YOU ARE WHAT YOU SAY YOU ARE

Back in 2013, the New York Times published a dialect quiz that I passed along to my students most years. Most of my charges were surprised that their answers to 25 language multiple-choice questions could so accurately reveal their origins. It didn't surprise me so much because I spent nine years living in southern Ohio and was well aware that everything just 500 miles west from my New York home had a different name. The questions in the Harvard Dialect Survey were created by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. Josh Katz of the Times created the quiz based on the responses of 350,000 test takers.

When I trekked out to Dayton for my freshman year, I learned that a seeded roll was a Kaiser roll and that no one knew what a bagel was. If I wanted a soda, I had to ask for "pop"! When I said I had to wait "on line", people wondered whether there was some sort of painted line on the ground, because they always stood "in line"! People pronounced "crayon" as a single-syllable word! When I started teaching, my students pronounced George Washington as if it were spelled "Warshington". When the show Roots dominated the airways, they shared their thoughts about Rutz. Anne, my wife-to-be, taught me that the area of grass between street and sidewalk was a "berm". She had the disturbing habit of pronouncing "Mary", "Merry", and "Marry" exactly the same way. She pronounced the molasses-flavored, gooey candy as "Car-mel", like the city in California. The most annoying aspect of the Midwestern accent for me, and I hear it on television constantly, is the inability or unwillingness to distinguish the short "i" sound from the short "e" sound. So the word "meant" gets pronounced more like "mint". For a toothache, you go to see a "din-tist".

Of course, I recognized my own tendencies. Most people were surprised to hear I was raised on Long Island. They would immediately mock it as Lon-Guyland! But my accent only appeared at moments of high emotion, when I would pronounce "chocolate" as "chawk-let". The word "forehead" was "forrid" when I really got going. Of course, I knew that MY way of speaking was actually the correct way (as do we all). Even still, I had to laugh when I took my Academic Challenge team a few years ago to a school out on Long Island for a competition. Just before lunch break, the host speaker got on the PA and announced that the "pizzers and soders" (pizzas and sodas) we had ordered were now available in the cafeteria.

Here is the link to the quiz: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html

There are more than 25 questions in the quiz, so if you take it multiple times, you will see four or five different questions each time. The big road question is ambiguous. Growing up on Long Island, I often drove on the LIE (an Expressway) and the Northern State Parkway (a Parkway). In NJ, I drive on both the Turnpike and Parkway at high rates of speed (most of the time). There was no single answer for me. You will surely see some questions where you will need to choose between two equally valid responses. But, at the end of the quiz, it will still nail you to a place within 50 miles of where you grew up!

Below is a fascinating linguistic tour of the USA with some dialect specialists. Sadly, there are ads. Enjoy!