![]() My first introduction was to see one of them perched on the headboard of our bed, just silently staring at me. We had recently moved, and the house apparently came with some of them. I had neither seen nor heard of those until about eleven years ago. I also refuse to call mountain lions "cougars" thanks to that term's association with a certain college in Provo. For example, I knew several people who called roly polies "potato bugs", but that seems to be mainly concentrated among LDS church members (which I'm not), so it never really caught on for me. There were a few questions that would have definitively identified me as from Utah had I answered differently. So I've had a lot of influences from different places - which explains why most of my map is somewhere in the yellow-to-red range. I'm sort of a weird case because I grew up in Utah, live in Atlanta right now, and my parents were originally from the midwest. Bottom 3 are New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Philadelphia. Top 3 cities are Fresno, Modesto, and Sacramento - funny enough, the only one of those I've even been to is Sacramento, and I've never left the car there. Both are fine words for referring to our glorious sport.Here's mine. That might end up being of more use to distinguish dialects than the actual language use. It was interesting to note from the maps that flew past that the ones which would uniquely mark out Scotland (and often Northern Ireland) were often to do with whether or not words rhymed with other words. Algorithms will have to get smarter to work out dialect. I used to use expressions (sorry for any misspellings but they were spoken, never written) like "peely-wally", "clarty", "cuddy louping" etc.), but no longer. However, many dialectical words are falling quickly out of use due to the homogeneity that you mention. In the old days, such a test would have been much more accurate because dialects were far more distinct. There wouldn't be any harm in asking for the information, but useless if left too late. That would, in my eyes, allow for a more refined and potentially more accurate analysis. So, in a perfect world, I personally would see the makers of the test asking folk for some of the principal attributes like these (there wouldn't be too many). Meanwhile my son's results were similar to mine but with elements linking to other parts of the country, which is a result I would have expected for a young person because younger Irish people have more homogeneous expressions and catchphrases than my generation.Īh, now I have no idea how they have process their data, but language use isn't just dialect-based but is also based on other factors such as age, sex and social background (I know, that's a difficult aspect to deal with but I, for example, say "football" rather than "fitba", but many folk up here use the latter*). My wife's results were similar to mine but more concentrated on Dublin, which didn't surprise me. All of that would explain the broader regional "heat map" in my case. My accent is more or less Dublin, but that's not where I was raised, and we have common ways of using words across the region even though accents vary. I thought that it needed refinement when I looked at my results first, but it is quite accurate given what it is. But that shouldn't really matter in the overall scheme of things as long as there are a big enough number of responses. There were quite a few words like that where I thought "I wouldn't use it, but young folk here would".Ĭan you be sure that the quiz doesn't take into account that you might not use a word but other people would? There are words I would use that younger people wouldn't, and there are even words that fellas would use but women wouldn't. I wouldn't be seen calling anything or anyone "awesome", for example, but my nephews might. The other thing is that there is definitely an age difference as well, but the quiz doesn't take that into account. as a result of far more people using it) to become of any use. I think the quiz needs a wee bit more refinement (i.e. My parents aren't from any of these areas as well, and I learned a lot of my language from them. Most of the rest of the static part of my life has been spent in the North East of Scotland. Although I've travelled around a bit, the only one of these I've lived in for any time was Edinburgh, and that was only for a few years. Strangely enough, after the full 96 questions, it put me down as being from the Edinburgh, Fort William or Ayr areas.
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