@db4690;
Same here, an immigrant & transplant, but the test was pretty accurate putting me half in New England and half in CA (actually Orange Country). Same for the older kid who was in NE until the 5th grade. For the younger kid, it was right on the dot for the city we live in Southern CA.
It can not sense the accent, just the terminology/jargon.
That test couldn’t decide whether I was in Pasaic New Jersey, Tallahassee Florida or Jackson Mississippi. I’m homeless it seems.
And speaking of grits and regional dialects. Does anyone remember this?
Maybe you should run for office @RodKnox, you are a man comfortable everywhere!
The three cities were wrong, but Central Maryland was among the most similar. The test worked in my case.
The test got me spot on. And I consider my speech patterns and lingo a little more cosmopolitan than most around here…
The test missed me by about 650 miles. The only thing that I can attribute this to is that I’ve lived in a lot of different states.
@GeorgeSanJose
I had some kind of red bean chili-like-dish in New Orleans one time, served w/rice, and THAT was very good.
This dish is creatively named “Red Beans & Rice,” and is traditionally eaten on Monday because that was wash day, and it was easiest to set a pot of beans on the fire to cook while you worked.
It put me in the same cities as you. Which is interesting because I’ve lived in several states, mostly New Mexico and Minnesota, but have only been to California on short vacations.
In our case, we noticed that whether you call a divided road a hwy vs a fwy makes a difference for the location; fwy puts you smack in CA. I think we still called them fwy in the NE, we only did not use “the” in front of I-95.
The test was pretty accurate in my case; less than a 100 miles from Tulsa, OK.
@RodKnox, I not only remember that Little Milton song but got to see him play it live (along with a ton of other songs) just a few years before he passed away. Whale of an artist and city code is the only thing that got him off the stage. 
Regarding food and regions, I might ask if anyone knows what “Goosefoot” is…
Well I’m clearly a Minneapolis boy, or Rock Island or Grand Rapids. I guess tennis shoes and pop did it. I didn’t know what sneakers were until college and there was a guy from New York.
There are a couple words that drive me nuts. One is from a prominant politician. Outside of continual use of “and” instead of um or ah, is “shore” instead of “sure”. Is this a Chicago thing or what? The other is the weather channel talking about “snew” instead of “snow” and “hewms” instead of “homes”. The older ya get the less tolerant ya become I guess.
On our way to Ohio, I go through either Ill, Indiana, etc. on the southern route, or Chicago, Gary, Toledo, on the northern route. When you hit southern Illinois and Indiana, they just sound more like Kentucky than anything. Like, you know, just have that southern drawl like you know a mouth full of something. You just want to tell them “front and center lad and speak up, I can’t hear you”.
@Bing–The old National Road, U.S. 40, or now I-70 which is parallel to U.S. 40, divide both Indiana and Illinois into two separate regions. In Illinois, Chicago is a third region. My dad grew up in Rock Island, Illinois and my mother grew up in west central Illinois. I was born in west central Illinois, but we moved to east central Indiana when I was 5 years old. However, we often went back to west central Illinois and to Rock Island to visit family. Later, I went to Carbondale, Illinois to do graduate work at Southern Illinois University. Southern Illinois seemed like a completely different state than the west central part I knew. Even later, I moved to Bloomington, Indiana to do more graduate work. Again, southern Indiana is much different than east central Indiana that I was used to. The dialect of the people, the political outlook of the people and the climate is different in the southern regions of Illinois and Indiana than in the northern parts of the states.
You are right that southern Illinois and southern Indiana natives are a lot like the people in Kentucky and Tennessee. Our son did an internship in Kentucky while he was in college. He liked the area and the people so well, that when he graduated from college, he first went to Kentucky and then to Tennessee. I can understand his attraction to the area.
“The other is the weather channel talking about “snew” instead of “snow” and “hewms” instead of “homes”. The older ya get the less tolerant ya become I guess.”
I have to admit that I have never heard “snew”, but…“hewms” drives me crazy also.
A runner-up for most annoying mispronunciation would have to be saying “worsh” instead of “wash”. If you have seen the commercials for My Pillow, the inventor (Mike Lindell, the guy with the bad wig) tells you that you can “throw it in the worsher, just like your favorite blue jeans”.
So, I guess that his pillow is…worshable.
Not a peeve but a curiosity, quite a number of people put an extra r in sherbe®t
I took the quiz, but the site wouldn’t respond with a conclusion.
I did learn when I went in the Air Force that I definitely had an accent. Then, four years later when I returned home, I was told I spoke differently. Of course, that was 40 years ago, so who knows.
@the same mountainbike; Probably the answer was; from the “air” force
Thanks for serving.
It thought I was from the Texas panhandle or Oklahoma…with a slight chance of Pittsburgh PA. I think the problem is “yinzer lingo” is like cockney slang: sure, everybody knows it, but most educated people would not want to present themselves as not speaking “proper” English.
And “highway” is the general term for a limited-access road; “freeway” is a highway without tolls; “turnpike” is a highway with tolls; a “parkway” is either a “highway” used for commuting, or one that runs through a wooded area.
Naw, no wonder you confused the test. A freeway is a limited access interstate. A highway is a standard two lane usually state road or US although in Ohio and Indiana they call it a national road for some reason. A turnpike is I agree a toll interstate. A parkway is just a split road with a ditch in between. Now anyone know what a “pike” is? I had to look it up after the movie Thunder Road. Its like a southern name for a parkway. I know I’m right-I’m from Minnesota, the only place where proper English is spoken.