You don’t sound like you’re from round here
Joshua Katz, a statistics PhD student at North Carolina State University, has produced a beautiful set of maps of US dialect. He used data from the Dialect Survey conducted by Bruce Vaux, of Harvard University.
As an example, people in various parts of the US were asked about their generic name for sweetened carbonated soft drinks: soda, pop, or coke.
The original maps by Prof Vaux were closer to the data, since they showed dots for individual respondents, but they have visual artifacts due to population density — the clear vertical edge running north from Texas is a rainfall threshold, not a dialect boundary.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I note that my preferred term, ‘soft drink’, isn’t on the map. I was raised in Virginia by Mid-Western parents.
Or, just to make it more confusing, some people say ‘soda pop’.
11 years ago
‘soft drink’ is in the original survey data, and shows up on Vaux’s individual-response maps. You see it in the same regions as ‘coke’, but it’s less common.
There are several other possibilities as well: for example, there’s a cluster near Boston that says ‘tonic’
11 years ago
In Santa Barbara, my officemate was from Pennsylvania and said “pop”. Now I know that it is quite probable that he is from West Pennsylvania.
Cool maps.
11 years ago