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.

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.