My Dialect

So I took the quiz, and I found out that I have a "Midland" accent, meaning that I'm supposedly from the area around Pennsylvania, southern Illinois, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, and Missouri, but I might also be from any large Southern city, meaning that my accent is pretty nondescript. Apparently I would have a good voice for TV since it's not particularly regional.

This makes sense to me because I have moved around a lot, attending international American schools, and I have been surrounded by people with all types of American and non-American dialects in English which has prevented me from developing one particular accent. I also lived four years in Wisconsin during my middle school years (when my accent might still have been developing), which might explain the more Midwestern tilt of my accent. My next-closest matches were Boston and the Northeast, which is interesting to me because I have not spent very much time there at all, though I have friends from those places.

I thought it was interesting, the questions that were asked. They all centered around vowel sounds, particularly "o" and "a", which suggests to me that differences in accents are based primarily on these vowels. I thought it was also interesting that some of the answers were "sounds very similar but just a little bit different" which fit, at least for me, for quite a few of the answers. Perhaps that only slight differentiation led to my result of a nondescript accent, since I didn't have any really distinct ways of saying anything. For some of the other choices (Mary, merry, marry, for example) I had fun pronouncing the words the different ways -- that seemed pretty alien to me -- after I'd chosen my own selection.

This was an interesting test because it simplified a topic that must have many variables and various subtleties into just a few simple questions to determine accent. As such it's not completely accurate, but it's cool the way that accents can be determined, and I hadn't realized how many different ones there are (Boston as opposed to Northeast, North Central vs. Philly, etc.). I'll be on the lookout for the differences between some of these from now on.

-Mitul
(Linguistics 5N)