Pretty cool dialect quiz

I guess it’s only applicable for Americans.

So embarrassing, it put me in Florida. I’m from Calgary Alberta. I was at least expecting it to throw me in Seattle or something. FLORIDA !!! :blush:

Although I did have to answer I have no word for this at least 7 or 8 times so I guess we Canadians are just weird…

You mean it works also for people from Cuba, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Colombia and so on? wow!

It placed me in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. I grew up in Baton Rouge and lived in New Orleans for a while. I think it put me in Shreveport because of the way I said lawyer. But after saying the word again a few times after the survey, I concluded that I had responded inaccurately to that item. So the survey did a pretty good job in my case. However, I think that my choice of poor boy for what a lot of people call a sub sandwich ensured that I would be placed in Louisiana–that and calling the evening meal supper.

Yeah there’s certainly a few questions that if answered a certain way they definitely don’t need a 2nd question to know where you’re from. Poor boy? Huh? :laughing:

You mean it works also for people from Cuba, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Colombia and so on? wow![/quote]

Anyone who thinks “Americans” refers to anything but people from the U.S. needs to brush up on their English.

In Spanish, America is a continent; there is no American continent in English. English speakers from the U.S./Canada, the U.K./Ireland, Australia/New Zealand, and South Africa reckon that North America and South America are two separate land masses (we count 7 continents total) – since they are the major native English-speaking countries in the world, that makes them right.

So in English, a Peruvian is properly called a South American; a Mexican is a North American; a Texan is an American.

This is completely black and white.

Yeah, I run into many Americans who would say no way to those statements.

And i don’t see why on Earth a Mexican is not an American, but somebody from USA is. Is it perhaps because they have more power and money so they can forge the language and terms as if they were the center of the Universe? just guessing.

EDIT:

From the wikipedia:

[quote]American(s) may refer to:
Anything related to, or originating from, the United States of America
Americans, citizens from that country
A person of American ethnicity
The indigenous peoples of the Americas
A person or attribute of one of the nations of the Americas[/quote]

Uhmmmm.

North America, apart from Mexico of course, has some interesting patterns of English.
Most of the questions had me answering in the negative: other, none of the above, never heard of that, et cetera.
Except for certain key questions, such as “caramel”, in which I go both ways, or weys.
Any of the above could be responsible for my being placed in heavy concentration to the north east of Yonkers, N.Y.
:ponder:

[quote=“TheGingerMan”]Any of the above could be responsible for my being placed in heavy concentration to the north east of Yonkers, N.Y.
:ponder:[/quote]

This is where I got placed as well.

Quite simply, they are wrong. Do they happen to also speak Spanish?

The vast majority of native English speakers will agree that American refers to the USA; it doesn’t matter what non-native speakers say.

It has nothing to do with putting America at the center of the world, since as I mentioned, Australians, Brits, and Canadians also use the terms this way. (Could I get further confirmation from non-Americans on this one?)

You are being obstinate and trying to impose your world view onto the English language. North and South America are two different continents. Thus they have two distinct demonyms. End of story.

EDIT

Also from wikipedia:

It the overwhelming number of cases where people say “American” does not refer to the USA, it is because of influence from a foreign language. It’s the same way that “New Open” is not English, but Taiwanese people insist it is. Any native speaker who thinks about it for a moment will realize where the problem is.

(PS, as there is no English term for estadounidense, we don’t really have an option but to call ourselves American.)

Some of you seemed to have missed the big maps of the United States used in the quiz.

Florida is home to scads of northern transplants. I don’t see how there can be any specific language pattern down there.

Quiz put me in the Santa Ana/Corona/Irvine California area–amazingly accurate.

On the other issue of “American” as a demonym for people from the United States, I’d have to agree with Hokwongwei: In standard English it’s “American.” Whether or not your language has another term is irrelevant when speaking English.

My personal experience with common usage: When I lived in the US I worked for several years with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. In our Spanish conversations I never heard the term “estadounidense” when referring to Americans, nor “americano” when referring to themselves. Occasionally I heard “norteamericano”, which was used in the same exact sense as English “North American.”

[quote=“BrentGolf”]

Yeah there’s certainly a few questions that if answered a certain way they definitely don’t need a 2nd question to know where you’re from. Poor boy? Huh? :laughing:[/quote]

Yep. As TM says those are reflected on the maps, solid mass of blue with a pinprick of orange. A “hero” in NYC for this one

[quote=“Gilgamesh”][quote=“TheGingerMan”]Any of the above could be responsible for my being placed in heavy concentration to the north east of Yonkers, N.Y.
:ponder:[/quote]

This is where I got placed as well.[/quote]

Interesting, I bet they pegged some NY type features in your speech, but without obvious markers for NYC or New Jersey. Would have been interesting if they added Canada.

Yeah there’s certainly a few questions that if answered a certain way they definitely don’t need a 2nd question to know where you’re from. Poor boy? Huh? :laughing:[/quote]

The legend (don’t know if it’s true) is that in New Orleans in the early twentieth century, some workers went on strike somewhere and had been manning picket lines for quite some time when a nearby Italian grocer said, “Let’s give those poor boys something to eat,” and made up a bunch of sandwiches for them.

Almost everyone from Louisiana pronounces it po’boy. It’s served on French bread, and there are a bunch of different kinds. In Baton Rouge, right next door to the LSU campus, there used to be a little combination bar and sandwich shop called the Library (“Where learning is fun!”), and they served po’boys and muffulettas. The cook there could do something with roast beef that I’d never experienced before and haven’t experienced since, but I tell you what, I wish I had one of those roast beef po’boys right now.

I got Boston, New York and Pembrook Pines(?) due to the usage of sun shower and sneakers.

You seem to do that pretty frequently.

Yeah, that and you can’t swing a dead cat in coastal Florida without hitting a vacationing Canadian. THAT’s probably why some Canadians get mapped to Florida. :slight_smile:

I doubt the tightness of the geographic correlation. I spent most of my first half-century in Kansas, so of course I got Lubbock, Shreveport, and Lexington KY. :loco:

You seem to do that pretty frequently.[/quote]
Yeah, like everybody :slight_smile:

Quite simply, they are wrong. Do they happen to also speak Spanish?

The vast majority of native English speakers will agree that American refers to the USA; it doesn’t matter what non-native speakers say.

It has nothing to do with putting America at the center of the world, since as I mentioned, Australians, Brits, and Canadians also use the terms this way. (Could I get further confirmation from non-Americans on this one?)

You are being obstinate and trying to impose your world view onto the English language. North and South America are two different continents. Thus they have two distinct demonyms. End of story.

EDIT

Also from wikipedia:

It the overwhelming number of cases where people say “American” does not refer to the USA, it is because of influence from a foreign language. It’s the same way that “New Open” is not English, but Taiwanese people insist it is. Any native speaker who thinks about it for a moment will realize where the problem is.

(PS, as there is no English term for estadounidense, we don’t really have an option but to call ourselves American.)[/quote]

To say it briefly, I know how people from the USA call themselves and I know that the same term is used by many other people in the world. The thing is that I find the term quite unaccurate and unfair, so I refuse to use it. The same than many people from USA who keep calling themselves “americanos” in Spanish, and like to complain about Spanish people calling them estadounidenses. They get reeally offended indeed.

When I said that many “Americans” wouldn’t agree with you, I meant that they wouldn’t call “American” to a mexican, as you said above. Rregarding the two continents thing, yeah, I also had to study at school and so, but you probably have heard about where “America” comes from, from the “Americas”, and that’s why you can use “American” for anybody or anything coming from north or south America: because both continents are called “america”. The term comes from Spanish, it’s not like Spanish are evil and want to impose their view on something they are nothing to do. You can check the ethimology of the word on wikipedia, but I’m sure you do not need to do so.


BTW, the quiz seems to be really interesting. I guess that it’s some AI system based on Artifical Neural Network. Some time ago people used to play with this site, that guesses what you are thinking of:

20q.net/