Loretta in Shreveport, Louisiana, wants to know what lexical and dialectal clues linguists look for when guessing where someone is from. She also wonders: Do people with long careers in the military or who grew up in a military family have a...
Regional grammar can be just as rich and diverse as regional vocabulary. The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project maps grammatical features that vary across American English, using research and survey data to show where they cluster. Examples include...
A Charlottesville, Virginia, woman says her husband, a New Yorker, makes fun of her for using the expression might could, as in, “We might could go to dinner later.” The hosts talk about this and other double modals. Incidentally, here’s the funny...