Oh, no! I’ve been assimilated!
| What American accent do you have?
Your Result: North Central
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“North Central” is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw “Fargo” you probably didn’t think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot. |
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| Boston |
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| The West |
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| The Midland |
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| Philadelphia |
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| The Inland North |
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| The Northeast |
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| The South |
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| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes |
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I suppose that since my mother’s side of the family were a bunch of Scandinavians who ended up in Seattle by way of Minnesota, it could be I had the accent before I got here.
But no, no way do I sound like those Min-nesöötans in Fargo…no sing-song here, just flat. The test also depends on your personal perception of your pronunciation, so I don’t know how accurate it could be.
(via Reassigned Time)
That was funny. It assinged me “midland”, translating to “no accent. The part which is funny is that I have lived within the greater Boston area all my life. My parents, however, come from S. California and central Utah, so I have always thought that the Boston accent sounded, well, uneducated. I have worked all my life to fight any excessive accent from developing, and I guess it worked!
Now if only someone would notice my neutral accent and offer me voice work…
Welp, I hate to be the first, but I call shennanigans on this. It said I had a “Midlands” accent. Said I sound like I have no accent, or I’m from the Mid-Atlantic area, the Corn Belt, Florida or some big Southern city.
I grew up in a town of 40 – count ’em, 40 – people in Northeast Mississippi, never lived in a town with more than 2500 people in it until I was 20 and have been asked by actual Mid-Atlantic staters if I was a foreign exchange student because of my thick drawl. Unless I’m watching my diction for some reason, I pronounce “can’t” and “aunt” like “ain’t”, and I don’t pronounce the “t” in “Saturday. Apparently, what threw me off the Southern trail was discerning a slight difference between “pen” and “pin”, both of which are pronounced with two syllables, of course. It sometimes requires a conscious decision to reign in the drawl and colloquialisms when meeting new people, particularly those whose backgrounds don’t include dirt roads and duck huntin’.
Makes me think, though. When I go to visit the folks in little ol’ Cardsville, Mississippi, from here in big, metropolitan Athens, Georgia, the good ol’ boys tell me I’ve lost my accent. Maybe that’s got something to do with it.
Correctly pegged me as being from the Northeast. Anybody listening to me speak could tell within a very short time that I hail from the New York suburbs.
It labeled me at North Central as well, and I have only been to MN once in my life, as a child.
(I grew up in Colorado and live in North Carolina now)
“You have a Midland accent” 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.
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I got “Inland North.” Very funny, it says that “once you leave the Great Lakes, people ask you annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?””
Yes, yes I am. My teacher told a story about visiting Los Vegas, where she was asked this question after just saying “hi” to people, which made me think of this.
And NO, it is a water fountain, NOT a bubbler! That is a south-eastern Wisconsin perversion.
FWIW, this born-and-raised Torontonian child of a Yorkshireman also scored North Central, though with a pretty strong showing in Northeast and Philadelphia (in fact, moderately high scores in all the bars — I don’t think this test asks enough questions to really get the distinctions that fine).
And the characters in “Fargo” definitely had accents.
It IS TOO A BUBBLER! Sheesh, where the hell are you from?
Also born-and-raised in Toronto, and I came out Northeast/Philadelphia, too. Must be a T.O. or general Canuck thing. What’s that all aboot/abowt?
Huh. That’s weird. I actually grew up in Fargo, and I got “The Inland North.” Which is definitely right for me, now. But last night I got off the phone with a Fargoan and thought, for the first time, “God, did I have that accent when I lived there???”
And no, I no longer call soda “pop.”
Apparently, I’m an Englishman from Philadelphia. Well, I guess the North-East is about as close to Britain as the survey can get, geographically.
This true blue Aussie has a Northeast accent, around New York way, which I can live with. Poms and Aussies both sound like that I gather from Tacitus comment.
I thought all the words sounded different, I guess NewYorkers do to.
Well, it certainly nailed this midlander, but for all they knew, I could have been from Austin:)
This quiz seems to have a bit of an eastern (by my standards) bias. It labeled me as ‘The Inland North’ but that’s probably as close as it could come.
Any southwesterner wouldn’t have to spend more than an hour with me to recognize S. Utah (w/ Midwestern influence) roots. I say ‘crick’ for ‘creek’ for example. I’m afraid I wasn’t as impressed as I could have been with the questions or the rating — sorry.
I got pegged as Inland North, wherever that is, but I grew up in the Finger Lakes area of NY. I say “crick” and “pop” for soda, and the pronunciation of “roof” is not like the oo in moon. But my schoolmates and I spoke differently, my parents (both from the same area) were noticably different in speech from some of my aunts and uncles. How they got that way is a mystery to me. Fascinating!
I think most Brits would get North East – a lot of questions are about vowel merges that occur in much of the US, but not in the UK. And apparently not in the US north east
My result: Philadelphia
Reality: I was born in Georgia and raised in Virginia. I have a Southern accent, albeit not a strong one. The questions seem to me to be tailored toward catching Southern GA/SC/NC even TX-style drawls, but not toward the more subtle (some might even say genteel) VA accent.
Word usage might be a better way to go about this. Which word do you use to address or indicate a group of people?
A) Y’uns
B) You guys
C) Youse guys
D) Y’all
E) I don’t address or indicate groups
That survey’s just not quite right, y’all. It says I’m “The Northeast”, which is at least half wrong. (Anyone looking at my handle should be able to tell where I’m from … :) )
To be fair, it *did* give my second-highest score as “The South”. But it also gave me the nearly the same score in both “Philadelphia” (which I have at least visited) and “The Midland”.
“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.'”
Um … got me. Spent birth through age 17 and a half within spitting distance of the Windy City. (Hint: always spit *downwind*.) And what the heck else would you call a carbonated drink? (OK, some of the folks around here in Dallas seem to use ‘soda’. Whatever.)
Midlands
I was born in southern Illinois, grew up in northeastern Ohio, have lived in central IndiaNOplace for nearly 30 years.
fusilier
James 2:24
That, of course, would depend on what kind of carbonated drink you were referring to.
Another Midlands accent here.
HA! I foiled the test! IT told me that I have “The Inland North” accent, but I am actually Spanish! But then again, I learned english from all sorts of people, so I probably have a mixture of many accents.
Nearly pure Midland, apparently. I can understand that. Houston tends to iron out the southern drawl – we’re very heterogeneous linguistically.
What I find strange is that South was 5th place, just below Boston and North Central. WTF? I’M FROM THE SOUTH. You *can* hear the drawl if you listen, or if I get tired or something.
I think there’s just not enough questions to pin it down quite accurately. Some usage questions would be good, as suggested above. I say “ya’ll” for a group of people, and “coke” for a carbonated beverage. Bam, that right there should nail me down pretty well, as they start saying “soda” as soon as you hit Oklahoma.
It told me “Midlands.” Well, maybe Midland, Texas…..I sound like a true hick unless I try real hard.
Where I grew up, at the home of Walmart, you said “straight pin,” “safety pin,” or “ink pin” to distinguish what you meant. Never “pin” alone, except if you say that a Cross pin and pincil set counts as “alone.”
i got sorted into “inland north” too, which i guess is appropriate enough considering i live in upstate michigan. but i surely wasn’t raised here, nor even lived in any english-speaking country until my mid-twenties, so who knows how “accurate” it might be…
It pegged me with 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.”
And I do call it pop.
Mine’s midland – no surprise, raised in St. Louis, college in northeast Missouri, grad school in Kansas. I agree that it was horribly short. If it doesn’t ask between wash and warsh…
There was a more extensive one on the internet awhile back that was part of a university study on linguistics and word usage and teh internets that was pretty cool, but they’re long done with the study and I’m not sure if it’s still up just to be able to take the test. It had a map that tracked where the answers came from and everything so you could see the distribution of accents. I lost the bookmark when my firefox crashed once, and never did find it again.
I thought I was a German living in California, but that test proved that I am really from ‘The Inland North’… I have never seen the Great Lakes, except from 30000 feet high in an airplane.
I read about the caught/cot degeneracy in the West, but actually I do not hear that here from the natives, although I tested them.
This quiz isn’t wrong, it’s just inadequate. There are literally thousands of isoglosses snaking all over the United States. Trying to determine someone’s regional accent from just 13 of them is a fool’s errand.
I’m from Seattle. It pegged me as North Central, but I know I consciously picked up saying “ote” instead of “aout” from listening to Canadian radio. When I changed that answer, it pegged me as The West. Fair enough.
Bah.. Since when is mid-california, close to the border of Nevada part of the “Midlands”? Though, I still tend to agree. The only serious glitch I know of in pronounciation that people from where I grew up had was using “warsh” instead of “wash”, though that wasn’t 100% common to everyone and I don’t have a clue where we got the ‘r’ in that. Otherwise, we tend to fairly clearly deliniate between “most” words, with exceptions of cases like the merry, marry, etc. ones. Though, if I where to pick in that case, I might “maybe” suggest that merry and marry where the different ones, not mary and marry, but only just barely, and that isn’t even a choice they give.
Strangely, “Inland North” – tho’ I spent my early childhood out of the States, then spent large bits of my life in New England, followed by a couple of decades in Southern California. I’ve never lived further “inland” than the Berkshires.
Kagehi, I was thinking that “merry” was clearly the only one of the three that sounded different. I don’t know why they didn’t have that as a choice.
My result was Philadelphia, which is good since I was born and grew within the city limits. My seven years in Wisconsin did not ruin me.
I am yet another southerner given the suggestion that I have a midlands accent. And so ya’ll know, it’s called coke, and it comes in myriad flavors from Coke or Pepsi on down to root beer. “I’m goan ta th’ store. What kinda coke ya’ll wawnt?”
I grew up in Atlanta which I pronounce Atlanna, though I never realized this till a Mexican coworker once asked if there weren’t two T’s in the word. Nothing like having your English corrected by a non native speaker. I tried to convince him it was a silent T.
I currently live in TN and have picked up a local custom of replacing hard I sounds with soft A sounds so that I may tell you, “That beer’s matty good.” or “the naff slipped and cut ma finger.”
As far as pin and pen, they both sound like peein’ which is just plain fun no matter how ya slass it.
Inland North here. I grew up in W. PA right on the border with NY. I talk like Bob C above who is from the Finger Lakes which is not so far away.
See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5220090 for an interesting discussion on NPR. “Professor William Labov, a University of Pennsylvania linguist and author of the new book Atlas of North American English Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change, says there is a shift of vowel sounds in the inland northern cities. He calls it the ‘northern city shift.'”
Thank goodness mass commnications haven’t homogenized regional accents out of existence, as some people once predicted. How boring that would be. I once spent 3 years living in Mississippi and very much enjoyed the way the natives spoke- much more pleasing to my ear than my own Noo Yawk (well, it isn’t actually that strong) accent.
Midland. “You have a good voice for TV and radio.”
Well I should hope I do.
Don’t know where it came from, though. My father is from Minneapolis and my mother is from Scandinavia, but neither have any discernible accent.
Oddly, my accent has changed in recent years. Which is why the “cot”/”caught” question tripped me up — used to be the same, but my “caught” has a vowel from somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.
I’m a Northeasterner too, apparently. I suppose Hertfordshire *is* north-east of the US.
(Why did I waste my time taking it? Pass.)
this is almost exactly what it said for a western accent, which is how it pegged me 100%. though it did describe me as “the lowest common denominator”.
ugh.
sounds more like a fortune cookie analysis.
Midland, despite having lived in Florida since 1984.
I mean, it’s not too unreasonable, since I was born in Detroit, but I don’t think I do sound like my northern relatives anymore. For one thing, I *never* say “pop” instead of “soda,” which I know isn’t a question of accent . . . ah, screw it. I thought I had a point. Guess not.
Hm, I got “West”, which is exactly right. (New Mexico and Colorado). I’m kind of surprised, given that (a) nobody else has gotten West, and I sort of figured I spoke pretty much like most people; and (b) with only 13 questions and the results so far, I thought I’d get “Midland” too.
West
Reminds me of the time I met a guy from Florida at a restaurant in San Francisco. I had just flown in from Kansas City. This gentleman surmised that I was either a native of the midwest or Pendleton, Oregon. He happened to know some people from Pendleton and found that they sounded just like Midwesterners. I agree; and I was born within 30 miles of Pendleton.
Another “Midlands” here, which in my case is correct, being raised in St. Louis and having returned, after a foray through the south and east, to mid-Missouri.
But the test didn’t ask whether Missouri is pronounced with an ending “ee” or “ah” vowel.
(It’s “ee,” by the way.)
;-)
Midlands accent.
Odd, because people from that area tell me I have a southern accent. As others have suggested, it might be word choice more than actual accent. I say ain’t and y’all pretty frequently.
Another Midlands – which makes sense I suppose, since I grew up all over the US, from Maryland to Hawaii, with stops in Nebraska, Texas, Washington (state), California, and even Germany.
Now many of my relatives are from rural Utah. They also say ‘crick’ for creek. They also say ‘carn’ for corn and ‘fark’ for fork. Always sounded a little strange to me.
Got me wrong too. Did it do better than chance? I don’t think so.
Well, I live in New York, and I consider the /O/ (“caught,” “claw,” “dawn,” “hall”) and /A/ (“bot,” “father,” “bother,” “mod”) vowels completely different. But I don’t sound like I’m from the United States at all.
It says I have the ‘accentless accent’ – midlands, etc.
In reality I’m from Utah (not rural, however). I say ‘crick’, ‘carn’, ‘fark’, etc, unless I realize I’m speaking to someone who’d rather hear ‘creek’, ‘corn’, and ‘fork’.
What bothered me most about the test is that my word enunciation is dependent on my percieved audience, to some degree. I’m unsure what happens when I’m ignoring my audience …
This actually makes perfect sense. The Wisconsin/Chicago accent had as its primary shaping force the accents of the Germans, Poles and Scandinavians that were the first Europeans in this region. (I tested as almost pure Inland North, perfectly accurate–born and raised in various parts of Wisconsin.)
I got “Inland North” also, which puzzles me, because I think I sound a lot like most of the people where I live, and we can’t all be from the inland north. And yes, I do call carbonated beverages “pop,” but so does most everyone here in Oregon. For that matter, I’m not really from the inland north very much, since my family moved to Oregon when I was about four. I’d love to say “abote” instead of “abowt” btw, cause I like how it sounds, but I just can’t make my mouth do it.
West. Not a surprise, since I was born in L.A.
The test was terrible at picking up southern accents. I’ve spent most of my life in 5 states in the south. I understand that my accent leans Midland and neutral. That’s because when I was about 10 I knew that people considered southerners to be unintelligent, and in a few months I learned to talk with a very neutral tv-anchor style accent. In my early twenties, when I thought about it again, I realized I had given in to a bullshit stereotype, and reverted to a deep southern accent, specifically the gorgeous one from Valdosta, where I lived for a few years. The test should have picked up on at least some of that.
“Your Result: The Inland North”
What?
“I think most Brits would get North East – a lot of questions are about vowel merges that occur in much of the US, but not in the UK.”
“The Wisconsin/Chicago accent had as its primary shaping force the accents of the Germans, Poles and Scandinavians that were the first Europeans in this region.”
Oh!
I guess the two years in Dallas didn’t take. Though I still say y’all when using informal english and it will be a coke, thank you very much.
What’s that all aboot/abowt?
“It is important that these exaggerated pronunciations, such as “a boat the hoas”, are usually only apparent to people without Canadian raising. They represent an attempt to imperfectly approximate the sounds they hear with sounds available in their own dialects. Because this approximation is imperfect, individuals who do speak with Canadian raising will frequently be baffled by reports that they are saying “a boat”.”
The funny thing is that in Canada, no matter what the accent, everyone has the “raise”.
It says I have the ‘accentless accent’
No such beast. Connected to:
That’s because when I was about 10 I knew that people considered southerners to be unintelligent, and in a few months I learned to talk with a very neutral tv-anchor style accent.
The US version of “Recieved Pronunciation”. Generally in UK people can speak both… RP for outsiders and the local dialect “at home”. I wish this was more common in the US, I’ve had to deal with folks from the US who were barely intelligible to me.
The Midland
Relatively accurate I guess. A few sprigs of the family are from southern Illinos and southeastern Missouri. But the bulk of my relatives are from western Kentucky and northern middle Tennessee.
“WTF? I’M FROM THE SOUTH. You *can* hear the drawl if you listen, or if I get tired or something.”
Same here. My better half is from New England and has always been amazed at the ease at which I can supposedly turn my southern accent on and off. I usually don’t even notice I’ve done it. She sounds like massatusets 24/7 and can say those “Massanuttunsquantiquo” words with ease that I can’t even begin to pronounce. For me sometimes its just better NOT to sound like “yuve been a workin in tha tubacker barn all daey”.
Due to the ole stereotypes, a lot of southerners can do the same. A soft southern accent comes in handy in that respect because backing it down comes natural. With a strong southern accent, it takes practice. Professionally, its hard to tell I’m from the north central south. At a farmers market I can drawl along with the rest. My wife calls us “stealth southerners”.
I got strong Boston (then NH) but I’m originally from Toronto and still live in southern Ontario. We did used to spend every summer in Gloucester MA when I was a kid but I always thought Bostonians had a heavy accent with much broader vowels.
I think the big difference is that our ‘r’ is much harder and our vowels are more clipped than most US accents, which would be hard to test in writing.
Pure midlands. Which makes sense. But Carlie’s right: without questions like “Do you say ‘warsh’ or ‘wash’?” and “Do you say ‘fork’ or ‘fark’?” leave much of the St. Louis are in an indistinguishable muddle. Might also ask about the pronunciation of “Chicago”–whether it sounds like the beginning of ‘ship’ or the beginning of ‘chimp’.
What do they mean, people from Ohio and Pennsylvania have “no accents”?! That’s screwed! Anybody who pronounces their state’s name as “Ahaya” can’t possibly have a non-accent, and people from Pennsylvania do really deranged things with their vowels.
From a linguistics geek perspective, the only non-accent accent in North America is the television received pronunciation (RP) accent that all the tv talking heads have, and that’s almost purely Southern California. (The rest is Southwestern Ontario, which is where I’m from, and where half of Hollywood is from, as well.)
I can’t believe how linguistically ignorant this test is. People from the movie “Fargo” don’t sound like Canadians; they sound like the worst exaggerated stereotype of what Americans think Canadians sound like. In reality, Canadian English accents have very few regional variations — certainly not as many as linguists expected, taking into account a small, somewhat isolated population spread over a vast amount of land. Someone from BC sounds almost identical to someone from Ontario, and someone from urban New Brunswick sounds pretty much the same as both of them. And none of us sound like we stepped off the set of “Fargo.” While there are a few distinct phonological features of Canadian English (Canadian raising, or the ostensible “aboot the hoose” phenomenon is not one of them), and the odd shibboleth and dialect word or three, many of the purported peculiarities of Canadian English are present in other English variants as well, not least some regional accents from the US northeast, and, in some cases, some of the regional accents from northwest England.
For those of you who might be interested, apparently “Canadian raising” is spreading into variations of English in which it has never appeared before. Heh heh heh…
My Scottish accent registers as North-East. That’s obviously far North, and very very East.
The Inland North. This is kind of interesting since I was born and spend my early childhood in Connecticut but then we moved to the Chicago suburbs. This test is, as people have mentioned, too vague. Of course cot and caught sound different, the latter is pronounced “cawt”. Continuing on, there’s stawk, cawler, and dawn (which is pronounced like it’s spelled). I use soda instead of pop but have heard sodie pop in the more rural areas of Illinois. Here’s one for you guys: do ant and aunt sound different? I pronounce aunt as “ont”.
I got “Are you from Chicago?”
That I am and 7th generation from the great state of Illinois. I’m always amused by the very Chicago accent of the junior senator from New York.
My extremely thick Irish accent came out as NorthEast (100%).
“Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.”
i’ve got a “philadelphia” accent …which of course makes perfect sense since ive never been there in my life ;)….im a native ny city gal with southern relatives and a west indian father ……i guess my accent should really be called “not quite new york”
try this one too http://www.gotoquiz.com/do_you_deserve_your_high_school_diploma
i apparently deserve my hs diploma too …….of course the question i got wrong was the one on religion
then there is the way i pronounce “aunt”
depends on who im talking to and what im talking about
if i say, “that’s my aunt” …..it’s awnt
if its aunt Sula that i’m calling , then it’s, “Ant Sula”
if it’s Aunt Jemima of pancake fame …it’s Aint Jemima
i remember cracking up when i first read “Having Our Say” by those two 100 year old sisters
they had told the interviewer about a relative named Cu’lot …..and she never picked up on the fact tht this “name” was probably a southernism for cousin Lottie
i had figured out that “worsem” was a southernism for worrisome and “chainyball” for chinaberry
“The Midland” for me. Of course, I am Canadian, raised in Montreal in a largely anglophone area to anglophone parents, so take the data point for what little it is. BTW, as I am sure any linguists around will remind us, there are more serious versions of tests like this. I suspect they would differentiate me … And I found I couldn’t truthfully answer the “merry/mary/marry” question …
Bill Snedden: There would be corrolations between word usage an accent, but not perfect, I imagine.
Steve LaBonne: It would be interesting to know if they have resulted in more homogenity, though …
Interrobang: Urban NB – provided, of course, they are not from Moncton! (One ought to limit the direct comparison to native speakers, though in the case of many NBers that’s hard too.)
“”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.'”
Weird. Especially since it didn’t ask anything that would identify the characteristic pronunciations I picked up from my native Chicagoan mom. I pronounce “chocolate”, “closet” and “coffee” “chawklit”, “clawsit” and “cawfee”, which is Chicagoan, and “Chicago” as “Chicawgo”, which is correct.
I also pronounce “eggs” and “legs” as “aigs” and “laigs”, which is Dogpatch; FSM only knows where I got that from, unless it was from Mom, who went to college in southern Illinois and taught high school chemistry there for several years. It definitely isn’t the usual pronunciation in South Jersey, where I grew up, or Philadelphia, where I lived for over twenty years before moving to L.A.
I did get a high Philadelphia score, which makes some sense, although people here in Southern California don’t think I sound like a Phillyite.
Must be a Toronto thing. I’m from BC, and got the “North Central – sounds like a Canuck” response.
Keith, I couldn’t truthfully answer the Mary/merry/marry question either. To me Mary and marry sound the same, but merry, while close, is not the same.
The quiz result places me in the Northeast US – actually I’m from Yorkshire UK
By the way I really hate Americans who tell me they love my English accent – I don’t have an accent – I speak English
Answered with my own accent and was told I was from “Inland North”, though I’m from New England. (I’ve never had a strong Boston accent.) That’s not so troubling, but then I answered the questions according to a friend’s Brooklyn accent and was told she’s from Boston.
That’s just wrong.
Being Canadian (B.C.) I came out as North Central, which is a hoot. I thought those Fargo accents were pretty thick if not actually fake (but I’ve never been to Minnesota). To be fair, the quiz is only for U.S. accents. It would be fun to do a more detailed quiz. We Canadians have regional accents too.
All these are obviously just for fun, but here are two tests that do ask more about vocabulary:
Yankee or Rebel?
What kind of American English Do You Speak?
I think most Brits would get North East – a lot of questions are about vowel merges that occur in much of the US, but not in the UK.
I think that’s why I got North East even though it put me on the completely wrong end of the continent for my first 25 years (I was born and lived in San Diego).
What I think cinched it was that I don’t do vowel merges, nor do I turn two syllables into one (or even more syllables, as I’ve heard some unique compressions when travelling the South).
And because of my focus on making vowels which should be different different, I’ve often been told that I have a nice British accent, when in fact I just speak English.
People’s perceptions of accents are weird.
I got about 95% Philadelphia, although in the past I have been asked if I were Bostonian. Originally from New Orleans. [Anybody else pronounce mayonaise ‘my-nez’?]
I got North Central, which isn’t suprising since I grew up in rural Minnesota (Ulen MN, around 50 miles NE of Fargo).
Geoff Pullum discusses this test, or something very like it, at Language Log. The bottom line is that the test looks at too little data to make a reliable judgement. Especially since it relies almost primarily on lexical differences.
As for the “merry, Mary, marry” thing, There is a split between NY and Philly over the pronunciation of ‘merry’. In Philly it is pronounced like ‘Murray’ and in NY the vowel is mid front, closer to the general pronunciation of ‘Mary’, but not quite.
I guess the “ya’ll” test would work for most, though my Nebraska-born, Colorado-raised husband sometimes refers to me as “ya’ll.” As in:
Pither: “What did ya’ll do today?”
Me: “Um, we all stayed home alone and read a book.”
I didn’t think the test had enough questions to truly determine an accent, but it did have me pegged. (From “The West”: “You could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.” I’m from South Florida and apparently Pittsburgh hasn’t yet corrupted me. (But my Atlanta relatives sound a LOT different… not sure how they figure that one.)
BTW, all who claimed not to have an accent – all you presumably mean is that your accent is like most people around you. Everyone has an accent …
Deanna, yes, that’s true of me, too.
As for Canadian accents, people claim to hear more of them then are there. Supposedly I sound different than native speakers from Toronto, but …
Kentucky born and bred with the accent/dialect that proves it, though many people think I sound like I am from Mississippi. I got pegged as being from the Midland. Now, what do y’all think about THAT?!
This thread’s almost 2 years old and someone still left a comment on it this month?? Wow.
Anyway I wrote the quiz. And the 4 or so other quizzes that came after this. Yes, it is too vague (which is why I made other quizzes). I kept sending messages to the gotoquiz.com owners to let me change it but they just ignored me. Oh well.
Arrgh, I forgot the ~ in the URL in the last post.