Sareena Sethi_Report 2

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Boston University *

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5560

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Linguistics

Date

Apr 3, 2024

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docx

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4

Uploaded by CoachReindeerMaster1267

The Dialect Map of the Typical Midland Girl Sareena Sethi I am a Northeastern Ohioan, specifically from Youngstown. I use in my day to day language "you guys" and sometimes "yinz." I expected my map to be more towards Pittsburgh due to spending lots of time there with family and friends and also being geographically close to it. However, after taking the New York Times dialect quiz, linguistically, my dialect is more similar to the west. Taking the quiz has opened up a similarity that I have never seen. According to the test, I sound like someone from Illinois, but I never really would associate myself with a connection to Illinois. The survey placed a relationship between states that I would never see as similar, but the world does not see a difference. However, all the cities given were in the region that my dialect matches best. My speech patterns fit into the dialect of the Midland region, which perfectly matched the map result I got from the quiz. My speech patterns include the Low Back merger and variants of language you would find in the Midland region. Examples of this include saying "I want off"
instead of " I want to get off," and "a quarter till" to express time. The survey tested variants of different words and phrases, as well as pronunciation to test various linguistic mergers and indicate the city from where my dialect originated. Examples include how the survey asked the pronunciation of the second syllable in pajamas and the first syllable in aunt , to which both of these made me stand out in the Midland region. These two examples brought out my Midland Low Back merger. With this merger, the sound in pajamas would sound like the vowel in jam , and the noise in aunt would be the same as the vowel in ant ([æ]). The survey also asked various questions on variants of words. An Example of this is the word for a sweet carbonated beverage, which I answered pop and immediately gave away my dialect region. A surprising lexical difference was in the word for four roads merging into a circle, which I called roundabout . This word matched on the particular question's map more around the middle of the country rather than near Ohio but was still consistent with the region in which I identify. Most questions flashed bright red on the individual question maps for my exact state, and areas that I have family in or that I visit often. All of these places are within the Midland region. Variants like blow-off (an effortless class in school) and roundabout (the connection of roads into a circle) were entirely similar (flashed red on the map) to the entire region. Lots of questions asked claimed that my answers were not just from my dialect region, but also in the state of Texas. I found this interesting because I have never spent a lot of time there, but my grandparents lived there for a couple of years. They might have rubbed off some of their Southern region dialects on me. However, since my grandparents have heavy Indian accents, I do not believe that this is a strong case.
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