Many here will have seen that the NYT has published today an interactive version of a sample of questions from the "Harvard Dialect Survey". The entire survey has 122 questions (you can see all of them at a link at the end of the survey), the NYT has selected around 10 or so.
I am suspicious that they may have cheated a bit using location data from my sign-in - two of my three most similar cities are within 100 miles of where I have lived the last 25 years, and one is the closest city to me with more than 100,000 people in it. None of the cities are within 400 miles of where I grew up prior to going to college (southern California), which would seem to be a big influence on speech patterns. If anyone has taken or decides to take it, I would be interested in a quick report on how close it got to identifying your city, and if it was closer to where you grew up or currently live (if different): http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131222 TV tie-in: Television is one of the main culprits for the break-down in regional dialects in the United States. I grew up in Los Angeles with a family of recently transplanted New Yorkers, who all had strong regional accents and speech patterns, and who were very aware of how differently Californians talked. SNL has a recurring sketch about The Californians that seems to self-consciously make fun of the assumption that everyone in SoCal has internalized the affluent Anglo subculture. The larger truth is probably that we are all Californians these days, or at least the flat California sound is what gets repeated in most mass media. Of course if you walk the streets of Los Angeles (well, few people actually do that, but if you walk the shopping malls or beaches of Southern California) the accents and dialects you will hear are anything but flat. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
