In the 1970s, Marc Okrand, who later created the Klingon language, taught an introductory course in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As an exercise to make students aware of language variation, he distributed a questionnaire that asked what terms the students used for various concepts. It also asked where the students were from. I was a TA for the course and helped to compile the students’ responses.
As I recall, some of the questions were about well-known differences within American English, such as soft drink vs. soda vs. pop or sneakers vs. tennis shoes. But a few were specific to California and were intended to show differences between the dialects of the northern and southern parts of the state.
For example, to the question “If you’re going to the city, where are you going?,” most southern Californians responded “to a city” or something similar, while northern Californians responded “to San Francisco.” There might have been one or two East Coasters who answered “to New York City.”
Another question was “Name a freeway.” The northern Californians almost invariably gave a number (“101,” “5”), while southern Californians gave a name (“the Harbor Freeway,” “the Golden State”).
I moved away from California a couple of years later and have lost track of linguistic trends there. Have southern Californians shifted away from using names for freeways to using numbers?