The Prairie house became a B&B throughout the holidays. Family members returned again and again, sheets and towels ran continually through the Maytag, decaf or high octane coffee was served with or without cream and sugar, and a continual flow of baked goods streamed in through the front door, compliments of the neighbors.
There was a day or two that cold weather or rain cooped us all up or football kept viewers riveted to the telly. For alternate entertainment the eldest daughter, an English teacher, suggested we all take the New York Times’ Interactive Regional Dialect Test. Seems the test which has been featured on everything from the “Today” show to “Geekwire” has been the talk of the town as it re-circulates year after year. The test was the result of 350,000 dialect surveys compiled by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder for their 2002 Harvard linguistics project.
The Internet test was a lot of fun and amazingly accurate. There are 25 multiple choice questions about the word you would chose to describe a particular object, person or situation. The test will then give three cities with your most similar “dialect.”
“Y’all” of course, is dead giveaway. After that it gets a little trickier. Six of us took the test; all of us got the “y’all” question from random selections. One of the answers was “I have no word for that.”
I had no word for “What do you call the day before Halloween?” and “What do you call the area of grass between a street and a sidewalk?”
We discovered that Mississippians are the only Southerners that say “frontage road.” I’m thinking we call it that because that is what the highway signs say. If you call the highway a “turnpike” or a “freeway” you will not be pegged south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
I waivered a bit on sandwiches — “subs,” “heroes,” “hoagies” or “po-boys.” I think I call the sandwich whatever is printed on the sandwich board. I don’t think I’ve ever said, “Ain’t cha got no po-boys?” — but maybe.
Southern dialect could also be determined by how many syllables you do or don’t put in a particular word, like “caramel,” (car-a mel or carmel).
Do you chase lightening bugs or fireflies? Do you order a sweetened carbonated drink called a coke, soda or pop? As a child did you play with roly polies or pill bugs?
Interestingly enough, the four original Bardwells tested for Columbus, Jackson and Birmingham. Which says something about nurture.
The one brother-in-law reared in Ohio tested for Cleveland, Akron and Lexington, Ky. He now lives in Kentucky.
My results were Jackson (where I spoke my first words and later lived as an adult), Shreveport and Baton Rouge. I’m attributing the latter to the use of the word “boulevard” and my love of crawfish etoufee, having once lived both in French Quebec and Cajun Slidell.
Test your dialect by googling New York Times and dialect.
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