Pretty cool dialect quiz

Discussion Open Forum
21

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.”

22

[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.

23

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.

24

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

25

You seem to do that pretty frequently.

26

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:

27

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:

28

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

29

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/

30

You’re still missing my point. It’s not selfish for Americans to use the term to refer to “U.S. Americans” – ESPECIALLY because other English speakers do the same – because in our reckoning, U.S. citizens/residents are the only people the term can refer to. It is not factually correct in English to call a Peruvian or a Canadian “American” because they are not from America; one is from South America and one is from North America.

I am trying to emphasize that it really blew my mind when I learned (just lat year) that some people consider North and South America as a singular “America” to me. To us, they are as different as Europe and Africa. So saying that a Peruvian is “an American” makes as little sense to me as saying a Londoner and a Beijinger are both “Eurasian.”

In Chinese, you would never say you are “美洲人” because Chinese doesn’t have the concept of one unified American continent. Instead, you would say 南美洲人. So would it be different in English?

In Spanish, I would not call myself americano because I respect that the term is different from the English world American. This is a case of “false friends” between the languages and that’s that.

31

Hokwongwei, it’s not that I didn’t read you, it’s that the only reason I see for calling a USA citizen “American” but call a Peruvian “South American” is ethnocentrism. Otherwise, what is it again that qualify USA citizens for being called “Americans”? because that’s what I can’t find among your arguments. I don’t think that North America and the countries within are so different from the ones in the south so they can be called plainly “Americans”, while the people from the south need that “South” at the beginning.

My point is, the reason because this happens in English is: a)ethnocentrism (from the people in USA) b)the term is wide spread among other people because it is used in the USA and because people are lazy and do not think twice of the words they use.

I hope this is not seen as an attack to the yankees but as something that bugs me as unfair and unaccurate.

32

I got Yonkers. Maybe I should see a doctor about that.

33

[quote=“jesus80”]Hokwongwei, it’s not that I didn’t read you, it’s that the only reason I see for calling a USA citizen “American” but call a Peruvian “South American” is ethnocentrism. Otherwise, what is it again that qualify USA citizens for being called “Americans”? because that’s what I can’t find among your arguments. I don’t think that North America and the countries within are so different from the ones in the south so they can be called plainly “Americans”, while the people from the south need that “South” at the beginning.

My point is, the reason because this happens in English is: a)ethnocentrism (from the people in USA) b)the term is wide spread among other people because it is used in the USA and because people are lazy and do not think twice of the words they use.

I hope this is not seen as an attack to the yankees but as something that bugs me as unfair and unaccurate.[/quote]
It really bugs when people say unaccurate instead of inaccurate.

34

[quote=“Incubus”][quote=“jesus80”]Hokwongwei, it’s not that I didn’t read you, it’s that the only reason I see for calling a USA citizen “American” but call a Peruvian “South American” is ethnocentrism. Otherwise, what is it again that qualify USA citizens for being called “Americans”? because that’s what I can’t find among your arguments. I don’t think that North America and the countries within are so different from the ones in the south so they can be called plainly “Americans”, while the people from the south need that “South” at the beginning.

My point is, the reason because this happens in English is: a)ethnocentrism (from the people in USA) b)the term is wide spread among other people because it is used in the USA and because people are lazy and do not think twice of the words they use.

I hope this is not seen as an attack to the yankees but as something that bugs me as unfair and unaccurate.[/quote]
It really bugs when people say unaccurate instead of inaccurate.[/quote]

Thanks for the feedback. I’m sure I have lots of unaccurancies when writing English

35

First come, first served:

[quote]The United States of America declared independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776 (although the event is now commemorated on July 4, the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence), in so doing becoming the first independent, foreign-recognized nation in the Americas and the first European colonial entity to break from its mother country.[/quote] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoloniza … ted_States

We got dibs. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dibs

Just kidding; I don’t really care if everyone or no one calls himself or herself an American.

36

No, you’re still missing my point because I’m telling why it’s rational for us to call ourselves American.

Our country is and has been since its founding called the United States of America. So we can call ourselves Unionites, Statesians, or Americans, and it’s the last one that ended up sticking.

I’m going to break out the graphics to make my point clearer. As far as the English language goes, the term American is not geographic, it’s political. It means you come from or live in the U.S. The term South American, in contrast, is geographic and describes anybody from the continent called South America. They cannot be called American because: A, they are not from a continent called America; B, the term American is already in use to describe U.S.Americans. There is nothing ethnocentric about it.

Graphics:

English-speakers count North America (blue) and South America (green) as separate continents. Denizens of neither can be labeled “American” because there is no geographic entity called America.

We have been called Americans (again, IN ENGLISH) since the times of the 13 colonies. English-speakers have never demanded that Americans be called “American” in any language other than English, so it’s unfair for Spanish speakers to demand that we change our definition when speaking English.

Again, I’ll call a Peruvian “un americano” because that’s Spanish logic, but I will not call him “an American” because that’s simply not how the term is used by native English speakers.
I’ll call myself “estadounidense” in Spanish, but I refuse to call me self “United Statesian” in English.

You may not like it, but that’s the way the language works. The only people who will agree that “American” can refer to South and North Americans outside of the USA are speakers of Latin languages. The rest of the world believes that North Americans are North Americans and South Americans are South Americans.

37

Follow-up:

To put it more simply, if you wrote a document in which you called Dilma Rousseff an American and handed this document to a copy-editor, the editor – whether he or she is from Ireland or New Zealand or Canada – would change it to say South American. It’s a simple right-wrong distinction as far as the English language is concerned and is not based on identity politics.

38

[quote=“Hokwongwei”
Our country is and has been since its founding called the United States of America. So we can call ourselves Unionites, Statesians, or Americans, and it’s the last one that ended up sticking.[/quote]

Yeah, I know, really, I know what you mean. But no, I can not agree. United States of America. If you remove United States and keep only “America”, it’s way too general in my opinion, and aplies to many people beside the USA citizens. I also think that Americans, given that it’s a term that comes from “las Américas” (“the Americans”) which refers to the “New World”, which is north, south and central America, should as well be valid for naming all the people in there. I hope you also get my point. I don’t think that it’s off at all. Indeed, please look the first quote I posted from wikipedia.

Now, I understand that language is something that evolutes with time, and some terms change their acceptions. What I’m trying to point out is that the use this word is given is not fair and is not accurate, and that the main reason I see for this situation is ethnocentrism. And well, ignorance (outside USA).

Hey, I might be wrong, not much though, but there could be some other reasons (like as you said, U. S. A. -> A), but… well, you know what I mean.

I’ll give it a shot this site and see if I’m chicano, or New Yorker or Canadian… I’m curious :smiley:

39

I don’t think there’s any ethnocentrism going on here. I call people from America (Short for the United States of America) Americans. People from Peru are Peruvians, Mexico are Mexicans and Canada are Canadians. It’s pretty straightforward. I think you’re grasping Jesus.

40

It’s very easy to understand: United States OF AMERICA. So, there’s something called AMERICA which is not USA, but USA belongs to that thing called America. I hope now you see what I mean.