They nailed it -- see that green circle around the dark-red blob in East-Central Indiana? While I was born here in Indy, I did most of my growing up in Marion, Indiana, just about dead-center of that spot. (Those even-darker red spots around Wichita KS, Jackson MS and the far-West corner of South Carolina? Darned if I know, though I do have some ancestors from that part of the Carolinas, just about the middle of the original Cherokee nation.)
How 'bout you?
Thanks to Jeffro, who found this.
It was pretty accurate for me. Two other towns
ReplyDeleteIn my state, and deecee.
Being from Michigan, I'm pleased to see that you've admitted what I've known for some time; I don't have an accent. You Hoosiers, however, do. :P
ReplyDeleteFascinating.
ReplyDeleteI moved from the Seattle area to Phoenix a few decades back, so my speech patterns are no longer what they were in my youth. The map picked three towns, each of which are more or less between Seattle and Phoenix: Spokane, Boise, and Reno.
Mine is off by a minimum of 600 miles too far west, even more if you go south west. It puts me much further into the South than North Carolina. Probably because of my propensity to hang out with rednecks no matter where they're from.
ReplyDeleteNailed it, but most of Maine, New Hampshire, and Easter Mass are dark read, and I'm from Portland.
ReplyDeleteLove these tests. Would be nice if I could go through the regions where all the answers I didn't pick came from...
Interesting. There's not so much pronunciation here - mostly vocabulary. My pronunciation is very midwest (Kansas, which is where my folks are from) but this rated be very new england because of the words I use to describe things (that's where I grew up).
ReplyDeleteIt seems, though, that people identify more by accent than word use.
Well, here's a shocker: http://nyti.ms/1jMLGY1
ReplyDeleteI took the test again, this time being conscious to answer as I would have before I moved from Seattle, WA. The result was: Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancounver, WA. Pretty slick.
ReplyDeleteThere's a question pool larger than the number of questions it gives you, so if you take it again you'll get some questions you haven't seen.
(Tam's results have a large hot zone around Atlanta and a smaller but significant one around Chicago -- alas, the link the gentlebeings from The Times gave her [and you'll be shocked at this] does not work to show her results.)
ReplyDeleteShock of shocks, I got a mix of North Jersey and Buffalo.
ReplyDeleteGiven that link stuf, I'll take a screencap
I got Dayton/Detroit/Des Moines. I grew up near Akron, so I'll call it "close enough for jazz." My dad (RIP) used to like to listen to R&B radio out of Detroit when he was a kid.
ReplyDeleteI got three cities in Georgia, including Atlanta. Funny thing, I've never lived in Georgia. I grew up in WV and FL. Both of those are on the outliers of my answers, though.
ReplyDeleteI've moved 16 times in my life...all over the US, 17 years in my current location..but there was a dark dark red blob in the county that shared puberty with me.
ReplyDeleteWeird. Apparently, living in northern Minnesota the first 8 years of my life, then southern MN the next 5, then moving to south central Virginia for my high school years and southwest VA from college onward puts my speech...
ReplyDeletein California.
Huh?
To be fair, I picked "you guys" instead of "y'all", but in reality I use them pretty much interchangeably.
I didn't expect precision, considering that my childhood gave me an accent that wanders depending on whom I am talking to: Nebraska, Iowa, Arizona, Minnesota, and Michigan (Traverse City, not Detroit). As an adult, add Denver, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Virginia; there might also be some southern (that is, southeastern) influence from 12 years in the military and in defense contracting, because good old boys dominate the services. (Your accent usually doesn't change in adulthood, but it can affect word choice and such things as whether you've even heard of a liquor drive-through.)
ReplyDeleteBut what I got was precise and 67% way off: Grand Rapids, MI, Detroit, and Fresno, CA. Grand Rapids is close - it's culturally German-Yankee rather like Traverse City, not displaced southern like Detroit. And I have lived in GR, 3 years of wasting my first shot at college in the 70's, and the last five years working there.
But Detroit? I think the deciding factor there was "devil's night" - the barbaric Detroit custom of attempting to burn down your own neighborhood on the night before Halloween, which the rest of MI mainly hears about on the news. IOW, a definite flaw in their database.
And Fresno??? Flagstaff, AZ was the closest to there I've ever lived, and I doubt the towns have much in common.
A thought about the false CA identifications: could this reflect CA regional word choices being broadcast to the rest of the country through movies and television programs? I know that in my childhood, every boy could do a John Wayne accent, and I suspect in places like Texas the boys would learn Walter Cronkite's generic midwest accent in addition to their own local accent. I'm old enough to remember older people with quite strong accents peculiar to areas even smaller than a county - a few miles from Traverse City you'd find farmers with an inherited German accent, blending to a Polish accent further out. But their kids all sounded like Cronkite, and this was when there were few places where you'd get a good TV signal. It's surprising that any local variations have survived.
ReplyDeleteWhile the non-surfer modern CA accent is as close to "General American" (the network-news accent) as can be found, I suspect the false-positives are due to people from other regions migrating to CA and bringing their accents and vocabularies along for the ride. For instance, one of the better-known towns (Pasadena?) was originally settled in the 19th Century by a large group from Noblesville, IN, and this seems to have been a non-uncommon pattern.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested that most people focus on the named cities and not the (IMO fascinating) "heat map" patterns. The city picks are at the whim of whatever hottest/largest algorithm they are using; the heat map is a little closer to raw data.