
Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Differently From Each Other - stollercyrus
http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6
======
tokenadult
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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).

~~~
antoko
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 :)

~~~
ghaff
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...](http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_all.html)

------
mhartl
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...](http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-
linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6#most-of-america-realizes-that-new-york-
really-is-the-city-20)

 _Hint_ : It's not San José.

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

~~~
epoxyhockey
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.

------
loganfrederick
[http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-
deepest...](http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-
linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6#seriously-alabama-and-mississippi-that-
is-terrible-19)

I have never known anyone to use the third phrase.

~~~
johnchristopher
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....](http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_80.html)

------
tzs
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?

------
D9u
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!

~~~
goodcanadian
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.

------
mieubrisse
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.

~~~
mindcrime
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.

------
mindcrime
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".

~~~
breadbox
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.

~~~
mindcrime
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.

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

------
bostonvaulter2
Hmmmm, I didn't realize that "sneakers" instead of "tennis shoes" was a north
eastern thing.

~~~
TillE
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.

~~~
vwinsyee
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?

~~~
digisth
NYC native here.

Mary - mare-ree

Merry - meh-ree

Marry - mah-ree

------
joelandren
Link to single page version: [http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-
show-the-deepest...](http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-
deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6?op=1)

------
RK
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.

~~~
lotharbot
> _"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?

~~~
RK
You got me there!

------
deevus
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>

------
ape4
I call those rubber soled shoes for gym class "running shoes".

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

------
k8si
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'.

------
azernik
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).

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

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

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

------
seanmcdirmid
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.

------
dghughes
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.

~~~
lindauer
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.

~~~
dghughes
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.

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

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

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

[http://www.nola.com/dining-
guide/index.ssf/2012/04/rb_top_10...](http://www.nola.com/dining-
guide/index.ssf/2012/04/rb_top_10_blog_entry_dnp.html)

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

~~~
Zikes
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".

~~~
nosecreek
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".

~~~
Zikes
Sounds like validation to me.

------
dangrossman
I didn't know "hoagie" was quite _that_ localized to my area.

~~~
telecuda
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.

------
jlgreco
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.

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

~~~
mtdewcmu
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!

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

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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.

------
robodale
southerners talk funny

