It's rather disturbing that the quiz accurately identified, as two cities where the talk like I do, Denver and Aurora. (Minneapolis was the other one.) Least similar cities are Montgomery, AL; Winston-Salem, NC; and Philadelphia, PA.
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk
70 view(s)
Spokane, Salt Lake City, and Fresno. The first two mentioned "kitty-corner," the last, drive-through liquor stores, as being most distinctive for those cities. For the record, i spent my first eight years in Fargo, ND, and the next 37 in southern California. I now live near Seattle (Hi, Spokane!).
The quiz nailed it for me, my wife, and my father-in-law.
Mine wasn't even close. But then, my pronunciations aren't particularly governed by where I've lived. (Marry, Mary, and merry all have different vowels, dammit.)
+Brittany Constable My wife and I had a long conversation about the differences in pronunciation between 'caught' and 'cot'. She didn't get it. 🙂
Didn't work well for me, I think because the time I spent overseas exposed me to many different linguistic patterns.
It nailedme as being from central Indiana, though i was surprised some place in Kentucky didn't come up as an alternative rather than Iowa or Missouri since my mom's side of the family moved up from there. Not sure where the IA and MO influences come from.
Having gone through the test several time I find the following issues with it:
It is very biased toward finding things that are east coast and south east US.
It has almost nothing to do with the west in general, New Mexico and California specifically.
I find that it thinks that Mary is from Texas to be most amusing.
Any test where you have to answer most of the questions as other or we do not have that item or a name for that item is a pretty good indication that it is a craptacular test.
@BD – Actually just read an interesting article http://boingboing.net/2013/12/24/what-we-can-learn-from-dialect.html talking about this and the research behind it — and how the West, yes, is far vaguer in accenting than the rest of the country (though apparently some new accents are cropping up there).