…
… and where we came from …
… I ran across this intriguing website today …
… the North Carolina State University Dialect Survey Maps …
… http://spark.rstudio.com/jkatz/SurveyMaps/…
… the self-description of which says, “Dialect maps by Joshua Katz based on data from the Harvard Dialect Survey conducted by Bert Vaux, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge.“
…
The site contains a quiz which you can take to see what how you talk … your dialect … says about where you live … or came from …
… the quiz is here …
… http://spark.rstudio.com/jkatz/DialectQuiz/ …
… and can be taken in about ten minutes.
…
I took it today … and found that how I talk really does say a lot about where I came from …
… as shown in the correlation map produced by my responses to the test questions:
…
Apparently, at least in my case, where I grew up had a much greater impact on how I talk than where I have lived for the 46 years since I graduated from college …
… and moved away from New York.
…
As you can see in the map, my “most similar” range of dialect locations is a very narrow band of locations in New York and New Jersey …
… and the four “most similar cities” are within a relatively short distance of where I spent most of my childhood …
… in Lindenhurst, New York, on Long Island.
…
And, somewhat oddly, my “less similar” range of dialect locations covers all of California …
… where I have lived since 1969!
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For the website of Joshua Katz, which contains a lot of information about regional dialects and his “Beyond ‘Soda, Pop or Coke'”, see:
Three Dot ... 