Puts me in Newark, NJ; New York City; and Yonkers. Very accurate.
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I’m going to have to try it again putting something else in lieu of y’all. It said I was from Montgomery/Birmingham. I spent my first 10 years in the Midwest, the next 10 in the DC area, and the next 30 in southern VA. And I have parents from NYC. It said my strongest answer was the y’all which is the southern VA influence.
I also had trouble with a lot of the answers that were about transportation/city scape items. I do that for a living and I use most all of the terms interchangeably, so I put “other.”
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This was fun! I waffled on a few answers, because there was one answer for where I grew up, and one for where I’ve lived most of my adult life. I didn’t answer consistently one way or the other. The map pinpointed the two areas exactly.
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Put me in Sacramento, Oceanside and Oxnard. I was born and raised and have lived my entire life in mainly central and southern Ca. I’ve not lived in those specific locales but I did some work in Oxnard/Ventura area.
It put me as Freemont, Santa Rosa and San Jose when I have lived in Southern California all of my life and in San Diego for the past 44 years.
Wow, this pulled up Ft. Worth, Irving, and Lubbock. I was raised around the world as a military kid but moved to Dallas at 13 where my Philadelphia dad retired. My mother was born and raised in Dallas but left for college at 16, later married dad, traveled the world and never back to Texas until she was 48. I moved to Atlanta 36 years ago from Texas. Fascinating how they got this so close. I’m guessing you don’t change your dialect from what is ingrained when young, regardless of where you are. Except of course, Canada. I can speak to a Canadian for 5 minutes and my husband says for the next 24 hours, I sound like I am from Vancouver.
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Interesting to say the least. Very disconcerting that the test is used to determine your political preferences. Gotta quit falling for taking these type tests.
Although the cities picked were wrong (I was conceived in one of them though…ugh…hated knowing that growing up), all six of the states I’ve lived in were at least light yellow in terms of the locations within the states where I live. And the place I live now is in a dark orangy-red area.
I didn’t notice that …
Where did you see that? This is what I read on the page regarding the test:
About This Quiz
The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz and has since written “Speaking American,” a visual exploration of American regional dialects.
Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux’s current website.
The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you.
It knows where I live if I put in tag sale, but that’s not what I say naturally. Without that it puts me in Boston, which is not unreasonable since my Mom grew up there. My Dad is from Chicago, and my mother always made fun of him for pronouncing Mary, merry and marry exactly the same. Most of my childhood was either overseas or in DC so I’m not easy to place. Many things I’ve called different things depending where I lived. I had grinders when I was in college, but never since. I learned to eat crawdads in New Orleans, but I rarely see them in other parts of the country.
Nothing to do with politics. It put me around where I live and grew up. I didn’t realize Mischief Night was just a NJ and NYC thing.
Philadelphia too.
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Well, it totally got my political preference wrong if it thinks I vote like Texas.
Same, very accurate.
I grew up in Chicago and have spent most of my life in the Chicago area. That question made me LOL. I thought… huh, you can pronounce them differently???
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Mischief Night in Phily too –
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I can pronounce them differently but do I? Not sure! I do know my Connecticut MIL had a very different pronunciation of the first syllable of my name than I do! And it was none of these three.
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I redid the quiz and now am Honolulu, followed by Fremont and San Jose. Haha!
I’ve done the test three times and it comes up the same. Apparently “sneakers” is a big factor! Chicago is bright orange; lived there for 40 years as an adult so I guess that’s where I picked up dialect that didn’t come from Mom. Not where I lived from age six to 17, though!