Sunday, November 05, 2006

Mm-hmm, that sounds about right

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Inland North
 

You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."

The Midland
 
The Northeast
 
Philadelphia
 
The South
 
The West
 
Boston
 
North Central
 
What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes

6 comments:

DoctorMama said...

Hmm -- I took it too, and my results were suspiciously similar to yours. I say suspiciously, because your accent is pretty different from mine.

jp 吉平 said...

I took it, and scored "the west."

My degrees are in linguistics, so I was skeptical when I saw your results. Happily, the questions, criteria, and explanations are pretty good, like they came out of a Linguistics 200 textbook. Still, this test presumes the whiter dialects.

I can spot a midwesterner from 50 paces, by their dialect. I was never a dialectologist, but I became radicalized after two years in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I do have a history of armchair dialectology, though. My most glorious moment was when I asked a guy if he was from Ephrata, Washington; he said, no, I'm from Moses Lake, 15 miles away from Ephrata! People were amazed and filled with wonder.

Mignon said...

Dude, you can't tell the difference between Ephrata and Moses Lake?? And you call yourself an armchair dialectology! Sheesh...

(But then I was born in Cheney and lived in Goldendale and the quiz told me I have a Midland accent. "[It] is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio." woo hoo)

jp 吉平 said...

I know that "Cheney" rhymes with "weenie!" I'm surprised that you scored "midland," though, your accent should be closer to mine than to "midland."

The whole "you don't have an accent" thing is NOT from a linguistics 200 textbook. Yikes.

Mignon said...

Okay, how about Sequim and Methow then, JP McSmarty?

Yeah, I was surprised about the "midland" result. Although, my mom was a stickler for enunciation, even though she's from Pendleton and says "Mundy" instead of "Monday" and "ca-eesh" instead of "cash."

E. said...

Well, I took it and it nailed me as a Midwesterner. (Even though I have no discernable accent whatsoever, clearly.) I can't wait to ask my Jersey man to take it...