There is also an option to view the cities least similar to your choices, which *might* be more instructive. As least for me, I was more confident in conclusions that I wasn't from Minnesota or Massachusetts than in being from various parts of Southern California.
David ________________________________ From: PGage <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2013 1:03 PM Subject: Re: [TV orNotTV] TV orNotTV] NOTTV: Harvard Dialect Survey in NYT Sorry - it is 25 questions, many or all selected from the larger set of the Harvard Survey... On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 9:34 AM, David Bruggeman <[email protected]> wrote: It gave me 25 questions, and placed me in or near Southern California cities not named LA. However, these cities were just slightly darker red than the parts of the Pacific NW where I spent nearly three decades (I've been in the DC area since 1999). I was not logged in, but I can't be sure there weren't residual tracking markers. > > >I would also note that the most distinctive answers for each of the cities >(Fresno, Bakersfield & Long Beach) was some variation of "no special word for >_________" so I am skeptical of how precisely those answers can be pinpointed. > Especially since I've only been to Long Beach of the 3. > >David > >Sent from my iPad > >On Dec 22, 2013, at 11:45 AM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > > >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 .... 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