For entertainment value, I had a go at this to see what it made of my British accent. I'm from London, so my accent is probably not too dissimilar from TDS's John Oliver.
Interestingly, while there was a hotspot in New York and another in San Francisco - which sort of makes sense - the map actually suggested the Jackson/Nashville/Birmingham triangle which feels to be a distinctly different dialect if my TV watching is accurate in any way! What I will say is that the easiest American accent for Brits to put on is probably a southern one. Whether they/we do a good one, is a separate question. Think Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind, or Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. However, I realise that I was being very unfair in taking the test. I just wondered if it was clever enough to spot a Brit, Aussie or South African. And the NY Times app definitely seemed to ignore my UK IP address. Adam On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 8:34 PM, Joe Hass <[email protected]> wrote: > Even based out of Chicago, it correctly pegged me with Detroit, Grand > Rapids, and Milwaukee. I'm willing to guess that anyone who answers the > night before Halloween question as "Devil's Night" is an almost automatic > lock for the state of Michigan (or, according to the lower map, possibly > Pittsburgh). > > It also correctly pegged my wife with Aurora, Rockford, and Milwaukee, but > *not* Chicago, because she grew up in the suburbs and didn't pick up the > classical Chicago tone. > > > > On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 10:45 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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