Despite the reach of television and pop culture, American English dialects are growing more diverse. Grant shows how it’s possible to pinpoint your region of origin — or at least come close — based on the way you pronounce the word bag. Of course, whether you call a carbonated beverage soda, pop or Coke also depends on what part of the country you’re from. Same with sofa, couch or davenport. Although we still tend to pick up faddish words from the media, local dialects continue to thrive, and there are plenty of quizzes out there to prove it. Linguist Bert Vaux’s American Dialect Survey includes helpful maps based on the answers that speakers in the United States give to 122 questions about regional words and phrases. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Determining A Person’s Origin by Their Language”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, thank you for taking my call.
Sure thing, who’s this?
This is Donna Morgan, and I’m in Fort Worth, Texas.
Hi Donna, welcome to the show.
What can we do for you?
In 1968, I took a test in my social studies class, and I remember it distinctly because it had a picture, and there were several words that would match it. And so like there was a picture of a sofa, and you would say, did you think it was a sofa or a couch or a Davenport? Or the van. And then there was a picture of a Coke, and it was, did you say Coke or soda or pop or cola or whatever? And so just depending upon our responses, our teacher told us where we were from. But I do remember that the picture for purse, there was handbag or pocketbook or purse. And about two months later, this girl came into our school, and she called it a pocketbook. And the teacher said, well, then she would be from the Boston area. And sure enough, she was.
And so I just have always wondered if you’ve seen a test like this, and if that test could still be used today, or is our word choices so ubiquitous because of television that we don’t tend to use different words for the same item?
Ooh, I love this. So you’re talking about a dialect quiz where the teacher basically told you where you were from. And let’s just assume that it wasn’t some kind of conjurer’s trick. It is still possible to determine where people are from by the words that they use and by their accent.
Absolutely. We, believe it or not, American dialects are growing more different from each other rather than more similar.
Oh, really?
Yes. And it’s hard for people to accept that. I get people refuting it when I say it, but all the evidence show this to be true. There are a few exceptions, but in the large, the large mass of data that we have shows that we are growing more different from other regions rather than more like them. There is one minor exception to that, and that’s that we tend to pick up faddish words much more quickly through the media, especially with social media. And if you leave those out, then when we’re talking about family words and community words and regional words, those are, we’re differentiating. And part of it is this kind of local pride. We still learn our language from the shopkeepers and our grandparents and our parents and our schoolmates and people. Even though we’re a very mobile country, we still tend to stay pretty much near home. And we tend to consume the same kinds of media, right?
Yeah, the same kinds of media.
So the Coke Pop Soda map, there’s a famous one online, we’ll put it on our website, is still very strong. The Davenport Sofa Couch Devan map, Chesterfield map, still very strong. And this is not even bringing up the stuff that doesn’t have to do with the Lexus. If we just look at the way that people change their vowels, their vowels alone can show you where somebody’s from. My favorite question to ask people is I try to get them to say the word B-A-G, bag. And if I can get you to say the word bag, I can probably get pretty close, at least on a regional level, to figuring out where you’re from. Because if you’re from the Great Lakes or the North Midlands, you might say bag. And if you’re from the South, you might say bag. And if you’re from somewhere in the middle, you might say bag. And those vowels are subtle, but if you can hear the difference, you can just, I’ve just divided the country in three, and I’ve got a 33% chance of figuring out roughly where you’re from. And then, you know, if I think you’re, if you say bag, I can say, oh, you’re probably from around Chicago. And if I get within a couple hundred miles, you’re going to give me credit for it, aren’t you?
Trust me, Donna, he’s great at parties.
Well, that’s why he brought up that, that’s why he wanted to know if it was a conjurist trick, because a little bit of this game, and all linguists kind of goof around with this a little bit when they’re in get-togethers. It’s a little bit of like a cold read, like a tarot card reader would do, or a supposed psychic. A little bit of us looking at the person in front of you and saying, what do I already know about this person? What can I tell by their dress and their carriage and the people that they’re with and their automobile? You know, if you have an LSU sticker on your car, I want to figure some stuff out about you. If you have a Jayhawk sticker on your car, I’m going to know a few things about you, right? But in the classroom, that’s just great. What a way to get kids inspired to think about language differently.
So, Donna, we have a wealth of links that we will provide on our website to these kinds of surveys and dialect maps and lists like that. I think you’ll really enjoy them.
Thank you. I’m so glad to hear that and know that because this is something, like I said, I’ve been interested in for a while. And every time I hear A Way with Words, I always think, I want to call in and ask this question.
All right.
Well, thank you.
Thanks so much for calling.
Thank you for calling, Donna.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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Once, I mentioned to a sociolinguist that I’d grown up in New Mexico, and she wrote up a list of words to check me!
We discussed this topic in my family recently and wondered: is there a particular time when these pronunciation differences are formed? My husband’s father was in the Army, so they moved around a lot when he was growing up – east coast, west coast, deep south, El Paso (TX), overseas. His parents both lived their entire lives in El Paso until the Army experience. Where would he likely end up on a dialect map – in the area where he lived at a certain age, or in the Southwest due to the influence of his parents?