Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Differently From Each Other | Hacker News Reader

Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Differently From Each Other

businessinsider.com

97 pointsstollercyrus95 comments

This interesting set of maps is an example of how presentation can triumph over content. The pretty maps total to not a huge amount of information on dialect differences in the United States, a topic that has been posted about here on HN before, but their sheer prettiness prompted me to share the link to my Facebook wall, whereupon Facebook showed me on my home page that five of my other friends have already shared the same link. It's often easier for pretty pictures to go viral than more informative paragraphs of text.

The underlying survey that gathered the data

http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/

is, I think, something we have also discussed before here on HN. The link from the survey home page that is supposed to lead to the faculty webpage of the principal investigator appears to be a dead link. He is now at a new university,

http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/staff/bv230/

still working on linguistics research.

I disagree about the quality of the information presented herein. As someone whose day job involves recording sound for film (necessarily including lots of dialog) and who is not American, regionalisms in accents are both challenging and fascinating for me, and a frequent topic of discussion between myself and the actors I work with. On smaller films there isn't usually the budget for a dialog coach and since I listen to people for a living that aspect of production often falls in my lap.

I found these maps extremely informative and and they helped to clarify some perplexing edge cases (eg people from Missouri sound southern in general, but on some words they exhibit marked differences from their near neighbors).

Not to put words in his mouth but, I think the GP was referring to the information density rather than the information quality itself. Likely as the comparison he was making was to the presentation quality.

I think you are both capable of being correct... but then I must think that because I agree with both of you :)

While I'm not an expert in the topic, the visualizations would seem to be drawn from a fairly substantial data set--over 30K respondents. http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_all...

It's really unfortunate that the data is presented at such a high level of aggregation.

It would be so much better to have individual level data (perhaps with personal info such as age, etc. removed) so other people could do their own analysis (e.g. clustering).

I don't want this to be interpreted as criticism of Bert Vaux and his colleagues: there is incentive in academia to not share data, since you get credited for the uniqueness of your work, and get no credit for collecting data used by others. I just hope the situation changes.

If you look at the concentration of blue in the Bay Area, you can see that they need to add a city to "What is 'the City'?":

http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest...

Hint: It's not San José.

Georgia has a similar thing going on. Looks like a pretty large radius around Atlanta thinks Atlanta is "the City".

Atlantan here. This was my first thought as well. Pretty much anyone in Georgia and a little bit into the surrounding states think that too. People on the coast of Georgia usually refer to Savannah though.

Yeah, I'm surprised San Francisco wasn't one of the options. Clearly the administer of this survey isn't from the Bay Area.

You know, I'm a little surprised that Socal doesn't have a similar concentration around LA.

LA is just called LA, though people do say downtown LA. I've only heard of San Francisco being referred to as the City by West Coasters.

Similarly around Salt Lake City - you may go "downtown" but not to "the City".

It probably has to do with the density gradient. With more spread out urban areas having less distinction between "the city" and outlying areas.

That's because people don't think of LA as a city, just a slightly more urbanized area within the larger semi-suburban expanse of the metro area.

It's all city down there...that's why.

It wasn't a game of "which of these does not belong."

My point was that everyone around San Francisco calls it "the City" (even those in more populous San José), so they would have done well to add it to their set. In contrast, people around, say, Los Angeles don't typically call it "the City", so leaving out LA is not a relevant omission.

Does anyone actually say Los Angeles? Maybe in Louisiana whose abbreviation is LA?

People around Sioux Falls, SD call it "the city" doesn't mean it should be added to the chart.

http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest...

I have never known anyone to use the third phrase.

I found a list [1]:

     a. sunshower (34.29%)
     b. the wolf is giving birth (0.04%)
     c. the devil is beating his wife (6.43%)
     d. monkey's wedding (0.16%)
     e. fox's wedding (0.15%)
     f. pineapple rain (0.03%)
     g. liquid sun (0.74%)
     h. I have no term or expression for this (55.15%)
     i. other (3.02%)

[1] http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_80....

From Texas here - I've heard someone use it. Though their version was "God is beating his wife" instead of "the devil". I heard it as a kid, from my neighbor's dad, when my friend and I were outside playing and it started to rain while it was sunny.

I'm pretty sure I've at least heard that "devil beating his wife" thing once in my life, somewhere... but in terms of routine, daily life, I know of no term for that phenomenon that's common place. shrug

I live in Louisiana. I have heard it from several people.

Also, here is a localized scene from a video game that uses it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk024-oaFv4

Well unless you live in one of those green regions, that is kind of the point.

I'm from South Louisiana. My grandma has told me this from the time I was a young child and it still comes to mind. Went through my head just today, in fact, during an afternoon shower.

I have always heard it referred to as "a monkey's wedding." Though I think that came from my dad who grew up in apartheid South Africa, so it might be racist...

My mother would say that "the witches are getting married".

Note: this post contains words some may find offensive.

I'd like to see something similar for children's songs. By "children's songs" I don't mean songs adults sing for children, but rather the songs children sing among themselves. There are many variations of these songs, and it would be interesting to see how they vary regionally.

For instance, when I was a kid, we had:

   He's Popeye the sailor man
   He lives in a garbage can
   *He eats all the worms
   *And spits out the germs
   He's Popeye the sailor man

There are many variants of the lines I've marked with asterisks:

   He pees like a fountain
   And poops out a mountain

   They turned on the gas
   And it burned off my ass

   He catches all the lizards
   and eats all their gizzards

   He sleeps with his granny
   And tickles her fanny

   He likes to go swimmin'
   With bare naked women

Same goes for other children's songs. There's the "Joy to the world/the school burned down" song, for instance. In ours, the principle ended up hanging from the flag pole by his dick. In others he's hanged by his neck. Ours didn't mention the janitor, but some others have him shot in the head.

There are also variants in things like "eeny meeny miny moe". Every parent in my neighborhood taught the next part as "catch a tiger by the toe", but every kid said (when out of earshot of adults) "catch a nigger by the toe". Where did that come from? I can't recall any adults using that word in my California suburban neighborhood and have no idea where we kids got that for eeny meeny miny moe. I suspect we got it by whatever mysterious mechanism we got our versions of songs.

(Speaking of eeny meeny miny moe, I'm guessing that I'm not the only one here who figured out ahead of time the rudiments of modular arithmetic, and used that to my advantage whenever I saw that an eeny meeny miny moe was going to take place...anyone else want to admit to massively cheating at eeny meeny miny moe?)

Another thing about children's songs. The lyrics are sometimes more sophisticated than you would expect from children of the ages that sing the songs. Who writes these songs?

I'm disappointed that my part of the USA is ignored by these maps. Hawaii has its own form of the English language, sometimes referred to as "Hawaiian Creole," but more commonly known as "Pidgin."

So, wow, laulau! Mo bettah da map include us, eh!

For the language pedants, it is almost always called "pidgin," but it is technically a creole which means that it was formed out of mashing several languages together, but it has become its own full fledged stable language. I am not really a local, but I did live in Hilo for 5 years. I know a lot of words with Hawaiian, English, Japanese, some other European language origins.

As a Chicagoan, I've never paid the slighted bit of attention that, apparently, literally everyone around me doesn't say "sear-up" as I do. No clue how that came about, with no family ties to the east coast whatsoever.

I find that I pronounce some words differently, depending on context (who I'm talking to). Also, I've altered my pronunciation of some words as I've aged. But, FWIW, when I say "syrup", by default it comes out like "sear-up" for me, but it sometimes comes out as "sir-up". Not really sure why. I'm from North Carolina, but never really paid much attention to how other people say this.

The one about "What word(s) do you use to refer to a group of two or more people" is missing an option or two. I often use "you lot" or "you kids". To be fair, the latter is more of a joking thing, like parting from a group and saying "you kids be good" or whatever.

The "you lot" bit is, I'm pretty sure, something I picked up from watching British television. Most people in my neck of the woods say "you all" or "y'all". Some use "you'uns".

I was also surprised that "you folks" wasn't on the list. I've used "folks" as a less gendered version of "guys" most of my life, and I thought it was more common than it apparently is.

I've mostly always treated "guys" as gender neutral myself, even though it may be technically incorrect. I'll sometimes say "you guys" to refer to either a mixed group or even an all woman group.

I do use "you folks" as well, somtimes. Not often though. Can't really say why.

So literally no one at all uses the correct "you" ?

I've used various different alternates as I've aged and moved locations but I'm fairly certain "you" (with a silent parenthetical (plural) ) has remained my default throughout.

youwse / you lot / your lot (northern UK)

guys (used as non-gendered) (bay area)

y'all / you all (Texas)

Additionally, there are still areas in Philadelphia where "youse" is more than acceptable.

We also say "yous" in Dublin. Other parts of Ireland generally say "ye".

In Newfoundland, Canada, we say 'ye' when we mean more than one 'you.' Roughly equal to 'y'all' I think.

I use y'all, but my favorite is "you'ins". (said by a guy from West Virginia)

Which made me think of this from My Cousin Vinny: "It is possible that the two yutes..."

Having never heard the phrase before, "the devil is beating his wife" really stood out to me.

Hmmmm, I didn't realize that "sneakers" instead of "tennis shoes" was a north eastern thing.

Yeah, I genuinely had no idea about that one. I know "trainers" is the British thing, but I thought everyone in the US called them sneakers.

That's the term used by zappos.com and rockport.com, for example. "Tennis shoes" is not a category.

I'm also slightly terrified that the vast majority of the country cannot distinguish Mary/merry/marry.

I'm having a hard time trying to pronounce one or more of Mary/merry/marry in any different way... how would one do that?

NYC native here.

Mary - mare-ree

Merry - meh-ree

Marry - mah-ree

For me, from Minnesota, they're all the same: vowel like in "made" [eɪ]. I think the others have vowels like in "bed" [ɛ] and "bad" [æ]. These vowels aren't allowed before r in my dialect.

Link to single page version: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest...

What is the difference between "cray-ahn" and "cray-awn"?

Note that I pronounce "dawn" = "don".

Also, I say crayon as "crown", which either isn't very popular, or they just chose poor colors for the heatmap.

Seems the answer is to learn International Phonetic Alphabet.

> "I say crayon as "crown""

From what I understand, this is common in Kansas. Are you (or at least one of your parents) from there?

You got me there!

"Dawn" and "don" are the same for me as well, although I have heard that some localities make a distinction between those two vowel sounds with a varying amount of "roundness" of the lips.

A lot of the pronunciation examples they gave made me speculate whether everyone even pronounces those words the same. It would be easier if everyone would just memorize IPA.

Dawn and don are the same for me, too.

I pronounce crayon as "cray'n" -- pretty much exactly as you could pronounce "prayin'"

What about "down" then ?

As in "Don said dawn gets him down".

Down is different, sounds like crown/town/clown/gown for me.

Don/dawn sound like the "a" in father for me. Down sounds like the "ou" in "Ouch!"

The difference would be that "ahn" is pronounced like you were saying "Ahhhh" and "awn" is pronounced like you were saying "awe".

Those are exactly the same here (ignoring that ahhhhhhhhh is longer).

Edit: Looking at a couple other comments apparently some people pronounce 'ahh' with the same a as 'ann'? I certainly don't.

My intuition would say the former is spoken faster and the latter with more of a drawl, leading awn to sound like lawn.

It would help if you mentioned where you're from, and where your parents are from.

i think it's that cray-ahn rhymes with ann, and cray-awn rhymes with lawn. i'm a cran guy myself.

In Australia (at least where I grew up), we call "water fountains" bubblers.

I can't speak for the rest of Australia though, since in Newcastle we use the phrase "ripping off" which means "making fun of" in addition to "charging too much".

In cities as close as Sydney, the phrase is "ripping into", whereas the Novacastrian[1] version makes no sense to them.

[1]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Novacastrian

I call those rubber soled shoes for gym class "running shoes".

Reminds me of a dialect map that was done in Shiny: http://spark.rstudio.com/jkatz/DialectMap/

A lot of these stimuli would have been better if they'd used pictures instead of "How do you say [misleading/too specific definition of term that requires some thought to arrive at a word for].

For example: present a picture of someone holding a paper grocery bag with an arrow pointing at it, then ask "What's the word for this item?"

Doesn't work for all of them (e.g. you can't draw a picture of a moot point?) but I'm just sayin'.

Huh. Despite having grown up in California, I tend to fall into Northeastern patterns for a lot of these things. Possibly an issue with the data, or possibly I'm a weird case - immigrant parents, and grew up in neighborhood that's heavily American Jewish (which I assume correlates with Northeastern dialects).

#21: What do you call a drive-through liquor store?

I'm in Arkansas, and I've always heard these called "Baptist Windows".

I'd have answered "daiquiri shop" since that's the only kind of drive-thru alcohol place I'd heard of before.

When I was living in Mississippi as a teenager, I remember making runs to a place called Daiquiri World across the river in Louisiana. It was (a) a drive-thru liquor store and (b) the drinking age in Louisiana was 18 at the time. The south could be a really strange place.

Oh those Cajuns causing trouble, hello from The Maritimes.

I would say crayfish just as it's spelled. I have no idea what it is in Acadian French I'm not French but I know a lot of Acadian people.

It would be funny if the name came from little lobster, maybe "petite homard"? Not even close to crayfish.

It's from the Old French crevis or modern French écrevisse, having something to do with crabs, not lobsters.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=crayfish http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crayfish#Etymology

For what it's worth, it is also spelled, not just pronounced, "crawfish" in Texas and Louisiana.

A guy I work with, Terry, an Acadian went to France and he said that the people there understood him as if he was from France and his friend from Quebec they could barely. understand.

The French from France asked Terry when he left and what village he was from Terry kept trying to tell them that he never was from France he had always lived here in the Maritimes they didn't believe him they thought he left France maybe ten years ago.

For #15 the Louisiana term is Poboy, despite the best attempts by Subway to convince us otherwise.

I have lived in Louisiana my whole life, and I've always considered po-boys and subs to be different things. A po-boy uses french bread.

Well there is always the argument over what a proper poboy is, and what the texture of authentic french bread is.

I thought a Poboy had fried food, not cold cuts.

Roast beef po-boys are a big deal in New Orleans.

http://www.nola.com/dining-guide/index.ssf/2012/04/rb_top_10...

The only strict requirement is the baguette style bread.

I am firmly on the side of "y'all".

My wife spent about half a year in North Carolina for work, where "y'all" seemed to translate to the singular "you", while "all y'alls" was used to refer to "you" plural.

I have used y'all for as long as I can remember (although not exclusively...it is mixed in with "you guys", "you people", and others according to whichever sounds best in that particular sentence), even though the farthest I was ever away from the West Coast for my first 47 years was just outside Yosemite in California, and I knew nobody who was from the South or spoke with any obvious Southern influence.

I think I must have heard it on TV and picked it up.

Anyone else here use it despite no Southern connection among friends or family?

One of my foreign friends was teasing me about how English doesn't have a word for "a group of people" whereas many other major languages apparently do, and I replied "sure we do, it's y'all".

I think you mean 'for addressing a group of people'. We have plenty of words for groups of people. And we have ways of addressing them, they just take more than one word: "you -foo-". It's like the infinitive in English is two words, (to -foo-) but in most other euro languages it's only one.

I'm in Canada where y'all doesn't get used much, but when I was learning Greek we used y'all as the English plural "you".

Sounds like validation to me.

I didn't know "hoagie" was quite that localized to my area.

I thought the same thing. But then again, I waited in line at the grand opening of Florida's first Wawa because I missed them so much.

Most of these pronunciation ones either sound exactly the same to me, or I use interchangeably like the two pronunciations of the word "a".

...hmm, I wonder if "a" has any geographic breakdown.

They left the Pittsburgh "yinz" off question #7.

I was kind of surprised that they left out yinz. I was going to mention it, but I figured someone else already did. There was a show on regional accents on PBS and they compared western PA to the Galapagos Islands of regional accents. I mean get aht!

Some natives of Bloomington, Indiana do that one, too.

Some people in North Carolina use what seems to be a subtle variation from that... it comes out "you'uns". It's been a while since I heard anybody say that, though. I think it's more of a country thing.

I almost spit out my drink at the map about "The city". I mean, really, what did they expect?

Well, in the bay area, "the city" means San Francisco. It took me a while to figure out they weren't talking about NYC when I lived there.

southerners talk funny

Reply on news.ycombinator.com