| What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop." |
| The Midland |
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| The Northeast |
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| The South |
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| Philadelphia |
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| North Central |
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| The West |
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| Boston |
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What American accent do you have?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz |
Matt sent me this
little quiz in response to the ongoing "Kerry" vs. "Carrie" debate (
"Talking the Tawk"). (They're pronounced identically, by the way.)
I'm a little perplexed by my results. "Inland North" isn't really a region of the United States I'm familiar with, but if I were going to guess what it means then I'd say it included North Dakota (why not Minot?) -- and must also mean Minnesota/Wisconsin/Michigan (the latter three of which I consider part of the Midwest). So I guess using that logic it's impressive that the test picked up on my being a Michigan native, although a Fargo or Minnesota accent is completely different than a Michigan accent. And that said, neither of my parents were born-and-raised Michiganders (Dad's from Pottsville, Pa., and Mom was born in Detroit, but grew up in Omaha, Neb.), so I never had the true Michigan accent that my friends sure had anyway --
and I moved to Arizona when I was 11, further distancing myself from the Land of Pop. I've called it soda for 30 years now and no one has
ever met me and asked me if I was from Michigan. If fact, a few years ago I was at a party near my old hometown and when I tried to tell people that I was a from there they thought I was kidding and told me they didn't believe me. (If anything, I get accused of growing up in the San Fernando Valley, but that's an entirely different
problem story.)
Secondly, about the "you may think you speak 'Standard English straight out of the dictionary' but ..." thing across the top of my results. Does that come up on all regions, or is it implying that, say, Southerners speak "correctly" or Bostonians speak "correctly" whereas Inland North people don't? I ask because the bias of whoever wrote the quiz is obviously an issue here (I'm guessing it wasn't a New Yorker since that's not even one of the choices -- or are not all of them showing up on the bar graph?). Also, I can still recall Indiana-born Jane Pauley famously saying that having the perfect Middle America accent was essential for making it in television broadcasting, which raises the question why would this be if it sounds so "regional"?
On a related note, and I ask this without saying I have a "right" or "wrong" answer to it: where do we draw the lines of different regions of the country anyway? A friend of ours is from Oklahoma and to me I've always considered it Southern-ish. I asked him where he considers himself from and he said the Midwest. Looking at a map, of course, he would tend to be right. But I'm from Michigan and everyone I knew called Michigan, Illinois and Indiana (et al.) the quintessential Midwestern states. (They're nowhere near and nothing like Oklahoma!) Other people -- mostly Northeasterners -- will go so far as to lump Colorado(!) into the Midwest. Then you refer to your map and you can see why people who are not from there would see it as being Midwesterner, geographically if nothing else. (I remember working for a news agency that counted West Virginia as part of the Northeast on its computer codes -- and thinking how hilarious it was; but if you look at a map I guess it's no different from calling Colorado the Midwest and is there an obvious other place to put it? The South, maybe?)
I guess it all depends on how many regions you're counting to begin with before you can start placing things, but I certainly have never thought of dividing the nation into the Midland, the Northeast, the South, Philadelphia, North Central, the West and Boston! This quiz knows nothing ...
(NOTE: The bar graph results do not seem to show up on Firefox.)
(The best place to start is with their flawless debut, "Pop Said...") Their wildly catchy 1990 single "Crystal Clear" made a small dent in the Modern Rock charts here in the U.S., but when the follow-up album bombed the band sadly called it a day. Andrea Lewis of the Buds was my favorite bombshell of the short-lived Indie Rock Blond Movement that also included Transvision Vamp, the Sundays and the Primitives ("Crash" rules!), although I must confess I never really followed up nearly as much with any of those acts. For those who know, let tell me if I should ... and for who never knew about the Darling Buds, dig in!
