I found a interesting interactive site while reading the news on the web. Its from NC State University and it's a survey of dialect and usage from around the united states. there are 122 different surveys, about half of them are how words are pronounced and half are what kind of word or expression are used, like Coke, pop, or soda. It is all shown on a map with shads of color matching the degree in which it is used. The maps have a composite view and a individual view.
I thought that any writers around here might like this for when they are writing about a character from an area they are not familiar with. Great way to add a touch of authenticity to them.
Comments
This is really funny !
I live in Portland, Oregon right where three different dialects seem to merge, and that, on personal observation, seems accurate to me. Though, the annoying California one seems slightly more prevalent.
About half the time I tend to use my North of London dialect, only falling back on colonist po white trash when speaking to malcontents.
G :)
Not that accurate in my experience
For instance, according to their map, hardly anyone in the south says crick for creek, that pronunciation is used, according to their maps, only in and around Montana and Pittsburgh. I question their methodology because that is so contrary to my experience.
In Arkansas where I was born, a crick is a small creek, one that does not usually have a name; they are two different words but slippery in usage. The old saying is that a crick can be stepped across but a creek must be jumped, waded or bridged. A navigable creek is sometimes called a bayou and what Louisianans call a bayou might be a loblolly in Arkansas.
In California, where I grew up, a creek is a small streambed that generally has water in it; one that generally does not have water is a wash, draw or arroyo, depending on shape. A wash is flatbottomed with sides made of dirt or sand; an arroyo is v-shaped with sides that are mostly rocky; a draw is wide at the bottom and narrows quickly, that is, it may be a wash at the bottom and an arroyo at the top. If it has a name, it may be called a river, even if it only has water in it during a flood. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
All of the surveys I looked
All of the surveys I looked at were accurate to my experience. I live in the south and I have only heard a few people use crick for creek. The methodology is an online survey on the university website so there could always be inconsistencies. for instance there is a bias against older people who are less likely use the internet. But I think the mistake you are making is thinking that when the map has the warmer color it is only used there. Even when it is all blue it can still be used in a local area, it just gets buried in the statistics. So people in your area may say crick for creek but when it is added in with what people in the greater area it gets watered down.
Of course going by personal experience, either yours or mine, isn't that great a measure to go by unless you travel a lot and have trained yourself to notice what people are saying. Even then you only talk to so many people in an area and how many times do they say something like creek? :)
Here is a link to the survey if you want to take it and add some to the accuracy. link
In the UK
a crick is something you get in your neck and it hurts. A creek is usually an inlet from the sea or a small estuary, as in Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier.
Angharad
here too...
At least in Ohio, you get cricks in the neck.
As for the definition of creek... that certainly does differ. Creeks here are very very very tiny streams with very little to no actual water... Granted, around here, MOST of our creeks have water MOST of the time, and even flood regularly... But we're a "wet" land. Creeks can be naturally occurring or man-made. We have a LOT of the man-made variety here... We were a swamp until we drained it by building a shit ton of man-made creeks.
We'd actually call what you call a creek different things depending. But then, we aren't actually anywhere near any real sea. Just the Lakes.
Abigail Drew.
Then you'd...
Then you'd laugh at "Third River" which runs through our town... (Anywhere else, it'd be at most a creek or crick (though, where my grandparents lived, you could step across a crick as Erin indicated - or get one in the neck.). )
Annette
wrong title.
Dialect is about how one says a word. For example the dialect between a person from scotland and a person from say canada is totally different even though they say the same word.
The link you provided has none of that. It is about the slang varation from area to area of the same language. The words themselves are totally different not the way it is said.
At least that is what the professionals tell me anyways.
You need to check the
You need to check the different questions out it has, 1 - 47 or so are dialect questions like 'pee-KAHN' 'Pick-AHN' ' PEE-can' and 'PEE-kahn' for how you say pecan. :)
Mistaken belief...
Dialects are defined by vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, all three. One can't fully describe a "Boston" accent without referencing the peculiar meaning of "wicked" in that particular dialect.
I was a linguistics major in college, although I didn't take it up as a formal profession, despite the fact that I made my living for many years through my practical knowledge of the subject. Words are slippery things, and using them is an art which we all of us practice every day, carefully identifying ourselves to our fellow human beings as either the same as or different to every other human being. We are not automatons, and people from Boston (or New York, or wherever) sound like Bostonians because they're proud of who they are, and let everyone else know it with much the same enthusiasm as the "fans" of sports teams make their preferences known with special colours and hats.
Of course, dialects are also fluid, because we humans move around and carry our many influences along with us.
I myself was born in California, but worked in Canada for quite some time, and in some sense am "bilingual," since I easily pass as 'Canadian' in Western Canada, or 'Californian' in the Western USA, adding or subtracting "eh?" and peculiar pronunciations of "about" as needed in casual conversation with easy fluency, not to mention the "black" dialect of the neighbourhood I grew up in. I know for a fact that "speech recognition" programmes have a great deal of trouble with my voice, in part because I also made my living on the stage for many years, and have an on-stage actor's habits of speech and enunciation, at least in part, which are different to the 'average' in any country.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Great Lakes?
I was at a conference years ago and at lunch at the hotel restaurant the waitress asked about drinks. "Any diet soda is okay." She looked at me as if I had two heads and said, "Diet soda? I've never heard about diet soda!" I tilted my head in question and she paused before saying finally, "Oh...you mean diet pop!"
Love, Andrea Lena
I recall...
I recall these...
Apparently I'm from the USA, not any one part... As depending on the term, I belong in different parts of the country. LOL