What you call a long sandwich, how you say “pecan,” whether it’s “pop,” “soda,” or “coke” — your everyday words quietly map to where you’re from. Answer a set of questions and watch the map find where in the United States people talk the most like you.
An earlier version of this site incorrectly stated that data from the Harvard Dialect Survey is available under a Creative Commons License. That was an error and should not be relied upon as permission to distribute or reproduce any survey materials. The Harvard Dialect Survey has not been released under any such license and all copyright is retained by Bert Vaux. If you downloaded any survey materials from this site or its source code, please contact Bert Vaux regarding permission for further use.
Quizzes are temporarily paused pending further collaboration with Professor Bert Vaux.
This map uses data from the Harvard Dialect Survey, a study of American English by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. For each question, the survey recorded the percentage of respondents in every U.S. state who chose each answer.
1. Scoring each state. Your similarity to a state is the average probability that a resident of that state matches your answers:
similarity(state) = average over your answers of P( resident of state gives your answer )2. Drawing the smooth map. We use Gaussian kernel smoothing to turn the state scores into a continuous surface, stretched to your range so contrast remains visible.
3. Cities & giveaway. Cities are scored by evaluating the smoothed surface at their locations. The "what gave you away" panel highlights choices that are far more common than nationwide.