dialects

[Jonathan Lighter]

Just took the quiz and found out I'm 52% Southern !  Seems to mean I could be from anywhere in the U.S., but the test has a funny feeling I'm from Dixie !

  If that ain't close enough for governemnt work, hush mah mouth an' call me Colonel !

  JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: dialects
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On Jun 22, 2006, at 7:43 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> ... The only sense I can make out of the radio comment [by Bob
> Beard, on Morning Edition, 6/20/06], to Steve Inskeep] is that
> native speakers of American English who live all their lives west
> of the Mississippi cannot be localized further just by listening to
> their pronunciation.
>
> This may be true, but I doubt it. It certainly was not true in
> the past. Even now I can't believe that people bred and born in
> North Dakota, for example, very often sound like people from
> Southern California.

or Utah. or, omigod, Texas. and so on. the idea is deeply,
irretrievably silly, and i find it astonishing that Bob Beard should
be maintaining that "all the accents are on the East Coast". but
then he has a "Are You a Yankee or a Rebel" test (which gives you an
overall score), and supplied "A Glossary of Quaint Southernisms" for
the NPR website,

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5496546

(Bethany et al., steel yourselves).

arnold

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