In 2003 a linguistic authority with Harvard, an Englishmen Bert Vaux, led a study quantifying the dialects of the United States. He conducted an online survey with 50,000 participants on how they pronounced a variety of words or, in some cases, which words they used to describe common objects. The survey itself was born out of necessity. Vaux was teaching a non-majors course, Dialects of English, at Harvard University in 1997. While preparing for the lectures he realized that most of the work on American dialects was badly out of date, focused on old white male farmers, and dealt with high level and abstract linguistic concepts of little interest to the public. You can see the Harvard Dialect Study results here. Joshua Katz, a graduate student in the Statistics Department at North Carolina State University, recently used this data to reconstruct the series of maps to display the regional variations in our language. Below are a few of my favorites. Ya’ll can also take the quiz for yourself. Apparently, I’m quite Southern.
