What American accent do you have? | Comments

Midland?!? I was born and raised in the South...the REAL south, not like Maryland... :-) I've lived in TN and GA my entire life--I've only been west of the Mississippi twice in 40-something years!! There's not much "Midland" about me.

I think this test sometimes is more a test of whether you learned diction...my father (a Yankee) and my mother (lifelong Southerner) were also both extremely intelligent and well-spoken, and they did not allow their five children to learn or engage in sloppy speaking habits...

The quiz is like 100% correct. Top it off I am 100% from Wisconsin and I do call call soda "Pop"

My Result: The Inland North 100%

You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."

64% The Northeast
60% The Midland
60% Philadelphia
50% The South
29% North Central
18% The West
6% Boston

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: North Central 88%

"North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.

As a Canadian; yes, people do think Im Canadian a lot lol which may be cause I live in Canada and have an Ontarian accent and have said that Im Canadian many times before lmao

Pegged me straight on. 93% from the inland north the other 7% well my stepdad was from the East coast and Mom from Germany so had that childhood language influence plus the first 18 years I lived on the West coast but the next 40 was in Wisconsin and Minnesota respectively. Now I've unfortunately moved on to Missouri but WI will always be my home

Well, I got Midlands, but I am from Minnesota, born and raised, then at 25 to mid/central coast of California for maybe 20 years, then to Arizona... I have relatives from West Virginia, however we don't keep in touch well. Hmmm.... I like regionalisms, and wouldn't knowingly change my accent for anyone! Unless I am imitating a cockney lass!

This was great, but I got the West (which is close but not quite). My accent is actually a slight Northern Cities Vowel Shift. It would be fascinating to add that to your quiz. It's the first vowel shift since the Great Vowel Shift hundreds of years ago (the date is not precise). I'm from Cleveland, but Chicago and other Great Lakes cities are included. For instance, top might be pronounced tap. There's a great Slate article about it.

I was born and raised in New England, CT and MASS; I have an accent that peels paint off of wood at 40 paces, and this quiz thinks I'm from accent-less Missouri? I "pahk" my "kah", and the word "chair" has two distinctive syllables, as does "there" and "here". I don't know if I should laugh or cry: I now live in California and often need a translator when talking ("tawk-eng") with the locals: sorry, but this Quiz is pointless.

I have never lived anywhere but the south, and mine came out 94% Northeast, most likely New York, which is kinda hilarious because for the last 35+ years in Sucks Carolina, every time I speak to someone new, the first thing I get is some version of "where are you from,up nawth somewhere?" Which is actually really annoying after awhile. Wouldn't be so bad if they'd let it drop, but nooooo, idiot people have to keep on and on trying to get me to tell them the "truth" about where I'm really from.

I thought the quiz was decent. (I actually had to sit here and say some words aloud to figure some out!) Haha, I've always enjoyed talking about linguistics/dialect . The quiz said I was 86ish% North Central (compared me to Minnesota, Canada and the likes).. I'm from very northeast Iowa (20min from Minnesota, 40min from Wisconsin), so I think it did a good job!

Fun, but not a winner. I am definitely not Boston-bred; I know what a Boston accent sounds like and I'm not even close. Born in Pennsylvania and spent most of my adult life in or around Philadelphia. Those who truly know accents have me pegged for Philly (not South Jersey, which is a whole different kettle of fish) before I have three sentences out of my mouth.

the problem is that you lump all Southerners together- the deep south has a totally different dialect than say the mountain regions of the south- like the word Cot and Caught- which in the mountains is more like Cot in that it is basically Cotched- Mary, Merry and Marry are different also - in that Mary is more like Murry- Merry is more like Merry and Marry is something between the two but closer to Marry with a short a.. I know I grew up there and moved to the south-- and trust me those that live in Charleston speak a whole different form of English than anyone else in the country unless it is Boston..

I was rated as 100% Midlands, probably from southern Ohio or some such place. WRONG. The survey does not check the pronunciation of long /o/-- Midlands people say "ayo" while northerners like me just say [o] gliding to [u]. Another good test here would be to check pronunciation of "Ow!" Is it "ayow" as in the Midlands and all over the West, or [ah] gliding to [o]? Additionally, word choice is part of determining dialect (pop vs. soda vs. tonic vs. coke) and even grammar is. In one part of the country "might could" is a legitimate modal verb.

How fun this was even if it's not 100% accurate. We Americans generally move around so much that I think it's very hard to pinpoint an accent unless someone stayed in a particular region their whole life. Mine was off of course. I've never lived in the inland north and am thoroughly annoyed by those who refer to soda as pop. :) I grew up in CT and then lived in Boston as an adult for a log time.

To Jerseygirl65: It's either "Inland North" or "Northeast", these are two different areas. They are a little vague as to exactly what Northeast means; I test as what looks like about 98% "Northeast" and slightly less "Inland North", whatever that means, although I learned to speak on Long Island but NOT in the parts where folks call it "Lung-GUY-lind aw-reddy" or say "Jeet/No/Jeet/No/Je et/No/Lesgweet" as the conversation of one person asking three friends if they had lunch yet or not. But although I lived most of my HS & adult life in NJ, I definitely don't say "Nih Joyzee, dah homa da cultcha luv-vahs" either, even though they do include New Jersey in "Northeast". It's all about "Which Exit?"

Interesting. I came out Midland. Yet I was born and raised in California, and have lived here over 6 decades. While my father was from the Midwest (Chicago), my mother's family has been in California since the 1800s.

One small point, the options on merry, marry, and Mary assume that, if only one is different, that one is marry. Yet for me, Mary and marry are identical, but merry is (very slightly) different.

Totally off! I was born in Ft. Myers, Florida. My one grandmother was from England,the other from Chicago of German descent. My mother grew up in Pittsburg, my dad in Florida. Most people think I am from New York or "somewhere up north" though I can sound as southern as you'd like--or use any number of accents--Cuban, Mexican, several English, Irish, Scottish, German or French.

I find this rather inaccurate, since it seems to assume that there is a distinct accent everywhere in the Northeast that differs from the "Midlands." I've lived in Western Massachusetts my entire life, and I got the Midlands. You probably aren't from New England if you don't realize that the east of Massachusetts, northern Connecticut, and other such places all bear the very neutral accent that you seem to think only "Midland" people bear.

Said I am from the midland. Nope, Western Washington state, although I was born in Brit. Col. Canada. Here since age 11 however. However, I remember that we on the west coast were once the best to be hired for national radio/tv since we can be understood by all the rest of the country and that is so not true of people from, say, Arkansas. Remember one lady from there told me she was going to feed her kids "bald" weinies. I said all the ones I cooked were hairless! How did I know she meant boiled.

Well, you guys really missed on me. I answered all the questions very carefully and was very sure of my answers. You came up with "Inland, North." Actually I am was born and raised in Eastern Washington State, where I currently reside. And, my parents, who raised me, were born and raised here also, so I didn't pick up a different accent from them, either. But it was fun anyway. Maybe you could stretch it to come up with Inland North, but then there is a comment about "Chicago", so I don't think that is what you had in mind.

I was born, raised, educated through college in Gulf Coast

area of Louisiana. I've never been to Philly. Your

text answer, ie., "Philadelphia," does not match the bar

chart below it, which emphatically states that I have a

Southern accent (true.) What gives? Many others seem to

have never been to places which were identified as their

origin of accent.

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The West

Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.

OMG How did it do this? I was born in the west(Oklahoma), raised in Florida(Jacksonvill e) and live in Atlanta!

I was interested in taking the quiz because I took several

classes on language and did a paper at Cal on American dialects.(In WWII era) At first I was confused by the designation of "Inland north". I was born and raised in California. However, I realized my father, a school superintendent, was born in Minnesota and moved to Los

Angeles when he was about 12. Your quiz is amazing.

Your analysis is little off. I studied speech and pronunciation, and I know and can hear the differences in merry and Mary and marry...as a matter of fact one of the pronunciation excercises we worked on is "merry Mary married Harry" and making the distinction among the four accented vowel sounds, which is considered Good American Speech, not northeast or Philly. But the quiz is fun.

I got Midland or "no accent". I'm not from any of the states specifically mentioned, but it did say something about possibly being from larger cities in the south. I'm not from a big major city but I am from a large and growing city in the south. The only hints of an accent I ever have while speaking are always southern, because a lot of members of my family speak with a southern accent. I'm often told at family gatherings that I "speak all proper."

Huh. I apparently have a Midland accent despite being born and raised in Chicago, going from there to college in Boston and from Boston to Manhattan, where I've spent the last 20 years in Manhattan).

I believe it; all the questions on the quiz seemed like they each had only one answer I could possibly choose.

I even have a guess how it happened; it's a little farfetched-seeming, but something has to explain it. (My father grew up in central Illinois, and while he moved to Chicago young and didn't have an accent I noticed, his relatives sounded (still do, the surviving ones) much more Southern than Northern. I guess I picked enough of it up on visits to soften the edges a bit. Cool.)