Bert Vaux, the linguist whose data was the basis of the wildly popular New York Times Dialect Quiz, is collecting more data about American English, and invites you to take a survey. The answers will help inform a new app he’s working on. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Online Dialect Study Wants Your Input”
You may have taken the wildly popular dialect quiz that ran in the online version of the New York Times a few years ago.
The guy who gathered all the original data for that is Bert Vox, and he’s a linguistics professor now at Cambridge University.
And he’s doing some more research along those lines.
And you can help him by answering his American dialect survey online.
And so you can answer from 30 to 60 questions about whether you say miniature golf or putt-putt or whether you call those insects lightning bugs or fireflies.
And you can help him build up a mega database of responses that will then be part of an app.
How cool would that be?
That’s very cool.
So the site for that is dialectsofenglish.com.
And if you forget the name, you can always find it at our website, waywordradio.org.
