Soon after it appeared on the New York Times website at the end of December 2013, a dialect quiz generated considerable buzz on social media.  I’m always one step behind whatever goes viral, so I didn’t take the quiz until recently.  Here are my results (the red-orange-yellow colors indicate affinity; the dark hues are the locations where speech is most similar to yours):

There are only 25 questions, so the results are amazingly accurate , don’t you think?  I was born and raised in Hawaii and, to date, have lived all of my adult life in Massachusetts (not sure where Yonkers comes into play).  I thought to myself, “Is this some kind of a parlor trick?”  But of course it’s not.  According to author Josh Katz, NY Times graphic editor who developed the quiz:

Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder.

Concluded in 2003, the original survey used 122 questions administered to 30,788 respondents, which is quite a large database.  As in any statistical sampling, there will be outliers, but that doesn’t detract from its validity for many people.  It’s also important to note that the survey was developed for native speakers of American English.

Coincidentally, the online edition of the Dictionary of American Regional English was released in December.  (Harvard University Press published DARE’s first volume in 1985 and the sixth and final print volume in early 2013.)  The dictionary is a treasure trove for linguists and social scientists, but it’s also a lot of fun for  ordinary citizens.  One might worry that American English is becoming increasingly homogenized, and that we are in danger of losing our regional eccentricities, but recent linguistic fieldwork indicates that this is not happening.  We speak like the people around us, and due to accidents of history and geography, there are numerous aspects of vocabulary and pronunciation which differ from place to place.  The many varieties of regional American English, both past and present, are certainly worth celebrating.  As NPR correspondent Amanda Katz writes:

Such marvelous words [slatchy, vinegarroon] are sprinkled through our national literature; without your own team of roaming lexicographers, there is probably no easier way to browse America’s past ways of living and talking than to read its books. But Dictionary of American Regional English gathers all these terms into one place, together with samples of the voices and stories and songs that gave rise to them. It’s the rare American book whose roots extend not just to one region but to all of them.