You Speak Wicked Different: Dialects around the United States

by Kate Carroll
Copyeditor

When I was six years old, I moved from Massachusetts to Texas. I’ll never forget balking every time I heard some phrase foreign to my New Englander ears. The accent, I was prepared for—I knew my family dropped our r’s, while our new neighbors would likely emphasize them—but the idea of different geographic areas having their own sets of words was entirely new to me. Which is why I thought my classmates were swearing at me when they asked if I wanted a sucker, holding out what I knew to be a lollipop. Then again, any time I emphasized something as wicked cool, they probably thought I was referring to some sort of sorcery.

At some point, we’ve probably all had the same realization. Whether it happened when relocating somewhere or being introduced to someone new, realizing that even people who speak the same language can’t always agree on terminology is pretty entertaining. After all, who hasn’t had the hoagie/sub/grinder/hero debate?

Since moving back to Massachusetts, the discovery of a new synonym hasn’t lost its effect on me. I’m a language lover, so I’m constantly intrigued by the dialectal background of people I meet, and I collect their foreign terms eagerly and without question. Want to coin your own word for a witty insult (in my hometown, we called it being salted)? I’ll take it.

Lucky for me, a much more academic study exists that produced precisely 122 discoveries. The Harvard University Linguistics department performed a dialect survey in 2003. As Joshua Katz of the statistics department at North Carolina State University (NCSU) notes, “Dialect encompasses both phonological differences (pronunciation) and lexical differences (vocabulary). The study of how dialect varies geographically is an important component of linguistic research.”

Some of the differences are pretty amazing. I always knew that the ice cream drink I enjoyed in the summer (a frappe) was simply a milkshake to most of the country, but I never knew that firefly was just as common as lightning bug or that there were so many different options for the term meaning the end of a loaf of bread. Likewise, I’d heard Florida and aunt pronounced a variety of ways, but I had never paid attention to distinctions in pronouncing miracle or really.

We’ve had our own discoveries in the PSG office. The day we realized that nearly half the country refers to our comfortable sneakers as tennis shoes, we were abuzz for hours. And we’ve had a few international lessons as well, courtesy of a former intern who grew up in Trinidad. We learned that, while friends may hang out in the United States, they apparently lime in Trinidad.

Check out the current list (which, incidentally, includes worldwide results), fill out the ongoing survey or do your own unofficial one—I guarantee that, if you’re a language lover, the results will be entertaining. And, more often than not, they’re good for a laugh. Go ahead, have that sandwich debate with coworkers. I'll stick hard and true to my sub and keep the heroes for the comic books.

Did You Know?

Accents come and go just like popular phrases and terms do over time, but academics at the British Library have put together what they believe to be the closest to the English accent in Elizabethan England. So it’s now possible to hear Shakespeare’s works the way they would have originally been performed.