harvard dialect survey quiz

Eventually, it pegged me as being from pretty much anywhere except the Old South, which is probably a pretty accurate picture of how I speak. The quiz was based upon the Harvard Dialect Study, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. My top three cities were in Southern California, and I did grow up on the west coast (albeit farther north, in Oregon). All in all, the Dialect Quiz was relatviely accurate in my case, at least with the . And that was a little weird because some of her answers weren't in accordance with the midwest city she lives in now, but that city where she grew up. @Sally Thomason: I didn't see anything until I had run an (unrelated) Java update. If accent had been a bigger factor, I think the similarities would have be smaller, especially in the case of Detroit. It wants to charge me money and I won't pay. What word(s) do you use in casual speech to address a group of two or more people? What do you call short undergarments worn on the lower body? You were obviously a Brit from your accent, but you were also clearly very used to using American idioms. US residents can opt out of "sales" of personal data. Do you say "frosting" or "icing" for the sweet spread one puts on a cake? Paul, where I've also been only twice. Click here to take the quiz For example, it asked me what I call the animal often known as a crawfish. Look at the map with the results of your survey. Teachers have discussed factors impacting language usage and are prepared to participate in an activity where they will reflect upon their own usage and dialect. Pretty interesting stuff. In that case, the regions which show up as "most like Australia" are probably just those with the highest proportion of Commonwealth immigrants in the population. I'll come back to the question when I can find out what Katz did.]. Using these results, a method for mapping aggregate dialect distance is developed. Box 800392 Here, laziness means that an algorithm does not use training data points for any generalization, as Adi Bronshtein writes. ", [(myl) Unfortunately, the "aggregate dialect difference" web page won't load for me maybe the server is overwhelmed. freakishly accurate for us. We will also ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes or beliefs about these topics and provide some information about yourself. Your home for data science. What do you call a drive-through liquor store? PostTV examined people's accents and state-specific answers to a list of questions created by Bert Vaux for a 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey . The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. I answered according to my British origin and got most-similar cities as New York, Yonkers, and Honolulu! What do you call the meal you eat in the evening, normally somewhere between 5 and 10 PM? What do you call the insect that looks like a large thin spider and skitters along the top of water? As Rochester is pretty close geographically to Toronto I was impressed. One issue might just be the way of asking the questions. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 In the crayon question, two of the options are: two syllables cray-ahn What do you call a rack you dry your clothes on in a house? Came out as Alabama. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website.. What is your generic casual or informal term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? What do you call the game wherein the participants see who can throw a knife closest to the other person (or alternately, get a jackknife to stick into the ground or a piece of wood)? at the University of Oslo. Want to get your very own quizzes and posts featured on BuzzFeeds homepage and app? If you feel sort of blah (in other words, a bit depressed, tired, uninspired, etc. New Haven (the city in Connecticut where Yale University is located). Even then, it took a long time to load. AVG 1.1: Membership in a Speech Community Segment; LA 1.5: Questions We Have ; HW 1.1: Reflect and Implement; HW 1.2: Honoring Language Difference; HW 1.3: Everyday Ethical Decisions; HW 1.4: Read the Wright Book, Ch. Some southerners may consider y'all to be non-standard, for example, and therefore give answers like you or you all. Project Implicit uses the same secure hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPS) that banks use to securely transfer credit card information. I'm a third generation Rochesterian (NY), and the quiz pegged me exactly. I took it and ended up in North Carolina, which I've visited but never lived in, and wanted to change one of my answers so I took it again, but "an error occurred." What do you call an unattended machine (normally outside a bank) that dispenses money when a personal coded card is used. most often pronounced with two syllables (car-ml). Can they have bad days? What word(s) do you use to address a group of two or more people? Grew up and now live in LA; school four years in Boston and three in Chicago. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. What, nobody else hears that? mathbabe, gives a good example of instance-based learning with a grocery-store scenario: What you really want, of course, is a way of anticipating the category of a new user before theyve bought anything, based on what you know about them when they arrive, namely their attributes. What do you call the night before Halloween? Then again I'm not from the U.S.. Discover unique things to do, places to eat, and sights to see in the best destinations around the world with Bring Me! results of 122 different dialect questions. "It got me right! There were no questions about final rhotics (non-, in my case, but linking 'r' and occasionally intrusive 'r') or the added 'y' in 'due', which are both firm features of my idiolect. So did anyone else take it? Lets use k-Nearest Neighbors. David Morris and Richard (and other interested parties): I did the same, and here's my map. Pantyhose are so expensive anymore that I just try to get a good suntan and forget about it. From that survey, he created a much more extensive study that he . But this test placed me pretty much solidly in the Deep South (either that or Kentucky). Of the remaining two, one was within a hundred miles of where I've lived, and the other was a bit of a fluke but within the swath of deep-red that represented "most similar". Do you use the term "bear claw" for a kind of pastry? What does the way you speak say about where youre from? survey you should be able to find your own response on the map in a little while! Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map. Teachers will compare their own usage and dialect with that of other across the nation and within their own colleague group within the class. My results were New York, Boston, and Miami. The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes, What do you call the long cold sandwich that contains cold cuts, lettuce, and so on? What do you call it when a driver changes over one or more lanes way too quickly? The Florida panhandle also showed moderate similarities. Its foundation was the supervised machine learning algorithm K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), which is, as my graduate-school TA told us, a machine learning algorithm used to predict the class of a new datapoint based on the value of the points around it in parameter space. We will dive into the idea of machine learning and the ins and outs of the specific K-NN algorithm in a later post. Similarly, I was torn between "traffic circle" and "rotary" since I rarely encounter these road features near my home in New York (where I think "traffic circle" is used) but often do when vacationing in Cape Cod (where they are called "rotaries"). Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. We may earn a commission from links on this page. I think "traffic circle" somehow exposed me for what I am. Not at all. Again, not very surprising, given what I've read about Western American English. The point of performing K-NN on a dataset like this is to predict whether the star, our new input, will fall into the yellow-circle category or the purple-circle category based on its proximity to the circles around it. Dialect Survey Maps and Results. I lived all over the States and overseas up until the age of 13 yrs when my dad finished his military service and retired in N California's SF Bay Area. Well, I do really like The Sopranos. Selected legacy data from the previous Harvard dialect survey. route (as in, "the route from one place to another"). You can also see the exact results of a number of cities. How do you pronounce the vowel sound in the word ('parent's sister')? These maps show your most distinctive answer for each of these cities. It's no surprise that the the most similar would be border cities in the cases of the latter two cities, or the largest city of a border stat in the first case. Since I am a visual learner, perhaps a doodle will be more edifying: Essentially, if you have parameters (i.e. How do you pronounce the word for the type of drug that acts as central nervous system depressant and is used as a sedative or hypnotic? And for background on how Katz's heat-map versions of the Vaux and Golder maps became so popular, see my LL post, "About those dialect maps making the rounds. What do you call the box you bury a dead person in? The description: Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. He created a survey he gave to his Harvard students to determine the influence of geographic location on language. If you'd like to find out, there is a 25 question quiz provided which if fully answered will then create your Personal Dialect Map. There were times during the survey when I thought that I would have chosen something different when I was younger, like crawdad when I was a young kid and crayfish as an adult. Survey said Fremont, Oakland and SF, CA. Selected legacy data from the previous Harvard dialect survey. In responses to the Harvard Dialect Survey, the word caramel is. There are a number of factors that affect the way you talk age, race, class, gender and more but perhaps the most significant is geography. The project is a slick visualization of Bert Vaux's dialect survey, and lets you look at maps of the results of 122 different dialect questions, either as a composite showing the variation across the country or each individual dialect's prevalence across the country. This is as you described, but keep in mind the question listed is the one with the most weight for the likely areas, not the only question. The numbers next to the most/least similar cities (which correspond to the colors displayed in the heatmap) are estimates of the probability that a randomly-selected person in that city would respond to a randomly-selected survey question the same way that you did. I learned the term "garage sale" before "yard sale", for example, but I've seen and probably used both throughout my lifetime, yet I could only pick one in the test. I have no idea of the origins of this expression. When you are cold, and little points of skin begin to come on your arms and legs, you have-. What is your general term for sweetened carbonated beverages? I care deeply about it because I am a language- and information science-nerd. After answering 25 questions aimed at teasing out your linguistic idiosyncrasies, you were classified as having grown up in a particular area of the US (technically, the quiz shows you the region where people are most likely to speak like you, so it could ostensibly show you where your parents grew up, rather than where you grew up, as Ryan Graff points out). this may be a completely personal outlier.). Reporting on what you care about. Weirdly interesting result: where I now live (Dallas area) came out as 'least similar' and where I lived until 13-years ago (Ithaca area) came out 'most similar'! Sadly, no. Caffeinate yourselfA whole array of Breville espresso machinesfrom manual to super-automaticare on sale for 20% off. What do you call your fifth/smallest toe? What do you say to call for a temporary respite or truce during a game or activity? Most recently, the project's added a dialect quiz. University of Virginia, P.O. The heat map accurately concentrates on the West but the city choices are just weird. Maybe the "y'all" and the "yard sale" thing pushed them over the edge? Vaux and Golder distributed their 122-question quiz online, and it focused on three things: pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website. A Medium publication sharing concepts, ideas and codes. When I later learned that you had lived in upstate New York, that seemed to match your American idioms a lot better. What do you call the creepy crawly thing that often rolls into a ball when touched. The map for the y'all choice seems plausible: But something seems to be wrong in the interpretation of not making this choice, or the method for combining choices into a final geographical pattern, or both. Personalized Dialect Map This quiz, based on the Harvard Dialect Survey, tells you where your personal dialect is located on a map. When you stand outside with a long line of people waiting to get in somewhere, are you standing "in line" or "on line" (as in, "I stood ___ in the cold for two hours before they opened the doors")? That is very much a northern Jersey usage? Dawn & -ahn rhyme. By the way I'm another Brit who seemingly talks like a New Jerseyer/New Yorker. What do you call a public railway system (normally underground)? What do you call the paper container in which you might bring home items you bought at the store? I took it three times, with about half the questions changing each time. LA 1.4: Accents and Dialects - What Do You Hear? I tried it a few times and it never managed to pick cities anywhere near where I've lived all my life. If 4 of them were medium spenders and 1 was small spender, then your best guess for Monica is medium spender. Know, understand, and use the major concepts, theories, and research related to the nature and acquisition of language and linguistic systems to support English language leaners development of literacy. The three cities were Baton Rouge, Montgomery, and New York. Youll need your answers later! For example, I have retained from childhood a very distinctively mid-Atlantic GOAT vowel (it's unusually um, fronted, or rounded, or tensed, or something) which "gave me away" originwise to a work colleague in NYC who'd grown up in Baltimore. In contrast to the original word maps of . The colors on the I concluded that you had probably lived somewhere else in America before Texas. About This Quiz. Maps based on survey responses to questions like this were published in the Harvard Dialect Survey in 2003. RP-ish Brit living in California for 10 years. For a New Yorker of my age, the absolute dead giveaway would be "sliding pond", a localism for a playground slide. Another Brit sneaking in. What do you call the end of a loaf of bread? Website for Research Participants: What is the thing that women use to tie their hair? Please upgrade your browser. According to Wikipedia, parameter space is the set of all possible combinations of values for all the different parameters contained in a particular mathematical model. While impressive-sounding, that definitions not particularly helpful for the layperson. My map placed me in Denver and Aurora, Colorado, a place I've visited exactly twice in my life, and Minneapolis/St. pronounced car-ml by people in the Northeast only. What do you call a narrow, pedestrian lane found in urban areas which usually runs between or behind buildings? As opposed to eager algorithms (e.g. For the Aussies and Brits shocked that they got New Jersey, let me assure you as a northern New Jerseyan who lives in New York, that pretty much nobody here talks like a Soprano (ESPECIALLY in Jersey) or the other stereotypes, with the occasional exception for Staten Island and some older folk. For some of you, it's an amazing thing that pinpoints your hometown exactly. Does the influx of Northerners (both American and Canadian) during the winter have an effect on Floridian speech? For others, it'll tell you that, for whatever reason, you don't sound like anyone else around. I thought cot-caught mergers were a minority. My son, who grew up within 20 miles of where I did, got the same answers, but my daughter got Springfield in place of Providence. What do you call the kind of spider (or spider-like creature) that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs? The New Yorker has published a rather delicious parody of the dialect map. https://research.virginia.edu/research-participants, I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree. Access it online or download it at https://open.byu.edu/understanding_language_acquisition/hw_1.6. most similar to Monica in terms of attributes, and sees what categories those 5 customers were in. That's not one of the choices, nor is "Devil's strip", which DARE says is common in Baltimore; and the thing itself is so rare in Manhattan, where I lived in my linguistically formative years, that the concept was without a term. Important disclaimer: In reporting to you results of any IAT test that you take, we will mention possible interpretations that have a basis in research done (at the University of Washington, University of Virginia, Harvard University, and Yale University) with these tests. (Don't include terms that aren't in your natural vocabulary but that you might use to accommodate someone who you think uses a different form.). Assuming it's all that accurate of course. But I don't know how you would reliably elicit that in this sort of text-based format. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from. What do you call the act of covering a house or area in front of a house with toilet paper? I ran through the whole thing and got no final map. So a fun game but hardly foolproof. For research purposes, data without directly identifying information is made publicly available. These are the results from all current and previous dialect surveys conducted I was curious too, since I've spent nearly 30 years on the opposite coast from where I grew up, and I'd like to know how much of my native dialect I retain. What do you call the little gray (or black or brown) creature (that looks like an insect but is actually a crustacean) that rolls up into a ball when you touch it? I've never ever watched even any part of any episode of The Sopranos, not even on advertisements or discussions about the show. Be prepared to share your insights in a whole-group discussion. (It belongs to the genus Allium and lacks a fully-developed bulb. IP addresses are routinely recorded, but are completely confidential. (I tried posting this comment a few days ago, when the post was fresh, but it never showed up). I guess that works on word choice rather than accent. What nicknames do/did you use for your maternal grandmother? The New York Times recently published a test titled How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk, which allows the user to create a personal dialect heat map in a few minutes by answering 25 questions about word meaning and pronunciation. Bert Vaux is an Associate Professor of . How do you pronounce the word "schedule"? The survey has since been revised and expanded for a larger, lay audience. What do you call item of clothing worn on the lower part of the body from the waist to the ankles, covering both legs separately? By the time the survey ended, it had been filled out (entirely or in part) by more than 3000 individuals. I learnt English as a second language in India, but have live in California for the last few years. Search, watch, and cook every single Tasty recipe and video ever - all in one place! Which of these terms do you prefer for a sale of unwanted items on your porch, in your yard, etc.? It was such a hit that three years later Katz published a book about it. Due to . two syllables, where the second rhymes with dawn. Well, they at least lie close to a great circle route from, say, San Francisco to New Delhi! The only requirement is honesty. One Morton Dr Suite 500 What do you call a room equipped with toilets and lavatories for public use? (But I guess if the British Isles were included in the survey I would probably end up somewhere in the ocean.). What about speakers who use "you," "you two," and "you guys" for singular, dual, and plural respectively? Select all terms that you might actually use. The survey was begun by Bert Vaux, a Cambridge University linguistics professor who became curious about US regional dialects when he taught at Harvard University. but if you go directly to the Harvard Dialect Survey Dialect Survey Maps and Results you can also get the specific answer breakdowns for each question asked. I suspect it's harder to ask questions about accent and expect accurate responses, though. Would you say "Are you coming with?" What does the way you speak say about where youre from? What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? Understanding Language Acquisition. What term do you use to refer to something that is across both streets from you at an intersection (or diagonally across from you in general)? I was born in Ft Benning, GA but spend very little time in the South but my parents were from Chattanooga, TN and Columbus, GA. All soft drinks were reffered to as 'cokes' in my family and I think that I spoke Southern American English when I was a kid. The project is a slick visualization of Bert Vaux's dialect survey, and lets you look at maps of the results of 122 different dialect questions, either as a composite showing the variation across . AVG 1.1: Membership in a Speech Community Segment, Session 2: Who are Our ELLs? What do you call a narrow street or passageway between or behind buildings? Do you pronounce r's when they aren't followed by a vowel, as in car, cart, carton, and so on? [Harvard/University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee] Dialect Survey. I wonder how much "devil's night" weighed, the only place I ever heard that term was Detroit (where I lived my first 21 years). Question 1. What is your general, informal term for the rubber-soled shoes worn in gym class, for athletic activities, etc.? The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey . Forget the nice clothes anymore (referring to babies eating messily after a certain age). However, these Universities, as well as the individual researchers who have contributed to this site, make no claim for the validity of these suggested interpretations. (The dialect quiz used to be hosted on his site but was always facing server issues, so it's great that the Times agreed to host it Katz is now an intern for their graphics department.) The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. I am British born but spent most of my adult life in Toronto and thought I had some sort of hybrid speech and accent. Surely Halloween is the night before All Hallows' Day. Filed by Mark Liberman under Variation. The answer was always Boston-Worcester-Providence, which is accurate although in fact I sometimes find Rhode Islanders hard to understand. What do you call this long green herb that is used as a garnish or in soups, salads and stir-fry dishes? What do you call the meal you eat in the evening, normally somewhere between 5 and 10 PM? It can't just be Sopranos, Southside Johnny and Bruce. In my case, I grew up in Connecticut, spent my . my daughter, born in florida, was placed in orlando. Those are positive markers of geo-social identity, while choices likeyou alland you are mostly negative markers, in the sense that their interpretation depends mostly on NOT having made the other choices. Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map. What is the distinction between dinner and supper? Not surprising since I first learned English in Northern New Jersey and studied in Boston. University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and is hosted by the What do you call a traffic intersection in which several roads meet in a circle and you have to get off at a certain point? The quiz is designed to pinpoint the quiz-taker's exact region, based on the words he or she uses. The takeaway: Even the simplest, everyday things might be called something completely different just miles from where you live. My mother took it and it pegged her exactly in the city in which she lives (and, weirdly, a suburb) but not the city where she grew up, which disappointed here. Note: This site is designed for adults, aged 18 or older. So how did the quiz actually work? Answer the 25 questions regarding your language usage and pronunciation. Despite the distances between these . What do you call this large aquatic bug that skims along the surface of water? Cathy ONeil, a.k.a. Though I obviously know about y'all, I'd never use it except as a joke or quotation or imitation, and similarly for you'uns and youse. I do "Brew-Thru" only because I have a week on the Outer Banks once a year or so. (As in: "We have milk, beer, apple juice, and four kinds of _____: Pepsi, 7Up, root beer, and ginger ale.") What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the grocery store or supermarket? This hypothesis can be falsified (or not) with reference to the map I provided. The above map (where you learn that the northeast pronounces "centaur" differently from everyone else) is from NC State PhD student Joshua Katz's project "Beyond 'Soda, Pop, or Coke.'" My map came up with Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Rochester and Providence. What do you say when you want to lay claim to the front seat of a car? (It basically tells you how likely people from a certain area are to respond . The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by . The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes is run by What do you call the big clumps of dust that gather under furniture and in corners? The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey . . when they walk their feet point outwards)? BTW, the map either took a long time to load for me, or it didn't show until I (randomly) clicked where it should have been. The survey created maps of the distribution of various word usage (such as pop/soda/coke for a fizzy softdrink) and was a relatively early example of widely shared Internet "viral" content. We havent yet bridged the idea of training an algorithm, but we can still understand what Bronshtein means. What do you call a traffic jam caused by drivers slowing down to look at an accident or other diversion on the side of the road? I found certain questions impossible to answer accurately, because of the structure of the test. But how can an algorithm be lazy? NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. Youre viewing another readers map. Do you say "expecially", or "especially"? Maybe that means I'm especially well-behaved dialectally (or, more likely, that I haven't moved around much).

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