A Personal Dialect

We spend a lifetime acquiring a dialect that is influenced by the sounds, phrases, and pronunciations we hear in the places we live. How does our dialect compare to that of our American peers?

I completed an NC State University Dialect Quiz to learn how my way of speaking compares with other speakers of American English.

This map is a data visualization of the similarity of my personal dialect with the dialects of American English as measured by data from the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey.

This "heat map" corresponds remarkably well to the places I have lived, or have spent significant time:

• New Jersey Age 0-17 
• Montana Age 17-22 
• Minnesota Age 22-present 

REFERENCES

• Dialect Quiz, Joshua Katz, Dept. of Statistics, NC State University.
• Harvard Dialect Survey, 2003. Harvard University.
• The American Dialect Society.