So I was looking at this map of how people pronounce things in the US, and I noticed that very few of them showed any distinct regional differences. The most striking of the few that do are what people call sweetened carbonated beverages, that thing you drink water from, and what you call Halloween eve. Bubbler people seem to reside mostly in Wisconsin, and Devil's Night seems to be a mostly Wolverine thing. I also notice that while they ask what people call drive-through liquor stores, they don't ask about liquor stores in general. An appellation that's apparently unique to Michigan (I didn't realize this until others pointed it out to me, having grown up with it) was "party store."

Most of them just showed that the distribution of people who called them different things was pretty evenly distributed (that is if 80% called it one and 20% another, that would be as true in the deep south as in New England).

I wonder to what degree mass media and migration has been wiping out regional dialects? How different would these maps have looked a hundred years ago?

Heh...87.68% say that "double modal" constructions are incorrect. This habit of grammar irked me no end when I lived in New Orleans.

Growing up "Yupe" (i.e., MI's Upper Peninsula) I can confirm the "party store" thing and the "pop" thing. The "bubbler" thing never made it across the WI border, though, and - at least back in my day - that "Devil's Night" thing was unknown as well. I think the reason "Devil's Night" may have gained traction in the meantime is because of the now well-established habit of our dusky brethren in Detroit of setting fire to derelict buildings on this particular night - said tradition having sprung up in the wake of the Detroit race riots of 1967 and having reached something of a high water mark in the 80's.

Several friends are linguists (yes, really--they write dictionaries and all that.) They take great pains to point out that mass media tends to have the opposite effect on accents and dialects than you might expect. One theory is that exagerated or emphasizing accents or dialects is a natural response to solidify one's cultural identity.

(One thing I've observed many times is how southern belles [upper and upper-middle class southern women] will dial up and down their southern accent depending on the context.)

Higher Education, Military and occupations that require a lot of travel. So I say Migration. Also technology and media have an affect, though I don't think as much. I think it is mostly because of the personal relationships of people who travel, have developed with people from other area's, they develop the affect of the people they know and like when dealing with them, and make the alien colloquialilsms their own.

Growing up "Yupe" (i.e., MI's Upper Peninsula)

Eastern or western UP? There are some distinct cultural differences (though they're both much more like each other than like the lower peninsula folks). My theory is that the western UP is really sort of upper Wisconsin, because there's a much longer tradition of interaction, without the straights to separate them.

Vocabulary is the first regional difference to be ironed out by media homogenization, but some of the other aspects -- vowel pronunciation, grammatical peculiarities -- are more persistent. And as some vocabulary gets homogenized, other differences arise. "Party store" does seem to be a wolverinism; when I was growing up in Pennsylvania the ubiquitous term was "state store" becasue we had a state liquor monpoly. In Virginia people tended to say "the ABC" since their liquor monopoly is called the Alcohol Board of Control; in Ontario it was "the LCBO" for the same reason.

The best test of whether dialect differences still remain is whether a person's speech is a useful predictor of their origin. I've tended to find that if you have a good ear and have experience with the various areas of origin, this is still the case in the US.

Well, the examples Rand made were specific words and phrases. Pronunciation is a different thing. To this day, the "accent" of popular news broadcasts is really an "urban midwestern" accent. You don't end up with a vinny or guido, in New York, and you don't have a Lance or a Jay, in the west, you don't have a Terrell, or a Shaniqua in the south let alone a Hoss, or a Festus, in the midwest you Do have Mikes, and Daves and Jims. . . . .If you know what I mean from that convoluted collection.

Accent is different from words, I think the point was that "pop" is pretty well distributed as a "soda drink." The specific colloqual TERMS and PHRASES, while somewhat isolated, are reasonably spread out over a wide area. There are floridians who say pop, there are New Yorkers who say "Bra" and there are Californians who say "guido" I think that was the break down.

I've personaly dealt with a lot of people from a lot of places and most of the time I can pick their area's of origin based on their accent, but that wasn't the point of the post, it was more about the WORDS or PHRASES, not the way in which those words were spoken. For instance, A friend of mine from Philly, LOVED! me saying one word and it was ONLY this word that gave away my general geographical origin.

Whenever we would get into regional "snaps" like "your from Norther California, let me guess, you surf! (with a sarcastic tone) BRA!" and then "You're from Chicago (which I more or less am) you must be a Dick!" playful male jibing. Thats how things often are, and it is a GAME, but the actually WORDS quickly become enmeshed into a conjoined language that is virtually indistinguishible one from the other.

However the ACCENT is always there, and since I already said I'm more or less from Chicago, the One word my philly friend always wanted to hear me say was "yesterday" which, with me, though I'm VERY clean in my speach for the most part, ALWAYS came out as "yest(schwa)day"

It's just a thing, I have it, we all do, with ACCENT, but we can all speak the language of our friends, and family, that is why colloquial words and phrases are so widely understood and shared.

People have a name for Halloween eve?

I had to click through before I had the least idea what TLJ was talking about with "double modal constructions."

Since I've been married, I have picked up "might could" from my wife -- and she was working in Slidell, near New Orleans, when we first met.

She had to have picked it up there, since she only lived in those parts for a couple of years.

"go with" or "come with" is a classic from greater Chicagoland or so I hear. Example:

"I got me some Sox tickets, wanna come with?"

"Do ya' think?" is another phrase my wife despises. Whenever I say "Do ya' think?" she says see feels insulted.

= = =

And Hinglish tickles me to no end, as I've posted before. ABCD Desi:

America Born Confused Desi:

Escaped
From
Gujarat;
Housed
In
Jersey;
Keeping
Lotsa'
Motels
Named
Omkarnath
Patel;
Quickly
Reached
Success
Through
Underhanded
Vicious
Ways;
Xenophobic
Yet
Zealous

About the "liquor stores in general", my in-laws introduced me to "packy", which seems to be very common in Massachusetts, and New England in general. I grew up all over the US, but tend towards Midwestern vocabulary and pronunciations, so my wife and I have more than occasional WTF moments with terminology. She was delighted to find "grinders" on a menu yesterday in Arizona, a term I had never heard until I met her. It turned out the restaurant owner was from Boston, and he said people still ask him what they are almost daily.

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