Which English dialect do you speak?

http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/

I'm surprised there is no English dialect thread. Surely, I'm just not looking carefully enough?

Anyway, here are my results:

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. Canadian
2. South African
3. Australian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Dutch
3. Norwegian

There's this but it's America-only DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English) -- it's finally done?

World Englishes is a really interesting subject to me personally

1. Irish (Republic of)
2. North Irish (UK)
3. Scottish (UK) - See more at: http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/done.php#sthash.c0Gs2BpP.dpuf

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

Is "Throw me down the stairs my shoes" a good English sentence?

Good? Well, that depends on how you look at it. It is awkward as hell, but it is grammatical enough that I can extract not just one possible meaning, but exactly one meaning, and only one. I'd never say it in real life, though.

I happied all over that quiz. Apparently I'm a Nordie though.

1. Scottish
2. English
3. Welsh

WILL HAVE BEEN

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

1. English
2. Swedish
3. Dutch

haha yeah that stood out xp

SHE'LL BE RIGHT

I wonder what slight differences made the algorithm suspect a possibility Swedish might be my primary language vs. Moodles above whose results mirror mine exactly except for a Norwegian guess.

ok THESE PRESIDENT OBAMA made me lose it

I WOULD HAVE SEX WITH ALL THIS PRESIDENT OBAMA

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

1. English
2. German
3. Dutch

WHO WHOM KISSED

I am getting far too many lols from this, sorry

Aimless, the game explicitly tells you to go with your instinct. We all have an inner prescriptivist!

1. English (England)
2. Scottish (UK)
3. Welsh (UK)

1. English (England)
2. Welsh (UK)
3. Scottish (UK)

1. English
2. Finnish
3. Hungarian

I think allowing WHO WHOM KISSED led to Finnish, but I'm not sure why

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:?
1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

I'm Canadian, my first language is German. Language I speak most in my day to day life is French.

it makes sense that American came out ahead of Canadian, since most of English was basically learned from American TV and movies.

I didn't spot that you'd to tick all allowable answers til about halfway thru so pinch of salt with mine

I think that's why the listed Scottish for you, darragh. #ducks

1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

Been mistaken for all three.

I'm a little surprised that American (Standard) isn't in my top 3 because, even though I am Canadian.

I think it has to do with interacting with many non-North Americans.

No one would ever think I'm South African or Australian.

I botched up that first sentence! Sorry!

Are you often upside down?

It depends on your perspective?

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. English (England)
2. Welsh (UK)
3. South African

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. German
3. Finnish

1. American (Standard)
2. Singaporean
3. Australian

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

Singaporean!

*punishes the thread with Judicial Caning*

yeah, i got that for my number 2. my guess is i wasn't paying attention and answered some questions wrong.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. Australian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. Norwegian
2. Swedish
3. English

http://www.guitarthai.com/picpost/gtpicpost/Q364832.jpg

Boringly correct.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. English (England)
2. Scottish (UK)
3. Welsh (UK)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Swedish
3. Norwegian

yeah, i got that for my number 2. my guess is i wasn't paying attention and answered some questions wrong.

― Spectrum, Thursday, June 5, 2014 7:40 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not about getting it wrong, though. It's about variations in dialect.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

I grew up all over the US, so the potential results were pretty up in the air. I'd like to find a similar test that tried to ascertain my regional dialect.

its prob based on IP address

scottish, english, norn irish.

rangers fan iirc

This test had Steven Pinker written all over it, although most likely it was designed by some of his grad students.

I found the instructions to be unclear, which was maddening, because the lack of clarity could have been avoided fairly easily had the designers given them further thought. Instead of reinforcing the point they make prior to the test, that one should just go with what sounds right to you at first blush, the instructions within the test ran counter to this and specifically asked the test taker to select everything that was grammatical. Had they phrased this more in the spirit they requested at the start, such as "select everything that sounds like what you might say in a conversation", then my answers would have changed., damn their eyes.

I know I will fall into a very tiny minority of the test takers who think this, but I can't help noticing that kind of stuff.

The use of the word "grammatical" should have been avoided entirely, imo, because the test purports to be interested in dialects, and grammar runs much deeper and embraces much more than the superficialities of dialect.

because the lack of clarity could have been avoided fairly easily had the designers given them further thought.
it's interesting that you think that you know more than the people at MIT who study language and designed this test?!

i took the "how large is your vocabulary" test and found their questions to be quite well written -- they went back and forth between things that well-read people know and more colloquial 2nd and 3rd definitions of words to see how deeply a person knows what the word "keep" means, for instance.

Are there really dialects where passives work the other way round? "The dog was pushed by the cat" meaning the dog pushed the cat, etc. Likewise "an sky"?

I assumed those first questions and some of the possible answers of later question were mostly to ascertain how well you spoke actually spoke English, regardless of dialect.

Oh I guess they're also trying to identify L1s for non-native English speakers, might be more relevant there.

Anyway, I redid the test and chose the opposite of my intuition/accepted everything as grammatical:

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. North Irish (UK)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Scottish (UK)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. Portuguese
2. Arabic
3. Spanish

LL, all I can say is that the design of the test was poorly matched to its stated goals. I make no claim to knowing more than the designers of the test. I only claim to see what was there written on the screen at each step.

I consider it entirely possible that the design concealed certain goals of the test and only a few of the answers were actually germaine to the algorithm used by the computer, with the rest of the test designed in order to facilitate that concealment. God knows what the designers really think they are doing. That's beyond my knowledge.

But I stand by my critique that the instructions and the test contained ambiguities that made it difficult for me to understand what they were instructing me to do.

i don't know either, i just know that generally people who design tests have put a lot of thought into the instructions and the way the questions are worded, and there's a good chance that everything is there for a reason. maybe you aren't privy to that reason, but there's probably a reason.

I'm pretty sure I'd be an outlier to their intended sample anyway. I note that I tried as best I could to follow their instructions exactly, and the result was that English appeared third on the list of guesses of my first-learned language after Norwegian and Swedish, and Ebonics showed up third on my list of my current dialects.

The "Every guide climbed a hill", "Every child rode an elephant" questions made me hesitate for about two more seconds than the other questions.

In those cases, either picture illustrated a possible sense of the sentence equally well, given that the sentence was context-free. There was no "best" answer, and that was apparent to me at once, but I was instructed to select a "best" answer anyway.

Every picture tells a story, don't it?

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Welsh (UK)
2. English (England)
3. South African

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

I'm not Welsh but I did spend three years there. #themoreyouknow

I eventually chose the illustrations that showed each guide on its own hill and each child on its own elephant, reasoning that if only one hill or elephant had been involved, the speaker had the choice of saying "the hill" or "the elephant" instead.

Ok a bit of Googling reveals that distributive and/or collective readings of quantifiers (as in "everyone read some book") are not always available for native speakers of East Asian (and other?) languages. And the weird examples with "also" are based on Singlish.

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. Singaporean

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

well, yeah

Are there really dialects where passives work the other way round? "The dog was pushed by the cat" meaning the dog pushed the cat, etc. Likewise "an sky"?

― popchips: the next snapple? (seandalai), Thursday, 5 June 2014 19:18 (35 minutes ago) Permalink

I assumed those first questions and some of the possible answers of later question were mostly to ascertain how well you spoke actually spoke English, regardless of dialect.

― silverfish, Thursday, 5 June 2014 19:22 (31 minutes ago) Permalink

Oh I guess they're also trying to identify L1s for non-native English speakers, might be more relevant there.

― popchips: the next snapple? (seandalai), Thursday, 5 June 2014 19:22 (31 minutes ago) Permalink

1. Irish (Republic of)
2. Scottish (UK)
3. English (England)

lol

Aimless not liking intended ambiguity vmic

"Up the audience's expectations, the critics built." lol

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. American (Standard)
2. Singaporean
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch
- See more at: http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/#sthash.RFxMek7u.dpuf

Up the audience's expectations, the critics built - lol i saw this and thought what dialect is that? dagobah?

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

Up the audience's expectations, the critics built - lol i saw this and thought what dialect is that? dagobah?

― balls, Thursday, June 5, 2014 9:14 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

anyhow i got english (standard), australian, ebonics w/ english/norwegian/dutch rising. i kinda changed how i answered some of them, progressing from 'this is gramatically correct (to me)' to 'this is correct + sometimes might say this' to 'this is correct + sometimes i might say this + i have heard this usage/it makes sense to me'. the ny times had one a little while back that pinpointed it geographically, it gave me the city my mother grew up in.

^I took that NY Times one, as well, and it placed me in New York/Boston and I think New Hampshire? I'm not from the States, though.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

the question after the quiz ended about "ebonics" -- made me a bit uneasy

what was the question? ebonics was not one of the guesses for my dialect so it didn't ask me anything about that.

It was basically whether you considered yourself a speaker of ebonics

a native speaker of English, American Standard dialect

There were a few constructions that sounded right to me even though I would never say them, and I think it's because I've read 20+ Ngaio Marsh novels in the last two months

Is "ebonics" a technical term? I'd have expected "African American vernacular" or something

maybe they were testing for people who use the word "ebonics"?

I think it said "AAVE or ebonics," recognizing that some people might only be familiar with the latter, colloquial term

It was basically whether you considered yourself a speaker of ebonics

― a strange man (mh), Thursday, June 5, 2014 1:48 PM (10 minutes ago)

I said yes, but felt a bit uncomfortable

from the explanation of how they determine dialect:

3. Some Australians and New Zealanders will say, 'She's raining outside' instead of 'It's raining outside.'

what the hell

Better get back into 'er indoors.

a+

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. English (England)
2. New Zealand
3. Welsh (UK)
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Finnish
3. Hungarian

too posh to be a proper kiwi

pippa's arse with a dash of tuomas.

choice!

I also got English/Finnish/Hungarian for native language, so our answers must have been similar - am simply wondering what pushed you over into Kiwi where I remained resolutely Scottish

i went along with 'she'll be right' (or something similar) even though it's not how i talk.

aimless otm about the contradiction in the opening statement and the approach taken imo

XP I took the opposite approach but they found me anyway \0/

lol sv

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Irish (Republic of)
2. North Irish (UK)
3. Scottish (UK)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

i went along with 'she'll be right' (or something similar) even though it's not how i talk.

― estela, Thursday, June 5, 2014 9:40 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha I did this too

impressed that they wanted to know the two counties at the end

i got dutch as a runner up to english, which is pretty funny considering where i grew up (and how little i liked it)

plot twist: http://www.pella.org/

it explains why you're so well mannered

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. Singaporean
2. American (Standard)
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

gonna take it again doing multiple ticks this time and thinking more how I'd speak, but tbh my vernacular changes radically based on the persons I'm speaking with so idk how to handle that using the instructions given.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Canadian
2. American (Standard)
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Irish (Republic of)
2. North Irish (UK)
3. Scottish (UK)
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch - See more at: http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/#sthash.JC1LToK3.dpuf

fair enough so.

I got Irish (Republic of) / North Irish (UK) / Scottish (UK) for the first part, can't remember the second part.

I've been to Ireland three times in my life, for a total of 3 or 4 nights, never to the North. Have lived in Scotland (East coast) my whole life. Right general ballpark, I suppose.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:?

1. Welsh (UK)
2. Australian
3. Scottish (UK)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?

1. English
2. Chinese
3. Swedish

I have never so much as stepped foot into Wales or Australia (but I blithely ignored the 'check all that apply' for a few questions, so...)

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
2. American (Standard)
3. Singaporean

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. Dutch
2. English
3. Swedish

I've watched too much The Wire...

And also, I've got a creeping suspicion that they've conflated Danish and Dutch. Did anyone get Danish?

the new york times thing was funner but it was for americans. i am puzzled by these singaporeans.

is the New york times thing still up?

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. New Zealand
2. South African
3. Australian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Finnish
3. Greek

Finnish and Greek are weird guesses. This kind of made me happy that I apparently still speak like a kiwi despite not having lived there in a decade.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html

I took the ny times thing twice. The first time, I answered the drive through liquor store question as "we have these in my area but i have no term for this" because there was a drive through liquor store in Hayward (about 20 miles from where i live) but I haven't seen any others. The quiz told me I was from Arizona. I have never been to Arizona, and none of my family came from Arizona. The second time I said "we have no drive through liquor stores" (or the equivalent) and it said that I was from the Seattle area. Again, none of my family came from there, though I spent a week there once on vacation.

Finnish and Greek are weird guesses.

did you answer a lot of questions "i don't even know what that is" y/n?

NYT one: I got New York, Jersey and Yonkers, with Hawaii also showing a strong red.

p sure if i take the nyt test my result will be 'fuck off back to englande'

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:?

1. Canadian
2. American (Standard)
3. Singaporean

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?

1. English
2. Dutch
3. Chinese

???????????????????????

"Peenie Wallie"?????

did you answer a lot of questions "i don't even know what that is" y/n?

― arid banter (Noodle Vague), Thursday, June 5, 2014 5:48 PM (10 minutes ago)

I've gotta stand up for Greek people here! Otherwise lol.

How did people answer the "He went to the shop. Bought some wine." ones? I found them very difficult, as I think that construction is both 'good writing' and 'not grammatical'. I suspect accepting them led to being (mis)diagnosed as Welsh - is that form used in Welsh dialect?

I said that was acceptable and I am American

Acceptable. Fragments are good.

Ok, the thing that is freaking me out a bit, is that the first time I ever spoke to actual English-speakers - a Jewish New Yorker family with whom I stayed for a few days - I sorta freaked out about how awful my Danish accent sounded, so I quickly added a fake upper-class English twang to it. So apparantly I speak in african-american sentence-construction, but with a faux-oxbridge sound.

did this at work and i think it called me as England (Northern). found it hugely problematic when it talked about shit being "grammatical" as opposed to just "would i ever say/write this and feel it made sense"

English-Scottish-Welsh, w/ Hungarian posited as a possible first language, which is curious. my test for qualifying as grammatical was whether I'd get the red pen out or not if I found it in an EFL student's work

it guessed Scottish > English > Welsh in that order which is rong but I have no problem with. suspect there might have been one specific sentence I OK'd which caused this.

enjoyed the lyricism of the "swam two miles in $100 goggles" one

Apparently, I'm Scottish, with some NZ

Dialect:
1. Scottish
2. English
3. North Irish

Native Language:
1. English
2. Swedish
3. Norwegian

It did pretty good - Scottish/English parents, lived in Scotland most of my life including a few years in the Mull of Kintyre, which is spitting distance from Northern Ireland. I've also visited Sweden twice, but doubt that counts for anything...

Does having Black Vernacular English in your 3rd place dialect just mean you're American?

BVE seems a much looser idea than AAVE but i guess that's what it's being used for here.

Took the test again without being drunk this time. Still Irish.

They used BVE and "Ebonics," which I just decided to ignore, assuming that it was safe to just slide AAVE and BVE up the scale one space.

xp but less Irish, I'd say

I'm guessing that to get Canadian (as opposed to American) first, you had to pick expressions like "I'm finished my homework" and "I'm done dinner"? Correct me if I'm wrong but my experience is that Americans would stick a "with" in those (which Canadians might do but also might not, at least when speaking). Also what I've read. I don't really know why anyone who got Canadian first wouldn't get "American (Standard)" in their top 3 though.

USA USA USA

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

now I am worried that when I go to britishes land next month I am going to order a beer and they're going to bring me blood sausage scones because they won't understand my english. AT LEAST I WONT HAVE TO TIP

that's the attitude!

you shd definitely get to as many different environments where you'd expect to tip in the US as possible, enjoy the full experience

that nytimes one nailed down my exact city of origin, despite my having lived in a bunch of places and sometimes feeling like i've shed the cleveland dialect

I tipped a valet in Quebec for retrieving my checked luggage and he seemed really surprised

its cos you look like a Brit imo

NYT one: I got New York, Jersey and Yonkers, with Hawaii also showing a strong red.

― emil.y, Friday, 6 June 2014 01:50 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Same here, but seems to be entirely down to pronouncing cot and caught differently.

when my wife tipped at a restaurant in the Basque country last summer the guy was so happy that he served us an after lunch drink on the house. so then it wasn't really a tip after all. so maybe if I try that in the UK I'll get a prawn biscuit or something.

So I shared this test with a some Danish friends, and like half of us got BVE and Dutch. There is something weird going on there. Also, nobody has gotten Danish. As someone who were repeatedly asked about windmills when I lived in the states, this somewhat annoys me.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. Scottish (UK)
2. North Irish (UK)
3. Irish (Republic of)
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Hungarian
3. Chinese

Something rotten in the state

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. English (England)
2. Scottish (UK)
3. Welsh (UK)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

(native first language: Dutch/Flemish)

I should have studied languages. But the last English teacher I had when I was about 17-18 was determined to crush my hopes, I think. I had always scored well for English before I was in his class, but he never let me answer anything, only gave me impossibly hard tasks and bit by bit, I gave up. He still didn't know what "mitigating" meant when I used it one day though, so there's that, I guess.

do you really identify that class/moment as the point where you lost hope/gave up? if so, i'm interested in hearing more! i am doing a lot of reading about why people give up learning a new language/skill and your anecdote really rings true to me in that at the early stages of language and skill development, it's important --essential! -- to build confidence rather than (or at least in addition to) to provide a consistently difficult new challenge.

Yes, I really do - I'm still mostly reading all my books/watch movies in English without Dutch subtitles, but yes, that one teacher did say "we'll see about that" when everyone had to introduce themselves and their previous exam scores at the start of the year and I had truthfully said I'd never scored less than 95/100 on English up to that point. There was no pleasing him, complaining to superiors didn't help, he had decided that I should be tamed and I was.

So when I had to choose my further studies English/languages didn't even come up in the suggestions anymore. I went with psychology because that was something we had never had. I was crap at psychology, I found out a couple of years later, but by then I had turned into a computer nerd (which is mostly in English as well, as it happens). I still work in IT now and I don't think I'll suddenly start studying languages now (I'm 41).

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Dutch
3. Norwegian

This quiz might as well just ask me "are you Prince?"

DJP = DJ Prince

you have impeccable, virtually native level english, dutch along with perhaps norwegian native speakers probably have the highest proportion of people with perfect english fluency (which is probably most of what is being measured in the second category in this stupid test, most 'standardized' or lowest frequency of unorthodox idioms or constructions derived literally from other languages)

StanM, I find it insane that someone would actively attempt to break you given how thoroughly you understand English (based on my interactions with you here)

ban terrible teachers IMO

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
2. Singaporean
3. American (Standard)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. Portuguese
2. German
3. Arabic

I have a good dialect sorting test question: how would you transcribe popeye's laugh?

ack ack ack uck uck uck ?

95/100

u gug gug gug gug

native English sailor speaker btw

hur hur hur ?

everyone otm about StanM's language skills -- assuming you're being sincere, i'm really sorry you had to endure that but the story does highlight how easy it is to discourage someone's progress. your english is beautiful and reads like a well-educated native speaker with a sense of humor and personality too, which does not come easy for people who have had traumatizing experiences with language learning.

obviously your teacher was a complete sociopath, but i'm glad you brought it up because it's also a good example (if you don't mind me storing it away for later? i can send you a pm if you'd prefer)

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Canadian
2. Australian
3. American (Standard)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Swedish
3. Norwegian

^ Never known nothing but American English, no idea how I got Canadian

I'm guessing that to get Canadian (as opposed to American) first, you had to pick expressions like "I'm finished my homework" and "I'm done dinner"? Correct me if I'm wrong but my experience is that Americans would stick a "with" in those (which Canadians might do but also might not, at least when speaking). Also what I've read. I don't really know why anyone who got Canadian first wouldn't get "American (Standard)" in their top 3 though.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Friday, June 6, 2014 1:42 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I made an honest attempt the first time (and got Canadian, South African, Australian), and after that I tried to get American, but ended up with US Black Vernacular and weird combinations for the second and third guesses.

Maybe I was just trying to guess how an American would speak? But that's odd, because I've spent a fair amount of time in the US, as well.

I'll give it another go now

The vocab test is fun

Another attempt:

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Canadian
2. Australian
3. American (Standard)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. German
3. Dutch

The vocab test is super fun!

my favorite parts of the vocab quiz were STRATOCASTER = RICKENBOCKER and NEBBISH = MILKSOP

Ha. My vocab quiz score:

Your score:
25/32

Among native English speakers of your age and education,
you did as well as or better than:
84%

Not enough people have done it yet for that number to be meaningful, I think.

I'm pretty sure my vocabulary is on par with regular university-educated people.

I've been thinking about bad teacher -- is there some weird cultural jantelagen-y thing where you're not supposed to be good at English?

D'oh, where was vocab test? At the end?

last night I tried to give the silliest answers possible and it came back with

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. Singaporean
2. Irish (Republic of)
3. Canadian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Portuguese
3. French

Oh wait I found it. xp

@leee

Vocab quiz: http://www.gameswithwords.org/VocabQuiz/

If you click on Quizzes, there's some more.

Here are some ways the algorithm has learned to distinguish different English dialects:

Here are some ways the algorithm has learned to distinguish different English dialects:

1. Canadians, Irish, and Scottish accept I'm finished my homework instead of with my homework.

2. Americans, Canadians, and South Africans accept I sent my mother a letter instead of to my mother.

3. Some Australians and New Zealanders will say, 'She's raining outside' instead of 'It's raining outside.'

^I chose "It's raining outside". I'm still wondering why my #2 was South African/Australian

The Vocab Quiz

Your score:
30/32

Among native English speakers of your age and education,
you did as well as or better than:
94%

got every question right in the vocab test
dialect......#1 guess is african american

yes, well

My vocab score was 31/32 (99th percentile). I really really want to know which word I missed...

hate u both.

(if you don't mind me storing it away for later? i can send you a pm if you'd prefer)

― La Lechera, Friday, June 6, 2014 6:55 PM (54 minutes ago)

No, no problem, I don't mind at all. Thank you all for the compliments!

leee how come i always got on so well with you until that african american reveal http://i.imgur.com/6GCQQqR.gif

I'm Donald Sterling's new toy.

only got 29 on the vocab test, and I realised I'd got two of them wrong as I clicked 'submit'

http://www.gameswithwords.org/MRQ/index.html

I got 36/80 Empathy in the Mind Reading Quotient which puts me in the 20th percentile
No idea how to interpret that

'nebbish' otoh can fuck off, 'blended of haircut' not being an option

30 on the vocab test, but I did get a couple of them by elimination, which doesn't seem as valid as actually knowing the word.

The Vocab Quiz

Your score:
30/32

Among native English speakers of your age and education,
you did as well as or better than:
94%

― Call the Doctorb, the B is for Brownstein (Leee), Friday, June 6, 2014 10:45 AM (12 minutes ago)

weird. i got 30/32 and 99th percentile. maybe i got the harder ones right?

or maybe 9s look like 4s to me, being addled

I got 100% on the Vocab test but maybe it's not the same one y'all are taking because it tells you right away if you clicked the right answer or not. Also I'm not sure it's testing what it claims to be testing, the word choices seemed...odd.

30 on the vocab test. There were a couple I thought were unfair, as they included words with synonymous and metonymic relations - obviously the former are closer, but there were also a bunch of questions where there was only one possible right answer, so you just click click away and then realise you fucked it.

weird. i got 30/32 and 99th percentile. maybe i got the harder ones right?

― riot grillz (contenderizer), Friday, June 6, 2014 6:59 PM (1 minute ago)

You might be of a different age/education, also.

Like rather than choosing unusually difficult words, it seemed to revolve around unusual meanings for not unusual words. Like for "citadel" the correct answer was "keep." I guess that's one measure of vocab proficiency, I dunno.

adjuvant i got by knowing latin rather than by knowing the biological term itself

^

i fucked up the two jewish ones by trying to be too clever

and by being an ignorant goy

I missed adjuvant and catalyst; I know the definition of catalyst but I guess I didn't recognize the alternate definition of one of the choices

I have a hard time accepting that knowing obscure brand names is a good measure of English vocabulary.

weird. i got 30/32 and 99th percentile. maybe i got the harder ones right?

― riot grillz (contenderizer), Friday, June 6, 2014 6:59 PM (1 minute ago)

You might be of a different age/education, also.

― emil.y, Friday, June 6, 2014 11:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I assume that, unless you're also in your mumblemumblemid-30s and have a graduate degree.

Lobby for obscure band names as common core requirement

Your score:
28/32

Among native English speakers of your age and education,
you did as well as or better than: 93%

Am I the only one here who didnt go to college/uni?

^ needs its own thread

re: los blue jeans & http://www.gameswithwords.org/MRQ/index.html

Vocabulary:
You got 20/20 of the questions right.
Out of every 10 people who did this experiment, you would score better than 10.

"Empathy Quotient" questionnaire:
Your score on the 'Empathy Quotient' questionnaire was 38 out of 80
Out of every 10 people who did this experiment, you would have a higher EQ than 2.

Social Language score:
Your score on the language tasks was 69%.
Out of every 10 people who did this experiment, you would score better than 4.

fyi my short-term memory is practically nonexistent so I don't remember which one I got wrong

I got one wrong, too but for some BIZARRE reason it was not synod/powwow.

Vocab: 19/20 / 90th percentile
Empathy: 26/80 / 10th lol
Social Language: 83% / 100th

That social language score has a weird curve, I got 74% but better than 7 out of 10.

okay, so I took the NY Times thing a 3rd time, and answered the "what would you call this" questions based on my memory of what my parents called things when I was a kid, rather than what I call them now, (e.g. growing up my mom said "soft drinks," i now say "soda") and it got the region right.

Lobby for obscure band names as common core requirement

Dave Matthews Band
rotund
prolific
speedy
hated
milquetoast

Watain
Le Tigre
The Notwist
Darkthrone
Sleep
Khanate

"soft drinks" as a term was associated with the temperance movement, in contradistinction to "hard drinks" like hard cider or hard liquor

the quiz with the empathy quotient where you had to pick things you think other people would pick had so many opportunities for joyous lols

From the "Trials of the Heart" quiz (which was really tedious, don't recommend it unless you are really looking to avoid work *ahem*)

http://i.imgur.com/JDGnTgp.png

the quiz with the empathy quotient where you had to pick things you think other people would pick had so many opportunities for joyous lols

I was paralyzed by the possibilities for the Three Novels question!

the most important invention question was the best imo

My inventions were lever, transistor, and gunpowder

I said computer, automobile, and airplane or something. (Should've said sliced bread.)

went with rather dull choices: the wheel, electricity, and nuclear weapons

I said wheel, light bulb, telephone

PEENIE WALLIE

(there was a point in that section where I wandered away from "what would everyone say?" towards "what do I think everyone would say?"; I was pushed to this point by imagining that most people would say The DaVinci Code was one of the three greatest novels ever written)

fuckin thing thinks i'm from santa rosa, stockton or reno

went w/ electric light, antibiotics, refrigeration. had given up on trying to work out what other people would say.

(why not wheel, lever, pulley?)

iphone, lipstick, death star

cronut, fleshlight, chipotal

car, wheel, televison
beyonce, hillary clinton, jk rowling (first impulse was angela merkel...)
bible, war and peace, crime and punishment (probably got that one way wrong...)

Scored
18/20 on vocabulary (better than 8 out of 10)
17/80 on EQ (better than 0 out of 10...)
67% on social langauge (better than 4 out of 10)

"Do I know what time it is?"

hi, you're insane

haha I said Michelle Obama, Beyonce, Hillary Clinton

novels I said War and Peace, Great Expectations, The DaVinci Code (I don't really think The Bible actually counts as a novel?)

Mind Reading Quotient Test == Family Feud dressed in quasi-academic garb?

Vocab 20/20 (better than 10 out of 10)
Empathy 31/80 (better than 1 out of 10)
Social Language 78% (better than 9 out of 10)

Did anyone get a good empathy quotient? Or would everyone with empathy be doing something different with their time?

Hillary, Merkel, OPRAAAAAAAAAH.
Atlas Shrugged, Harry Potter, The Great Gatsby (I TOTALLY wanted to say the Bible)

Some of the polite questions made no sense -- like no one would say these things, unless they were a non-native speaker, maybe?

Yeah, the language was quite old-fashioned.

address for this? could you do it on a phone

http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/
http://www.gameswithwords.org/VocabQuiz/
http://www.gameswithwords.org/MRQ/index.html

31/32 wtf at quarter

Another odd thing about the ordering-by-relative-politeness test was how few of the options included the word: please. And none were prefaced by: excuse me.

I would have done better on the Mind Reading Quotient quiz if I hadn't gotten so hung up on the twisted sociopathic mindgames going on in those "indirect responses to questions" scenarios.

"mommy, when's daddy gonna be home? he promised we'd play ball tonight."
"you do know how to use Google, don't you, Jack?"
"but mommy, what does that have to do with—"
"GOOGLE IT"

http://i.imgur.com/WZSVWTt.png

The empathy test most definitely rewards "strongly" answers. I always hate the kinds of statements I am supposed to agree or disagree with. They always contain such sweeping categories and nebulous concepts, for example:

Sometimes I say things that other people may find thoughtless or inappropriate, even if they do not say so.

Even though this wasn't on the test, it strikes the note I am talking about. If I "strongly disagree" maybe I get big ups for empathy, but how can anyone strongly agree or disagree with such a weak-assed sentence?

http://www.gameswithwords.org/IgnoreThat/index.html
http://i.imgur.com/R5EA9MB.png

One assumes I got them all correct but was much quicker to answer correctly in the 2nd test.

this site and its tests kinda suck balls tbh

you say that like it's a bad thing

Is it weird that I think that elaborate polite requests are actually kind of impolite? like somebody who asks me "may I please ask you what time it is" is actually taking away more of my time than someone who just straight up asks me what time it is.

it's more about assessing how much effort they are putting into being polite than w/e yr reaction is, imo

got a light m8

If using elaborate ceremonial language in social discourse is much ruder than just blurting out whatever is the quickest, most direct means to get at your desired end, then just about every traditional society is massively, even grotesquely, impolite.

Oh man, I did so badly at the empathy thing. 20/20 vocab, 26/80 empathy.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2014/01/what-do-yall-yinz-and-yix-call-stretchy-office-supplies.html

31/32 wtf at quarter

― dn/ac (darraghmac), Friday, June 6, 2014 10:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"jewish quarter"

knowledge of alternative definitions of words is a measure of vocabulary I think, I liked stuff like "keep" itt

(got 30 btw)

Am I the only one here who didnt go to college/uni?

― ۩, Friday, June 6, 2014 7:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no me also

I'd put the rtc in castlebar up against non attendance anywhere else any day

love the NYer dialect placer linked above (not the joke version, the real thing). placed me at:

Seattle
Portland/Vancouver
Salt Lake City

which is pretty impressive, considering i've spent most of my adult life in western washington and my high school years among tissue-hoarding mormons in eastern WA. HOWEVER...

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/langmap_zpsa2be2413.jpg

The whole thing makes me wonder about how individuals' speech changes when they move to a different region or among a different cultural group or groups. Presumably you wouldn't continue using terms that the people around you don't understand. Wouldn't you adapt to a certain extent? I also wonder whether terminology or pronunciation is most likely to change.

NYer is spot on about potato bugs and Portland, OR. I now know that many outlanders call them pill bugs, but at age 10 potato bug was all I knew.

xp

depends, some of us would adapt, some of us would loudly and pointedly continue to use the CORRECT WORDS and make sure when all the people around them knew that they were WRONG

potato bug, pill bug...they're all woodlice to me

I grew up saying pill bugs, but now say potato bugs, probably due to having lived with someone for 12 years whose family was from Salt Lake

I adapted every time and lapse into wildly different accents and dialects like changing gear.

I'm nicer in a donegal accent. haven't picked up dub yet thank fuck

I think I mixed up the NY Times dialect placer with another one, because I took it again now, and on the first try I got:

Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland/Vancouver

which makes sense.

Snooping around, I found these:

http://dialect.redlog.net/maps.html

and

http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/cambridge_survey ("World Englishes")

Results of World Englishes survey: http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/cambridge_survey/maps

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. English (England)
2. Welsh (UK)
3. Australian
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Chinese
3. Swedish

Surprised not to see American in the list, although I steered around a lot of yinzer grammatical ticks

Eeek, the nytimes one has me square in Alabama

Looks like I'm from Honolulu, Long Island, Los Angeles or Miami. Somewhere coastal at any rate (which is actually true).

i have also only known potato bugs but i'm from ny

apparently i speak with way more dialect than i realized

1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
2. Singaporean
3. American (Standard)

american
canadian
black/ebonics

are we all just getting ebonics because that's the only other north american choice?

The whole thing makes me wonder about how individuals' speech changes when they move to a different region or among a different cultural group or groups. Presumably you wouldn't continue using terms that the people around you don't understand. Wouldn't you adapt to a certain extent? I also wonder whether terminology or pronunciation is most likely to change.

― sarahell, Saturday, June 7, 2014 1:24 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

depends, some of us would adapt, some of us would loudly and pointedly continue to use the CORRECT WORDS and make sure when all the people around them knew that they were WRONG

― arid banter (Noodle Vague), Saturday, June 7, 2014 1:29 PM (7 hours ago)

on the other hand, i picked up "y'all" (initially affected) when I lived in NC. i feel weird saying it elsewhere, but the habit has become so deeply ingrained i can't seem to help it. my insistence on keeping my "soda" when i moved out west was similarly affected, but in reverse. now i say "soda pop" and take pleasure in the obsolescence. i also say "crawfish", but it's never occurred to me that this might be regionalism. if you move around a lot, i suppose you necessarily stop being any one thing. except potato bug. potato bug forever.

much of linguistic assimilation depends on a host of different factors, including but not limited to a person's sense of identity/language ego and cultural pressure/necessity of assimilation
it's going to be different for everyone
lexical and phonological examples abound

i keep finding myself asking where things or people are at and feeling a mix of confusion and shame

why would you feel either of those things? idgi

i am exaggerating but i never used to say that! the brain does weird things to words

you're assimilating because it's socially advantageous for you to do so
it's like wearing a linguistic disguise

seems like a stretch to say that everyone who picks up a bit of dialect is doing it for social advantage. differing levels of adaption are very curious though; ppl who grow up in the same house & sound nothing alike

CHOICE BRO

1. New Zealandish
2. American (Standard)
3. Australian

seems like a stretch to say that everyone who picks up a bit of dialect is doing it for social advantage

Social advantage = fitting in to yr surroundings and being able to communicate with yr peers. Not usually a conscious thing, and is pretty much why every person picks up language.

ppl who grow up in the same house & sound nothing alike

We don't sound radically different, but both my brother & step-brother have picked up the long a in grass, bath etc since moving down south, whereas I steadfastly hold on to my Midlands pronunciation.

Emil.y otm, thank you

Some people do it consciously, which strikes me as a little disconcerting as a longstanding late adopter.

19/80 for empathy. lol

I have very little Cornish accent to speak of and my younger brother has a v strong one even though we grew up around effectively the same ppl. think on some level he figured out the advantages of assimilating with one's peers while I persisted in being a hapless misfit

xps
yeah that's how I took it, but ppl pick up all sorts of things from the ppl they're around that aren't in any sense advantageous. it seems similar to ppl who describe creatures evolving for a purpose.

whatever copying instincts ppl may have are useful bc they facilitate social bonding &c., but that doesn't mean that's why they exist

my brother & step-brother have picked up the long a in grass, bath etc since moving down south, whereas I steadfastly hold on to my Midlands pronunciation.

This reminds me I was trying to find out what the linguistic term for the "3rd" A sound you get in the west of England. It's not the long A in RP grass, but it is a long sound. It's more like graaaaaaass than grahss. Googling it looks like it might be "a:" but not sure really. Anyway I used to say graaaass, baaaath etc but I lost that years ago. Think my favourite one I used to say was pronouncing scarf like that, not rhotic so it became scaaaaaf.

enthusiasts of these quizzes might find this interesting http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/06/internet-research

The first is called “Which English?”, from the website Games With Words. Like another recent popular dialect quiz, it attempts to guess where you might have learned most of your English. But the version going round last year focused only on American dialects, and mainly asked questions about vocabulary and pronunciation. Which English? asks grammar-focused questions instead. It is also international: it will not only rank three guesses for the English dialect that has influenced you the most. It will also give three guesses as to your native language. Joshua Hartshorne, the MIT researcher behind the Games With Words lab that created the quiz, says that the top three guesses included the correct one about 80-90% of the time. Anecdotally, Johnson’s Facebook friends find it either eerily accurate or amusingly inaccurate. (It nailed your columnist’s own home dialect.)

What’s interesting is what’s going on behind the scenes. Mr Hartshorne, a cognitive scientist, conceived Which English? to research not dialect but language acquisition, and in particular the “critical period” hypothesis. Many linguists believe that there is a period for language learning (just before puberty) after which it becomes much harder to learn a foreign language.

I thought a long "a" was the first vowel in "acorn"??

It's like ay -- AY corn

There is no other way.

the a in acorn is a diphthong [eɪ̯]

... Am I missing something? I thought by definition that the long 'A' sound in English was that exact diphthong.

for received pronunciation it's "ɑː" (bath, past, rather) as opposed to short a "æ" (bash, rad, gander), but I think this isn't much of a distinction in with US pronunciation

-in

i.e. bbc say "barth" not "bayth"

haha okay I kind of forgot about the "ah"/"ahr" variants because lol American

it varies so much. this is very rough & incomplete but offers some idea how pronunciation breaks down amongst english speakers - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_chart_for_English_dialects - & suggests americans might have a longer a in palm or father than in bad.

Thank you

There's a terminology confusion here, too. When I was growing up, the vowel sound in "cat" was called short 'a' and the vowel sound in "face" was considered a long 'a'; the vowel sound in "palm" or "father" would be most analogous to a short 'o' ("cot", "hot")

Short/long are not technical terms -- I'd avoid them. Learn the IPA vowel chart! I love teaching it to my students. It explains a lot.

ə

I kind of know IPA via adventures in singing

yeah IPA is good, been learning it this year. short/long a is used a lot in the UK as a litmus test for southernness

also IPA is good for teaching & writing but ironically useless in conversation

schwa is a good, fun word to know, ə

1) US BVE / "Ebonics"
2) England (English)
3) South African

1) Norwegian
2) Dutch
3) English

How accurate. I have always felt like a Norwegian Black person deep down inside.

(I am neither Norwegian or AA but have lived in proximity to both ESP in childhood)

The English I'm not surprised by since I spent early childhood with Irish grandparents.

also IPA is good for teaching & writing but ironically useless in conversation

― ogmor, Monday, June 23, 2014 2:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

speak for yourself!

it's a specialist set of symbols, I'm not sure what yr thinking of

I love how the NYT test places anyone who opts for "youse" in ... some place with a lot of Italians.

1. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
2. American (Standard)
3. Singaporean - See more at: http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/#sthash.WjuRZ021.dpuf

I'm about as white as can be and grew up in the Ozarks/midwest with maybe traces of west coast slang..This has probably been said already but I think they just reduce all American dialect to 'ebonics'

When I was growing up, the vowel sound in "cat" was called short 'a' and the vowel sound in "face" was considered a long 'a'; the vowel sound in "palm" or "father" would be most analogous to a short 'o' ("cot", "hot")

OTM: this was my elementary school phonics understanding.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

There were some odd choices here- for "The man ____________ arrived yesterday needs a wakeup call at nine," it should be "who," right? I chose "that" since it was the closest to being correct, but still wrong...

Yeah, there were some weird ones like that.

well, in that sentence, in my dialect... who and that are interchangeable.

Beached aaaaaaaaaaaaas bru!

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. New Zealandish
2. Australian
3. English (England)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Italian
3. Chinese

1 and 2 should switch, but otherwise that's pretty otm

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/british-irish-dialect-quiz.html

waste some time doing this nytimes UK and Ireland dialect thingy

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. Singaporean

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Romanian
3. Dutch

Way more accurate than I expected.

I didn't get the top 3 guesses thing? maybe that's for if you click not from UK/Ireland?

but it got me bang to rights - between Wolverhampton and Gloucester

the one that really pinpointed me was "mom" tho (although I think I'm slightly to the south of the tiny area that says that). and "tag" apparently, who knew

That NY Times one got me very accurately, though I did deliberately try to stick to my word usages from before I moved to Glasgow, as some of those have changed from living here long enough. I thought that I could spot some of the questions that would really pin-point me before answering them, which was interesting in itself.

Oh sorry, that was in response to the quiz OP posted four years ago.

xp

The map doesn't work on my phone.. sorry, the map disnae work oan ma phone.

aye pure didnae work oan ma phone an' aw

did it oan the computer eh day

there's some quite specific vocabulary that i wasn't expecting the nytimes to be offering me as a choice. both "sannies" and "gutties".

Yeah, I spotted gutties - which always makes me think of our mutual friend from thee olde record shop days btw as I'd never heard the word before then.

lisburn or drogheda

not quite but hey transient childhood

xp. :)

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. English (England)
2. Welsh (UK)
3. Singaporean

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Swedish
3. Hungarian

I’m Dutch, so hmmm... Curious what brought out the Welsh. Singaporean seems to come up in a lot of these for some reason.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

Didn’t stand a chance in the NYTimes one though: “Definitely not from around here are you? Your answers were closer to the average person outside of Ireland and Britain than anywhere inside it.”

The short version of the NYTimes was scarily good for me, it coloured in my general region with a little circle exactly stretching from where I was a teenager 20 miles away to where I am now. Then I did the 95-question one and the map was less focused but still p. good

I think my primary school was on a tig/tag faultline, I spent a good 5 minutes trying to remember which was standard (think "tag" was the standard but a few holdouts went for "tig")

also felt a weird obligation to tick things I wouldn't personally say any more but my parents would (settee, berk) - and felt horrible ticking "townies" but hey, when I was a kid, those other kids were "townies"...

NY Times quiz was spot on, but that's no surprise.

The original quiz:

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. Scottish (UK)
2. English (England)
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. Hungarian (!!!!!!)
2. English
3. Dutch

NY Times thing has me coming from the south-east of England, which is true, but not very precise. But then I'm not convinced there's much difference between how people speak in St Albans, Chelmsford, Gillingham, Eastbourne, Woking, etc.

Lol Tom, everybody knows that if there's a continuum between Scotland and Eastern Europe, its Westernmost tip stops at haggis, whereas its Easternmost is Romanian drob. Hungary's got nothing to do with it (no puns pls).

maybe Hungarian has similar grammatical structures to English? I got English, Hungarian and Greek for the native language guess (English, Welsh, Scottish for dialect)

To my admittedly limited knowledge, Hungarian is extremely different from English. It's also the hardest European language to learn as a non-native (unless you're Finnish or Estonian, perhaps).

i threw my full 96-er out wildly by knowing the word "twitten" (hastings-ish for a narrow passage or path between houses in a town, which i learnt this year from my sister: in shrewsbury these are called "shuts", which wasn't even on the list)

but it had a good solid blob of accurate west midlands as well as quite incorrect south-east coast blob and an inexplicable loughborough-ish blob, where i don't believe i've ever even alighted from a car or waited on a platform

what exactly was meant by the small "yeasty dough" bun-thing? i recognised lots of the words (as objects ppl talk abt and eat) without knowing what those words signify bcz i'm not from there. i put bap bcz we used to eat loads of them, but that was mainly bcz it was a nice child-friendly item sold at safeway, which was just over the road from where my mum's mum lived. but the word-scatter for bap (minor usage all over, not regional) suggests i wasn't actually naming the same thing at all

oh ok as you were, i was in fact correct despite myself:

http://87food.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Bread-debate.jpg

bap or cob for the west midlands imo, breadcake for Hull

hungarian bloody difficult, same family as finnish - very different structures. agglutinative endings. idk if it’s one of those ones like polish where there’s a high barrier to basic competence, but once you’re past that you’re laughing, or like english, easy to pick up but gets harder and harder, or like russian, hard to pick up and gets harder and harder. i don’t know mainly because i did enough to get by and be basically polite in budapest but didn’t get any further. the high quality of hungarian lit keeps making me think i should go back. plus i really liked the hungarians i met.

i was solidly and unsurprisingly south east on this with a smattering of northern and midlands words.

Someone should probably post the Monty Python Hungarian Phrasebook sketch here.

i vaguely feel my mum (b.newcastle, raised filey and welwyn, strong-willed glaswegian mother) reserved cob and batch for larger kinds of loaf but i must say i wasn't ever listening carefully or taking notes while tugging at her hand in the bakers. the typology of bread is honestly something i have always been a bit daunted by (for years i mainly bought hovis bcz the name was right there on the side and i knew how to ask for it)

early midlands gf always used cob for bread roll.

early midlands sounds like a prehistory category. just meant “when i was a student”

Shame there was no room for a 'piece' for a sandwich in there.

First guess for native language: English. Suckers! Lol.

someone on twitter was discussing types of tig/tag and lolling that they'd arrived to live somewhere as a kid where they called it "kick-can" and i very nearly sea-lioned into the thread to "well actually" at them (even tho i didn't know them at all)

bcz (to me) kick-can (or kick-the-can requires an actual placed can the chased must strive to kick (to win and end the game), which tick (which i grew up with) does not. anyway the strain of not explaining at these strangers has only been assuaged by listing (here) the varieties of tick that i remember from the primary school playground =

A: tick: someone is "on it" and chases the chased -- when touched by the tagger a chased is now "on it" (viz the chaser)
B: ball tick: see above but you throw a tennis ball instead of touching
C: off-ground tick: the chased are safe from being tagged if they are "offground" (cue much learned squealing debate abt what constituted "offground")
D: shadow tick: see above but you stamp on a shadow instead of touching someone (VAR wd not have resolved some disputes in this game)

E: statue tick: when tagged you stood still with yr arms out -- the non-tagged can free a statue by slapping their outstretched hand
F: (variant of above, name forgotten): the non-tagged could free a statue by crawling between their legs
G: chain tick: when tagged you joined hands with "it" and became a multi-person pursuer -- only the end hands were tagging devices and did not function if the chain broke… so on one hand the game quickly reduced to a long chain sweeping across a playground targeting singuler atoms with nowhere to run, BUT those atoms could run at weak links in the chain and either dodge under them or body them to break them

A-D the person "on it" changed when someone was tagged; E-G the person "on it" remains so until no one is left untagged

i feel i've forgotten some though: kick-the-can made no sense in the actual primary school playground, it works better if there's places round a clear centre to hide or at least hover -- i only ever played it on holidays with family (and perhaps other families), among dunes or in woodland or similar. there's a tagging element but the chased also have a goal besides not being caught (= kicking the can)

i loved shadow tick, you had to be so fast and agile and alert, and there was something so evocative and liminal about it

F: (variant of above, name forgotten): the non-tagged could free a statue by crawling between their legs

This is called 'sticky glue' (or at least it was in the 80s in Harlow)

everyone shd read this btw:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/511mBZf%2BKbL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Something about that title evokes an intimate, privileged and unbroken connection with one's mother tongue that depresses the fuck out of me.

ok via some google (and acknowledging that google entirely steamrollers the regionality)

i think my mum's distinctions were as follows:
i: a batch roll is a squary-round one with four torn patches at each edge, because they're baked many-as-one -- i.e. in batches -- then separated)
ii: a cob roll is a harder darker crustier crust, often glazed
iii: a bap is a soft roll, the crust much lighter and barely crunchy at all -- the safeway ones were also flour-dusted

iv: a batch loaf is square with a torn patch on each long edge (for the same reason as i)
v: a cob loaf is large and round and low and pale-ish and may well be flour-dusted

Wasn’t aware that I needed to take a quiz to answer this question

What is this "tick" madness? Never come across this variant of tig before?

Thru the legs game = stuck in the mud in Hull. Growing up in Staffs we was all about British Bulldog tbh

xps to pom:
that's definitely part of the opie argument, that the playground functions as this chthonic folkway beneath the surface (bcz largely beneath the notice) of grown-up cultural changes, which can reach back, linguistically, into regional deeps of language seemingly effaced (or anyway blurred) at an adult level.

from memory, the bulk of the opies' research was in the 1940s and 50s (1st pub = 1959), so time-wise it's right at the final edge of the pre-modern: while not entirely pre-mass media, it's certainly largely pre-television. i'd have to go back and see how much they talk about other largerscale, post-imperial issues of cultural mobility, such as begin to emerge postwar. it's obviously way before cheap and accessible air-flight, and all present-day kinds of trans-cultural family-making and life-making

still, the other part of the argument is that the adaptiveness of children is very quick to respond to topical subjects -- the influence of radio is discussed as a source of parody rhymes -- and how "the playground" is taken (by kids) as a deep given in its novelties as well as its more ancient rituals: it moves and it doesn't move; the "lore" may be decades old or just months old.

the patches on the NYT map are linked to regional settlement maps in the UK which go back millennia, and sometimes the playground charts -- bcz they're so much abt adaptive acculturation to the extremely local -- reflect this more precisely than similar maps of grown-up regional usage would. but of course new trends and fashions also flash across schools globally now -- i'd love to read an update of opie that explored multicultural city life and, like, whatsapp and the spread of dabbing and such… and actually pinned down whether the dialectic of change and stasis they provisionally uncover (from 70-odd years ago) has changed significantly. lol but it wd be so politically contentious now…

cannae tag ur butcher

yes i thiiink "stuck in the mud" was what we called it also -- tho there's something weirdly self-gaslighting abt reading all those lists.

tick is very northwest midlands: primarily, possibly only shropshire and cheshire

played stuck in the mud, British bulldog, What's the time Mr Wolf and variation of tag we called Circle Tag (because there were some circles painted on the playground and if you stood in those you were safe) in Worcester

Moved to Worcester around 1987, and was introduced to a new game in my primary school called "Alpen tag" which operated much like "chain tick" described above, eventually worked out it was called "helping tag"

raised in Leicester, and yes, in my heart all bread rolls are cobs. I generally use the standard bap/roll taxonomy but default to cob when not thinking.

It placed me in the east mids fairly easily - Nottingham rather than Leicester, but I went to school between the two.

(Stuck/stick in the mud for me I think)

xp it's quite possible we went to the same primary school, although I left in 1987 - since I saw you post on another thread you went to the secondary school on the same road

I went to St Joseph's in Warndon then Blessed Edward Oldcorne, then the Sixth Form College

yeah I figured you went to Blessed's - I went to Cherry Orchard primary then King's. my nephew's at Blessed's now

I hated it there, worst five years of my life, my sister and 3 cousins liked it fine though, so may have been more of a "me" thing.

tbh I hated King's as well, probably would've gone to Blessed's if my mum hadn't put me forward for the assisted place (we lived in Cherry Orchard) although quite a lot of kids went to Nunnery as well

my best friend from Cherry Orchard school just added me on FB this week. not sure whether to accept I haven't seen him since I was 13

xps to mark s:

That does sound positively fascinating, it's just so utterly foreign to my own experience of perpetual foreignness and disconnection that I can't help but look at it with some envy. For what it's worth, I was born in Romania in the mid 80s, at a time when Ceaușescu's slowly unravelling regime was more cut off from the rest of the world than ever, so I don't recall either radio or television playing the slightest role in my language games as a child. If anything, the cursor was definitely set to stasis, especially when my grandparents would take me to the country, which was a genuinely pre-modern space back then (in some ways, it still is).

My family emigrated to Canada – Montreal, to be precise, which makes a huge difference – when I was seven, so I found myself cut off from that native 'lore' and suddenly required to learn a new set of codes, made all the more complicated by the simultaneous, paradoxical permeability/airtightness of the French/English divide in Canada's most bilingual city. Having experienced certain things only in a given idiom, I always feel like my relationship with language is fragmented and artificial, as though it were wholly distinct from myself, in an irrevocable way.

There is, to my mind, an unbridgeable gap between pre-pubescent language games that carry over into a collective unconscious shared by the majority of native adult speakers (i.e. growing up in a certain region where a certain language/dialect is spoken then either remaining in said region or moving to a place where the same language is spoken, more or less) and emigrating to a completely different country where the most that can be said in terms of linguistic commonality is that your mother tongue and those of your hosts are all Indo-European. While I have not lost the use of Romanian (I still speak it with my parents and when I go back to visit), I am almost never reminded of words/expressions I only used as a child due to the linguistic context(s) I've taken part in as an adult (French/English or exclusively French or exclusively English).

All things considered, I prefer being 'cosmopolitan', but on some days this lack of continuity (whether real or mostly imagined) saddens me to no end.

To be perfectly fair, though, there are greater leaps than going from Romanian to French.

Quiz in OP:

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Canadian
2. American (Standard)
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Dutch
3. Norwegian

I'm guessing that sentences like "I'm done my homework" and "I'm finished dinner" (with no prepositions) tipped it towards Canadian?

I suppose so. It might be a Montreal-only thing, but 'I'm done my homework' sounds perfectly correct to me, whereas I have lingering doubts about 'I'm finished dinner'. I'll ask around when I get the chance.

Idk if the latter was the best example, actually, ha.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. Scottish (UK)
2. Welsh (UK)
3. Australian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

Identified the jock nae bother. Also guilty of dropping prepositions.

i just dug the opie book out and to be honest the issue even of internal mobility doesn't seem to be explored at all: it's *very* empirical -- they talked to kids and wrote down what the kids told them, then gathered it into topic types and lists structured regionally, noting continuities and novelties, and that's kind of it, they don't really draw conclusions. the subject matter is what it is (basically lots of funny and silly rhymes and language games and pranks) that no one had systematically studied this way before this book, and they were evidently generously excited about and keen to dig out what they saw as evidence of semi-autonomous curational agency on the part of this overlooked child-led micro-culture -- but today the relative privilege of the area under study is very obviously a dimension you'd want to explore and account for (as are the assumptions about the parochialism of the interested readership the book was directed at)

anyway as i'm feeling a bit under the weather i'm going back to bed to reread some of it with these question in mind!

so i leave you with this artefact, which i remember from reading the book as a kid myself without looking it up, and also remember thinking a mighty excellent contribution to the arts at large:

"ladies and gentlemen, take my advice
pull down your pants, and slide on the ice!"

Ha! It thinks Swedish is my first language, which is extremely odd. I'm Irish-American and my dad did have a slightly Irish manner of speaking in terms of his cadence and some of his usage, but the test didn't pick this up...instead I'm a Swede, whatever that means! A Swede who occasionally lapses into Black English Vernacular. Which is funny because I did grow up around a few Swedes and had a number of black friends growing up.

A-ha! Grandparents lived in Wisconsin - and the other test says I'm from Milwaukee. That's where the Swedish came from, I'll bet.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:?
1. Scottish (UK)
2. English (England)
3. Irish (Republic of)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?
1. English
2. Swedish
3. Dutch

OK. I mean, my dialect is definitely not scottish tho my speech patterns -- via my mum and her mum may be a bit?

Wisconsin is more German. For Swedes, you need to go a bit further West.

(xp) can't say I'd noticed, mark!

Thru the legs game = stuck in the mud in Hull. Growing up in Staffs we was all about British Bulldog tbh

― CDU next Tuesday (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 16 February 2019 11:50 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Both very much familiar games in 80s Hackney although British bulldog pretty much banned; possibly the imperialist overtones but more likely that any game had a better than evens chance of ending in hospitalisation.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3mucidygqe1tyj1/IMG_3194.JPG?raw=1

Fairly generic Home Counties splodge for me, seems reasonable especially since, during my formative years, my dad was doing his level best to suppress any vocal link with Liverpool.

Very tightly on Merseyside/NW England/N Wales for me but perhaps I was answering the questions as if it was 1982 and I was talking in the playground.

Surprising how localised tick, maiden and grid are.

Where do people still say maiden?

Bulldog was frequently banned at my school and yes it was about the high casualty count

...I was answering the questions as if it was 1982 and I was talking in the playground.

Yes, it wasn't always clear what answer to give. I think I denied that I would call someone a 'wazzock' because I probably haven't used that word since I was about 11.

We played British Bulldog in Florida. I loved it, it was one of the few sport activities at which I was any good.

there used to be a football game that was referred to as "English" when I was a kid. I can't even remember the rules and was totally shit at it and had zero enthusiasm to learn it. I can just remember hearing other kids saying : "we're off lecking English" and thinking: fuck that - I'm off to do something else then.

incidentally my favourite line from the intro to the OP quiz is this one: "scientists have discovered that many of the 'rules' taught in school are wrong anyway"

Using the prestige of "scientists have discovered that..." is a common rhetorical device to sell you something that even scientists are not above employing.

not really abt dialect but i found it rereading the opie book mentioned above:

for 200 yrs (until the 1950s) 25 July was called GROTTO DAY and londoners ate oysters and the children built little shrines with the shells and asked passersby "penny for the grotto"

probably it actually belongs on Real England

xp. that's very picturesque

http://i.imgur.com/bpUdqIN.png

via

Their guesses for my native language were 1. Norwegian 2. English 3. Swedish ... I grew up in Minnesota and a lot of my ancestors were Swedish and Norwegian so ha.