Saturday, August 26, 2006

What do you speak ...

Amy Nelson-Mile links to What Kind Of American English Do You Speak? (Amy is clearly more cosmopolitan than I.)

Here's my result (interestingly, my grandmother's family hailed from south of the Mason-Dixon line. Must have picked up the Dixie from her.) One question threw me and I din't answer it, the one about putting toilet paper in front of your house. What's that about?:

Your Linguistic Profile:
40% Yankee
30% General American English
20% Dixie
0% Midwestern
0% Upper Midwestern

4 comments:

  1. Frank, I guess you can take the boy out of Dixie, but you can't Dixie (or, at least a Dixie way of talkin') out of the boy ...

    I experienced that, first-hand, moving north of the Mason-Dixon line whenever my father was transferred (inlucing a stint at Marine Corps Supply Activity, on Broad Street) ...

    All of a sudden, 'crick' was 'creek' ... and 'resevwah' was 'reservoir' ... and 'polecat' was 'skunk' ...

    It provided no end of amusement for my classmates!

    However, it DID come in handy in high school, when we staged "Thurber Carnival" ... I was the only one qualified to play General Lee, complete with sccent, in the skit, "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox" !!!

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  2. I'm a GAE/Dixie/Yankee, what does this mean? Think they got confused - I'm English!

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  3. Cosmopolitan? Ha ha ha! (or ROFLOL)

    I grew up in small town Saskatchewan (population 700) and still mostly keep to its way of speaking.

    Now I live in the big city of Regina (population approx. 178,000--waaay less than Philly).

    I know it's not all about numbers, but still . . . .

    I guess small town Saskatchewan has a lot of the same characteristics of General American English. Maybe some of the clever linguistic people out there can tell us.

    Toilet-papering? I think that's when someone wraps your house with toilet paper.

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  4. LOL...TP'ing is the term for toilet papering your house....done mostly on Halloween, or if you've really ticked off the neighborhood teens!

    That was fun. I got 45%, 35%, 10%, 10%, and 0%

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