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How y'all, youse, you guys talk (quiz)

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Vombatus, Jan 25, 2014.

  1. Bradley Guire

    Bradley Guire Well-Known Member

    Birmingham and Chattanooga. I'm from Decatur, Ala., which I'd call in the middle. Pretty damn accurate.
     
  2. Matt1735

    Matt1735 Well-Known Member

    It had me in the south, which is accurate... but not the right state.
     
  3. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    I took this a few weeks ago and it put me in Atlanta, which is fitting. But it also means I've picked up more of this place in the past four years than I thought.
     
  4. albert77

    albert77 Well-Known Member

    That's pretty good. Mine were Baton Rouge, Jackson and Birmingham. I live right smack in the middle of all three.
     
  5. Dyno

    Dyno Well-Known Member

    It put me right where I grew up.
     
  6. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    Not even close.
    Fart is from Southern California.
    Vowel shifts can tend to place speakers in the Great Lakes region, so it is understandable.
     
  7. Jake_Taylor

    Jake_Taylor Well-Known Member

    I think a fairly high percentage of us moved away from the region we grew up in. Do you think about the way you talk? I think I make an effort -- sometimes knowingly, sometimes unconsciously -- to keep speaking like a Midwesterner even though I married a Jersey girl and have spent pretty much my entire adult life in the South or Mid-Atlantic.

    I think it's partially because I had a cousin who moved around a lot when we were kids and we'd give him shit when he'd come back saying "y'all" or calling a Mountain Dew a Coke. I also have an irrational fear of losing all connection to where and how I grew up so I still drink pop. A Ford Ranger isn't a truck, it's a pickup and a small one at that. I never say y'all and when there's crawfish on the menu I still ask for crawdads.
     
  8. Vombatus

    Vombatus Well-Known Member

    When interpreting the results, I am also thinking about where my parents came from, because a heavy amount of my dialect was picked up from them.

    So for those of you who had fairly wide mismatches, did one or more of your parents come from the areas indicated by the map? Just curious if that makes a difference for a few of you.

    VB
     
  9. Just_An_SID

    Just_An_SID Well-Known Member

    Nailed me perfect. Gave me three choices, the first two being 500 miles away, but the third choice was my hometown.

    Damn.
     
  10. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Nailed me perfectly: of the three cities listed, my hometown is almost perfectly in the geometric center of the triangle.
     
  11. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    It had me right on the nose where I was born and where my parents are from. I was born in Brooklyn, and while we moved away from there while I was still a toddler and I grew up for the most part in then Atlanta area, we did move back to the Northeast (Jersey, specifically) for about four years when I was a little kid, so it sunk in some. And as someone else mentioned, I know I picked up a lot of region-specific words and usages from my parents.
     
  12. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    When I was 18-21, I worked in gas stations with people who were, a) much less educated than most people in my family/school background, and b) in a couple cases, from rural and southern regions of the U.S. (in particular, Arkansas).

    I know for a fact my speech became much more 'countrified,' lazier, drawlier, much rougher and more casually obscene (I swore plenty before then but that kicked it into a much higher gear) after spending three or four years in that company.

    Thirty years or so later I still use a few of the vocalisms I picked up in that era.
     
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