Dialect variations and different kinds of regional Englishes have persisted over decades, and they’re going to exist for decades to come. South Africans call traffic light “robots,” which is cute.

A drinking fountain here is a water fountain in the South and Northeast — and, mysteriously, a “bubbler” in Green Bay and Boston. Carl Lentz, the celebrity magnet of a pastor who brought the global megachurch Hillsong from Australia to the United States, has been fired, acknowledging on Instagram that he cheated on his wife. Ditto “may-uh-naze” rather than “man-aze.”. There’s a link in the BI story to the full set of maps.

This is part of a complete episode. Tola Rotimi Abraham's "Black Sunday" is this year's winner of the Kirkus Prize for fiction. But then they don’t have a Detroit to burn down, do they?

A: One of the fun things about this process is that people will suggest terms and phrases to me that they’ve noticed that might not be in the book. (via detsl on /r/Linguistics).

It’s definitely not a comprehensive guide.

That’s not true. There’s a Minneapolis way of talking and then there’s a northern and western Minnesota way of talking that’s sort of closer to North Dakota. A debut novel about four Nigerian siblings and a family torn apart has won a $50,000 award.

Here in HI we call it ghost rain. “Bicha” is a offensive slang for homosexuals in Brazil, and it´s “waiting line” in Portugal. You mean the south efricans.

@john personna: I had no idea. We also called the night before Halloween “Devil’s Night,” which I only learned was a Michigan thing when I joined the Air Force. He started collecting data on dialect for a statistics project in graduate school and never looked back. I was shocked that Rhode Island calls them Bubblers as well.

It gets more fun as you go international. Q: Is there anything Minnesotans say differently from everyone else? 79.4% of residents of my hometown of Troy, MI refer to it as “Devil’s Night.”. My husband and I have an ongoing parenting disagreement, and it involves how we should teach our children to say the word “crayon.”.

I didn’t realize that Devil’s Night was specific only to us. Growing up north it was unheard of but in Florida it’s de rigeur. In fact, outside Michigan and New Jersey, it’s just “the night before Halloween.”.

Some people pronounce it "cray-awn," rhyming with "dawn," and others pronounce it "cray-ahn," rhyming with "man." Soda vs. pop is a long-standing vernacular battle among the different regions of America. @Mikey: I’m from Michigan. We tend to pronounce the word “crayon” with a single syllable, “kran,” while most of the country uses two-syllable pronunciations. Here’s a dialect survey map that shows the distribution of these pronunciations.

Apparently, “roundabout,” which I had always thought a Britishism, is much more common than “traffic circle,” which I’ve always called them.

And of course, the game the rest of the country calls Duck, Duck, Goose. The book is like 200 pages, but I could turn around and write another one just as easily. @Ben: I grew up in Plymouth, MA, and it was the same there. Oftentimes people don’t even realize the words they’re using might identify where they’re from.

Do you know that pill bugs sometimes climb to the top of mountains? Cran? A: This is one I learned when my sister moved to Minnesota. In "Speaking American," colorful maps reveal how Minnesotans talk differently from the rest of the country. The part on the west shore of the Delaware River (Northeast Philly, to be exact). In one of the assignments in the very first linguistics class I ever took we were asked to produce phonetic transcriptions of a list of words. Having myself moved around a lot, first as an Army brat and later as an Army officer and academic gypsy, I use a lot of the pronunciations interchangeably or now pronounce words differently than I did as a kid in Texas.

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The reason for that is that there is a large suburb of Washington, DC called “Bowie” which is pronounced “Boo-ee”.

My husband is firmly in the two-syllable “cray-on” pronunciation camp, whereas I have always called the wax coloring implements “crans.” Other variations on saying the word include “crown” and “cray-awn.” Does this debate sound familiar to you? One of the crazier bug-moments on a hike was finding pill-bug peak on Catalina Island. I grew up calling sodas “Cokes” (What kind of Coke do you want? You learn something new every day. But that’s not the only difference between us Minnesotans and the rest of the country in how we talk. If it helps your case to know the language of origin, the word crayon comes from the Latin word “creta” and French word “craie,” meaning chalk.

Most Americans are under the impression that regional dialects are declining. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Voux’s linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words. Q: Why do you think how we speak gets such a strong reaction from people?

What I call scallions in most of the country are green onions. Add Comment. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Voux’s linguistic survey, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

1. Most of the terms and pronunciations in the survey are known to me even if I don’t use them.

Business Insider has assembled “22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other,” itself based on 120 maps produced by an NC State grad student. I grew up in Michigan where they are roly polys. One more thing. Go to Australia, the Caribbean, India-heck, the UK- and you will have even more fun. We spoke to Katz about why you can’t lump Minnesota and Wisconsin together linguistically, whether accents are on their way out and why people get so worked up about the words they use. People really find a lot of meaning in it.

A country divided by a common language. 3. Q: What did your data show about the Upper Midwest? The oblong sandwiches he called “hoagies” were called “subs” in the northern part of the state. For example, the Philadelphia dialect (mentioned above) has actually deviated more from Standard American English farther over the last 30 years. My parents are from the midwest, I grew up in Seattle, and I’ve lived in the west my whole life; and I rarely recall hearing anyone pronounce it “car-a-mel,” although the Harvard Dialect Survey maps show that there are some people here who pronounce it that way.. Sharyn Jackson is a features reporter covering the Twin Cities' vibrant food and drink scene. Katz developed an online quiz that eventually culled 350,000 responses from Americans about the words they use. A: Ultimately, it’s because language — and the way people talk — gets really wrapped up with their identities.

The “cray-on” vs. “cran” debate has continued to rage online thanks to social media and local news coverage like this segment from a station in Florida: BuzzFeed even got in on the action a few years ago: Now don’t get me started on how to say caramel. More oddly, virtually everyone in the country puts “SIR-up” on their pancakes rather than “SEAR-up” like I do. I loved one of the answers to “What do you call it when rain falls when the sun is shining?”, Answer parts of LA, AL and MS: “The devil is beating his wife.”. Just take a look at some of the pronunciation maps out there showing how “crayon” is said across the country.

Is it cray-on? @OzarkHillbilly: We tend to pronounce the word “crayon” with a single syllable, “kran,” while most of the country uses two-syllable pronunciations. I pronounce crayon as “cray-ahn,” even though “cray-awn” is somewhat more common.

As a child I would confuse the saying, turning it into “the devil’s wife is beating him.”, Really weird thing I just realized about myself is that I pronounce the word Pecan differently when I’m talking about the loose nuts (pee-KAHN) and when I’m talking about the flavor (PEE-can pie), In Bawlamer (the big city on the East Coast between Philly and DC), H2O is also “wooder” and people “wersh” with it. (The French pronunciation of crayon is distinct in its own right, of course.) Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect. Q: Until everyone just stops speaking altogether and only communicates in emojis? It’s rare that you’ll find one thing that everyone will say in one part of the country. What’s the correct pronunciation of crayon? Something else that many people aren’t aware of: medical education is conducted in English in much of the world including places that were never part of the Commonwealth. According to Crayola, arguably the top crayon experts, the correct way to say it is "cray-awn," but even they admit that there are too many regional differences to try and implement a single pronunciation. Hundreds of them. American Word Pronunciation Maps A look at regional differences in American English. Those are pretty specific to SE MA and RI, I guess. I think the quiz and the book spoke to that. South Africans call traffic light “robots,” which is cute.

Whether or not science needs a global language — which, Scott L. Montgomery believes, it does — like it or not, it already has one: English.