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        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> Harvard Dialect Study
        
(Message started by: Garzahd on Jan 17^th, 2003, 5:44pm)

Title: Harvard Dialect Study
Post by Garzahd on Jan 17^th, 2003, 5:44pm

I'm reluctant to toss this in the General section, because I think fewer people will read it than I'd like, but it's not really a puzzle, rather a curiousity item.

Anyway.

With all the recent puzzles about language (olive sheep being the nail in the coffin), I dug up this webpage that's conducting an interesting survey. It asks you for your zip code, then asks all sorts of language questions whose answers may vary depending on where you live (or grew up).

For instance: Do you call carbonated beverages "soda" or "pop" or something else? Do you pronounce the stuff on pancakes sur-up or see-rup? Do you have a special name for the day before Halloween?

Once you take the test, you can see a scatterplot map of how the rest of America answered to each question. (For the lazy, you can go straight to the maps, but clearly no one here is *that* lazy, right?)

Take a look: http://hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/