Wa'chUtalk'n'bout

[tdjohnsn]

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

15% Dixie

15% Upper Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I have never been (or at least only briefly) to most of the regions listed. Now, I suppose expecting actual linguistic analysis of regional phoneme and word usage across the US from a livejournal meme is a bit much, but completely ignoring both the distinct Californian dialects and the usages common to most of the rural west (including the Northwest) seems, well, like a livejournal meme. I think I am just annoyed because this would actually be really interesting if the questions were designed by someone other than a 19 year old from New Jersey.

Comments

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. It would be really interesting to know how your speech traits track your linguistic heritage, but I just ended up feeling kind of... dissatisfied.

What I found really interesting is that my answer for a bunch of the questions was "it depends". I say "y'all" if I want to be clear that I'm indicating the second person plural. Frosting is the stuff on top of a cake, unless it's a simple powdered-sugar/lemon juice mixture or something like that, in which case it's icing. I use "catty corner" for diagonal, but only in reference to buildings. Et cetera...

I think that the regions have less to do with where you're from than where your family's from.

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

I noticed the "it depends" factor as well. And I was thinking about how where you family is from would influence your speach and I would imagine that word usage and pronounciation are influenced differently than one another. It seems like family would influence word usage most heavily while the community would influence pronounciation most heavily. It would be interesting to know how much family influences one or the other vs. the actual region you are in. I did read somewhere that many teenagers no longer have regional accents because they are influcenced so heavily by media.

(And the quiz totally left off "Okey Dokey." What were they thinking? :-)