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Article posted on Mar 28

Another goddamn poll

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on March 28, 2004, 11:00 am

My dialect is 50% popular!
I answered 122 out of 122 questions, with 72 out of 122 (59%) answers the same as the United States' most popular answers, according to a Harvard dialect survey. This is a 50% weighted average (taking the percentage of survey respondents who pick each answer into consideration).

See my answers, or take the poll yourself!

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Yeah, another poll has been unleashed upon the world, but this time *I* made it. I saw the Harvard dialect survey a couple years, but forgot about it until recently. I was having trouble remembering which parts of the survey I alread looked at and how my own preferences related to them. So I decided to just parse and import the questions, answers and high-level statistics and do some PHP-fu.

Some observations...
* There are a lot of words that, when I say aloud, could go either way. Such as quarter, spigot, etc.
* Several of the questions deal with how words are stressed (insurance, New Haven, umbrella). I realized that much of the time, I do not stress words like that at all. I think this is a midwest accent thing. For example, "Green Bay" is properly pronounced with no stress. You could tell if somebody was from out of town because they would stress "Green". Anyways, for times when I do place stress on words like that, it depends on the context in the sentence.
* What do you call the thing from which you might drink water in a school? I chose "bubbler", with a whopping 3.84% of respondents! If you look at the map, there are only 2 places in the country that use "bubbler": Wisconsin and New England. (I'm from Wisconsin, and most of my extended family is from New England.)
* Speaking of Wisconsin-isms... There is an ATM network in the midwest (Wisconsin mostly) called Tyme. It was a large enough network that Tyme became a generic word for ATM, and hearing "I'm going to go to the Tyme machine" was commonplace. When I moved to California, I got many weird looks because of that.
* What do you call a public railway system (normally underground)? "BART" is an option, which is stupid. Yes, BART is a rail system, but it hasn't become a generic word. Oh well

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