Sareena Sethi_Report 2
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Linguistics
Date
Apr 3, 2024
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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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