If you grew up speaking American English...
What dialect do you speak?
I came up as 41% Yankee - "just barely Yankee" - which I guess makes sense: Boston/California on one side, Tennessee/Idaho/Oregon/California on the other, born & raised in California by parents who were* both big ol' language geeks**. (I lost track of how many times I heard my mother grumble "It's miss-cheh-vuss, not miss-chee-vee-uss, dammit!")
One pronunciation quirk that I don't usually see in dialect quizzes like this is the characteristically Californian raising and flattening of vowels (which is something I consciously work against, but which comes out more strongly when I'm tired, I think). I remember Mom saying to me once, regarding my friend Tobin, "His name's toh-bin, dammit, not teww-bin."
"Mom," I said, "he's a Californian. His name's teww-bin."
Also, um, the characteristically Californian lack of enunciation, especially when tired. Mom used to rant about how all her Beginning Acting students had terminal cases of "California Wooden-Lip".
I think that although I inherited my language-geek inclinations from both parents, for Dad the geekery mostly manifests relative to the written word, but for Mom (the director and theatre professor) it most often manifested regarding the spoken word.
via Metafilter
*One still is, luckily.
**Do I even need to say "and I mean this in the most positive, loving way possible, because I are one"? Surely not.
I came up as 41% Yankee - "just barely Yankee" - which I guess makes sense: Boston/California on one side, Tennessee/Idaho/Oregon/California on the other, born & raised in California by parents who were* both big ol' language geeks**. (I lost track of how many times I heard my mother grumble "It's miss-cheh-vuss, not miss-chee-vee-uss, dammit!")
One pronunciation quirk that I don't usually see in dialect quizzes like this is the characteristically Californian raising and flattening of vowels (which is something I consciously work against, but which comes out more strongly when I'm tired, I think). I remember Mom saying to me once, regarding my friend Tobin, "His name's toh-bin, dammit, not teww-bin."
"Mom," I said, "he's a Californian. His name's teww-bin."
Also, um, the characteristically Californian lack of enunciation, especially when tired. Mom used to rant about how all her Beginning Acting students had terminal cases of "California Wooden-Lip".
I think that although I inherited my language-geek inclinations from both parents, for Dad the geekery mostly manifests relative to the written word, but for Mom (the director and theatre professor) it most often manifested regarding the spoken word.
via Metafilter
*One still is, luckily.
**Do I even need to say "and I mean this in the most positive, loving way possible, because I are one"? Surely not.