usage of the definite article persisted.

"Take the Ventura Freeway" -> "Take the 134"

Using single digit numbers by themselves to denote highways is awkward and confusing, but it's much less of a problem with double and triple digit numbers--"I took 95 from Boston to Washington" sounds prettier than "I took 5 from Seattle to Portland". Since the IHS numbering system starts from the southwest and increments up as you go northeast, southwestern Interstate highway numbers are disproportionately single-digit, which is probably why "the" is commonly prepended in SoCal.

"Cascadian"

Of the Republic of Cascadia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_(independence_movemen...

The "Youtube Voice"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-l...

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/aepn94/the-rise-of-youtub...

However, much of the internet is written and not spoken. So we gets new ways to write (doge, memes, 4chan green text, etc.) but not really new accents.

Parodied in the highly polished mockumentary http://www.purepwnage.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pure_Pwnage_characters

Because Jeremy has lived in his basement for most of his life, he has had very little conversation with any other person and has therefore taught himself how to speak.

When i am in the us everyone thinks im from california. Regardless of studies, BC, cali and alaska share a west coast accent. Thats one of the reasons hollywood likes to film in vancouver.

Actually the 'aboot' thing that people stereotype about Canadians is more prominent in the upper midwest US than it is in most parts of Canada.

I do hear a difference between western Canada and Ontario (I'm from the former and live in the latter.) But there's also a known dialect difference between central and southern Alberta (former settled by English/Ukrainian/Germans the other by American immigrants).

Rural Ontario, well, that's another story.

"Do you say pop or soda?"

There is no option for "ginger".... not impressed ;-)

Tangier cannot go w/o mention - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

As another child poster mentioned, the Ocracoke brogue is basically gone, but Tangier Island, Virginia still has a population of speakers.

Of course you have an accent, everyone does. What you mean is you have an generic American "TV accent."

> I don't have an accent

As I'm sure you are aware, of course you do. Everybody has an accent. To my European ears, all Americans most certainly have heavy ones.

But there is a Miami accent that I can hear. Not everyone in Miami has it, I don't and I was also raised there. I hear it more in the first generation children of Spanish-speaking immigrants (which I am one but I never picked the accent up)

Not sure why people are downvoting you for sharing your opinion on a light subject. (Even though I'm sure you have an accent!)

It took me a lot of work/traveling around the U.S. to detect my own bastardized Michigan accent, which people on both coasts think is very cute and very Canadian+Chicagoan. When I'm feeling playing playful I take it full Fargo to make 'em laugh. My accent is very apparent to me now, and it's made me appreciate all the flavors and refrain from stereotyping.

I really enjoy trying to pinpoint geographic origins from people who have the "TV accent", since there are always subtle indicators that often surprise me after I inquire further into someone's background.

(I agree 100% on "Y'all". Y'all is an awesome contraction; should be considered a legit word and imported north. "You guys" seems clunky compared to y'all, latter of which is one syllable and sounds right.)

What is with Yankees and the persistent myth of the singular "y'all".

There may be some small, isolated spots in the South where that's true, but they're not common, and, as someone born and raised there, Dallas is definitely not one of them.

> Fun fact: I'm told that in Dallas, TX "y'all" is singular, the plural of which is "all y'all."

False fact. Source: life long DFW resident. It is plural in basically all uses.

Where do you live?

I grew up in Eastern CT and the only people I've met for whom "caught" == "cot" or "dawn" == "don" are from working class families in Boston.

I'm from Indiana. I think most folks there (including myself) say caught = cot and dawn = don.

My mom is from Rhode Island and Cot and Caught were different for her, but Cot and Cart were pronounced the same! I grew up in Northern Virginia where the vast majority of the population was from somewhere else (school bus rides occasionally broke down into arguments like Aunt/Ant or caught/cot).

As a kid I pronounced caught/cot differently but have lived all of my adult life in places where they are pronounced the same, and so I don't say them differently any more.

See ya on the 13th

Not only that but there's a pretty clear continuity of dialect _over_ the US Canada border in many places. Drive into upstate NY from Ontario and there's a pretty clear cultural and linguistic continuity in many respects.

Many of my in-laws are from the East Bay, so I have something of a window into these issues. The 'southern' accent of the Valley towns is from their Okie migrant ancestors. As many fled the Dust Bowl, they carried their accents into the San Joaquin Valley and the Salinas Valley too. I've spent a bit of time out there in construction (SJ and Salinas Valleys) and most of the time those guys have little discernible accent. However, if you get them very angry or very drunk, it's nearly a southern accent. I've no idea where they get it from, as I've had a fair few glasses of wine at the holidays and can't recall hearing the southern brogue, but they all seem to slip into it when they get rear-ended on 5.

As an anecdote: I have a friend who grew up in Sydney, AU. Never left the country. He has a distinctly american accent. He attributes it to too much TV.

Ever been to the UK? There are some accents that for many American English speakers wouldn't be intelligible. I doubt those will disappear within a generation.

There's a general tendency of accents merging or becoming more similar but new accents develop out of that as well. I think you underestimate the effect everyday speech has on people. Take the Dutch for instance. They're famous for almost universally speaking English very well. The main reason for this is that in the Netherlands foreign language films, TV series etc. come with subtitles instead of a dubbed version. Still many still have a recognisably Dutch accent.

Then there's another phenomenon that in language history so far has only happened to English: There are more non-native speakers than native speakers. So we might very well end up with something like a universal, worldwide English accent. It might just not sound like any of the native English accents at all.

I think that was the expectation a few generations ago, once TVs were in most people's homes, but it didn't happen. I recall seeing a headline for a study a couple of years ago that said that regional accents were actually getting stronger.

Empirically, this does not seem to be the case. Labov at UPenn has been studying American dialect formation for the past ~50 years, and has found several ongoing changes. In some ways the Midwest is getting more divergent, with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

Many small dialects are disappearing, but others are becoming more divergent (out west). It's a mixed bag.

People have been predicting that for a long time. I can remember reading something in Encarta 95 about it. But it's also been disproved for just as long. New dialect features are constantly being created, just as surely as old ones are levelled. Even as much as certain groups move around a lot, huge numbers of people are living in the same area their grandparents were born in.

(Sometimes, I feel surprised when I meet someone else who was born in the city I live in. But if I listen to how someone speaks, no matter if they're fifteen or fifty, I can tell whether they're from here.)

Probably QGIS if you are doing something data driven and want a big image as output (especially if the source data has geographic coordinates associated with it).

There are a few open map engines, I guess mapserver and mapnik are 2 of the more prominent ones, and now there are several implementations using OpenGL (aimed at tiled vector maps in browsers). But that is all more at the toolkit level rather than the application level.

For simple stuff, using leaflet to draw on top of OSM tiles is a nice solution.

Not exactly a written map, but I think you'll enjoy.

"A tour of the British Isles in accents" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mzWkuOxz8

That might be quite tricky - I suspect the regional variations aren't quite as strong as they used to be but where I grew up (a small fishing village in North East Scotland) it was possible to identify people from a farming rather than a fishing background due to them having a different accent even though they lived perhaps 1km away...

It's done a bit differently, but there's an app on phones "The English Dialects app" you can install that will give you some specific features and how they distribute in Britain and Ireland. It will also try to guess where you're from, if you're from those parts.

It does heat maps of features, rather than trying to group bundles into discrete areas. This is probably more accurate, because it shows you were features are strong. Sometimes they'll correlate with others, sometimes not.

There was a quiz in the NYT a year or two ago that did an astounding job of this without any AI -- it suggested two places for my upbringing based on what words I used "pop" vs "soda", whether I pronounced "pin" and "pen" the same or not, etc -- and the two suggested places happened to be where I grew up and where my parents grew up (which probably influenced my speaking by copying them as well as my peers).

That would be fun to use. Talk to an AI for a minute and have it figure out where you're from. Kind of like an audio based 20 questions. It would also be entertaining to try and trick it.

Why is it ironic? Alabama gets many tornadoes, so it makes sense that an audio clip describing a tornado is from a place that receives tornadoes. It's like saying it's ironic that someone from Buffalo NY is describing snow... they get it quite often.

It might be ironic if someone from Alabama was describing snow, though.