Thread: US English - With maps!

I thought this was pretty interesting. Makes me wonder at why some distant regions have similar language quirks...

22 Maps That Show The Deepest Linguistic Conflicts In America - Business Insider

Purtty kewl dood..


I found myself saying all the words to figure out some of them

I dont think it is entirely correct. There are still plenty of people in the KC area that use the term "ya'll".

Hot Dog, Red Hot, frankfurter,Franks, dachshund sausage ,Wiener-it's all the same.

Originally Posted by nun2sharp

I dont think it is entirely correct. There are still plenty of people in the KC area that use the term "ya'll".

When you do a survey of this type, you go with the statistical trend, not the person by person characteristics. There are always tons of exceptions.

Yeah, if this guy is a stats PhD student those maps would be based on some sort of spatial model, probably smoothing, and there are/were probably different interim versions or at least some kind of iterative process to obtain these "optimum" graphs.

Obviously I don't know the exact approach he took, but usually what happens with this stuff is that the mixture of data for an area gets weighted by probabilities, so what you are more than likely looking at would be interpreted as some kind of "expected" or average pronunciation, spatially smoothed in 2 dimensions to model how things like this transition from one area to the next rather than abruptly change based on arbitrary (State) borders. It's a very similar thing to the mapping of contagious diseases, and it is a very cool but underused area of statistics.

They are very interesting, even to a non USsian like me. Who'd have thought there'd be such clear spatial separation for some words? I wonder if similar things apply in other countries?

James.

Yes, it doesn't seem like he collected the data - they came from somebody else's dialect study Dialect Survey Results

It's probably his introduction to visualisation of statistical data and the questions and the pictures are interesting and accessible enough for the average Joe that it got picked up by businessinsider

It's pretty much a routine procedure in science and you see graphs like those on almost any presentation, but the underlying phenomena is so much more complicated than 'do you say crayfish or crawfish' that only very very few care about it...

It's very entertaining, though.

Originally Posted by nun2sharp

I dont think it is entirely correct. There are still plenty of people in the KC area that use the term "ya'll".

Find a trailer park, you'll probably see mullets and hear y'all (probably more common on the Missouri side than the Kansas side, I'd suspect)

I'm sorry, I may be provincial, but I'm still rofling (rolling on floor, laughing) about the ingenuity of the term brew thru. I've spent a couple of years in the states in the 90's (went on a 4 months coast to coast trip, driving, hiking and scuba diving), and have visited multiple times since ( admittedly mainly east coast, other than a visit to L.A), and though familiar with the concept of liquor stores, as far as I knew if you wanted some service you'd better get out of the car and show some ID... isn't there a law (at least in some of the states), that alcoholic beverages must be in the trunk and not in the cabin of a vehicle?
anyway, cool term :-)