February 15, 2004

Harvard Dialect Maps Do you swim in a creek or crik? Do you like carr-a-mel or car-mel in your candy? Harvard Computing Society has done a neat survey where American dialect variations are mapped out. The geographical bias in the maps are not normalized, and some results are rather homogenous, so use at your own risk!
posted by anonymous 20 years ago
  • Great post! But what do you mean by "the geographical bias in the maps are not normalized"?
  • Sorry for not being more clear. It just means there's too many dots in the cities and not enough in the countryside, simply because that's where all the surveyed people live. There are ways of normalizing the results (or at least the displayed data) to help show the contrasts better, but since the site doesn't do that you kinda have to scrutinize the maps to get meaningful results.
  • This is rad.
  • I noticed that about the maps - the eastern US and the western seaboard dominate all categories, just because more people answered the questions there. What would be more informative is "what % of people surveyed in Wyoming say x, compared to what % of people in California or New Jersey?" Only a few questions provoked clear responses, like the division between pop (middle-north), soda (east) and coke (south). Also "tag sale" and "grinders" - strange words that seem confined to Connecticut and its surrounding area.
  • Agree with the_bone, radical! Not to hijack the thread, but it reminds me of a discussion that I had with a friend years ago regarding childhood songs, most of which had gross-out lyrics. The one that we were specifically debating was sung to the tune of "The Old Gray Mare" and started with the words "A one quart can of all purpose porpoise pus, chopped up turkey feet, mutilated monkey meat..." (sorry but we were just uneducated kids, my monkey lovin' pals). His version (he grew up outside of NYC) ended "...and I forgot my spoon", whereas mine ended (grew up near Palm Springs, Ca.) with "...floating in pink lemonade". Does anyone know of an study/websitesite that breaks down childhood rhymes/songs/stories?
  • Great green gobs of greasy grimey gopher guts, floating in the sewer, squidranch, you might try Googling it. Been engrossed in this link since you posted, timmus, it's amazing to learn how wisespread or limited a particular pronounciation is. Pity there's not more data for those north of the border, or parts farther flung. *a whole banana tree, in full fruit*
  • "Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey feet, dirty little birdie's feet - all this wonderful food for you and me to eat, and I forgot my spoon!" (from Toronto, Ontario, really shakey on what the third line is, and I agree, Beeswacky, they ought to have surveyed Canadians (if only because we are endlessly fascinated with ourselves :) Jack Chambers at the University of Toronto has done some interesting stuff on dialects and the the border.
  • I feel dumb but I can't find the pop/soda/code one after looking over the list 3 times. Which number is it?
  • Ahh. I even thought I did a search for beverage ...but maybe I was just imagining things.
  • jb, those are great, too, thanks. Though 'tis a bitty discouraging to see the rancour in a few of those Yod-dropping quotes. On the Harvard dialect map, I came out in red, blue, and occaisional purple spots, so colourful to behold. And of course cot sounds like caught! As every fule kno! - Molesworth One.
  • This is excellent. I'd like to see a version of this for Britain.
  • I found this a couple of years ago while living in CA and entered my NZ dialect version of everything. I'm sure I've totally skewed the entire site, now.
  • *sends linguistic hit squad after tracicle*
  • Consulted the Great God Google and got a couple of links that might interest those from non-North American parts as well -- 1 and 2. The links on the lower pages look promising, anyway.
  • Argh, the words, the words! *collapses*
  • The stuff of life, tracicle!
  • Thanks beeswacky. This one, especially, looks excellent. The extracts chosen here, just a taste of what is available, were selected to reflect as far as possible the dialect in each of the 302 Survey of English Dialects site recordings held in the British Library Sound Archive. There's about 130 recordings of peoples voices on there. I'll have to a better look when I've got the time.
  • i can't believe people call goosebumps 'goose pimples'.
  • Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey feet, little dirty birdy feet, all covered up in all-purpose purple porpoise pus, eat it with a knife and spoooooooon! GramMa sez, "Sing together with me now!" Great link, timmus.
  • Oooo! Well, now, BlieHorse, reckon I'll see your greasy grimey gopher guts and raise you a hearseful o' worms.
  • *sigh* BlueHorse, apologies, meant Bluehorse.
  • beeswacky - could have been worse... you came really close to BileHorse. But then again, given the context, it might have been appropriate.
  • We ought to map our variants of that song : ) Where is yours from, BlueHorse? And yeah - tracicle, there will be some irate linguists coming up to your door soon : ) I love doing surveys, especially linguistic ones, but I probably can't do Jack Chambers' one about the Canadian-US border because I've moved out of the region. Also, I'm so weird now, with British and New England and California (due to unhealthy amounts of Buffyness) all squishing around my little Canuck head, I don't even know what I'm talking anymore. Chambers also had a really interesting article on dialect acquisition among anglophone Canadian children who emmigrated to Oxford, UK, which looked at what features were adopted more quickly than others. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the full text or abstract online, but it was essentially that vocabulary was one of the first and most easily changed features, then pronunciation where the phoneme existed in the original dialect (like picking up a long "ah" in "bath" or "grass"). The last change, which was not even picked up by children who immigrated after a certain age, were those phonemes that did not exist in their Canadian English, like the open o that exists between the low back "ah" and the the mid back "oh". It's the vowel in the British pronunciation of "dawn" that I can't say, because I say "dawn" with the same vowel as "Don". "Caught" and "cot" are similar, but I can't ever remember which is which. Americans seem to mostly (those who make the distinction) say something like "ah" for "dawn" and then a mid low vowel, halfway between "ah" and the a in "cat" for "don" - or as we Canucks always notice when we go to Buffallo "dahler" It's funny how dialect differences, which are so minor compared to language differences, seem to fascinate people. I know they fascinate me - and in my first year in a graduate school dorm, they were a constant dinner conversation staple, whereever anglophones from different regions congregated.
  • lessee, jb, I'm sure it would have been stuck in my widdle mind by the age of 10, which is when I left Denver to head to Johnstown, PA. So what's your version of the Greasy Guts song? And yes, linguistics is fascinating! Even more than discriptive linguistics, I love psycholinguistics. beeswacky, make up your mind, I'm feeling a little schizo here: BlueHorse, apologies, meant Bluehorse See what worms do to you? Better stick to the gopher guts a la mode.
  • arrrgh! what happened to all the italics?
  • BlueHorse - my version is above, and begins quite similar to yours, though it's from Ontario - not exactly near Colorado. The main difference is the bit after "dirty little birdie feet" - but then I'm not exactly sure how that bit DID go (I think my memory might have made it up). All I know is that it ended with "and I forgot my spoon" Oh! And there was a coda: "but we brought straaaaaawwwwssss!" HTML tags haven't been working since the programming was updated, something techincal my little humanist/socsci brain has trouble wrapping around. I believe it might involve computers. All I know is that I am very very happy that other people know more about this sort of thing, and will happily send psychic bananas to everyone helping with the metaphilter hack
  • I love sites like this! I find discussion and analysis about dialect highly entertaining--especially when people have emotional attachments to things. I double majored in English Lit and Linguistics. Sometimes I felt like my head was going to explode because English majors are all, "There's one right way to do it! If you don't you're wrong and you suck!" and Linguistics majors are all, "Universal Grammar means everything is just fine... It's all groovy man. There are no primative languages." (So I'm all "Do what you want but you still suck!". j/k) I also really appreciated the trip down "greasy grimey gopher guts" memory lane. I haven't thought about french fried eyeballs dipped in booger sauce in a loooooooong time.