Accents

Gotoquiz has a surprisingly accurate quiz about US accents I’ve been clamoring to see for years, after being subjected to quizzes that ask about how I call buckets and pillbugs. Predictably, I got Northeast. I don’t sound like a native speaker of any kind, and I have an online sound sample that proves it, but I don’t have any American vowel merger except this of the British /A/ (“cart,” “father,” “balm,” “calm”) and /Q/ (“cot,” “bother,” “bomb,” “com”) vowels, which to the quiz is what matters.

On the other hand, outside the US the quiz will be completely inaccurate for obvious reasons. Brits will probably get pegged as Northeasterners. Katie, whose accent is 100% Ontario, was pegged in the North Central region, because she has the same vowel mergers and the same Canadian raising as Minnesotans; but her vowel shifts are characteristic of Canada rather than the Old Northwest, so you’ll never confuse her with William H. Macy on Fargo.

5 Responses to Accents

  1. I got The West, with almost 100% correlation. Go figyer.

  2. Stentor says:

    Apparently my accent has completely shifted in the three months since I moved from Massachusetts to Arizona, because it put me at almost 100% West and about 20% Northeast.

  3. Apparently I hail from Philidephia, even though I was born and bred in australia.

  4. whig says:

    Midland, which it says means I don’t have an accent.

  5. […] I am “probably . . . from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri)” according to my answers to the What American Accent Do You Have? quiz. Take it if you like to ponder whether the first syllable of “horrible” rhymes with “whore.” (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.) […]

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