Which English dialect do you speak?

1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

Been mistaken for all three.

I'm a little surprised that American (Standard) isn't in my top 3 because, even though I am Canadian.

I think it has to do with interacting with many non-North Americans.

No one would ever think I'm South African or Australian.

I botched up that first sentence! Sorry!

Are you often upside down?

It depends on your perspective?

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. English (England)
2. Welsh (UK)
3. South African

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. German
3. Finnish

1. American (Standard)
2. Singaporean
3. Australian

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

Singaporean!

*punishes the thread with Judicial Caning*

yeah, i got that for my number 2. my guess is i wasn't paying attention and answered some questions wrong.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. Australian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. Norwegian
2. Swedish
3. English

http://www.guitarthai.com/picpost/gtpicpost/Q364832.jpg

Boringly correct.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. English (England)
2. Scottish (UK)
3. Welsh (UK)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Swedish
3. Norwegian

yeah, i got that for my number 2. my guess is i wasn't paying attention and answered some questions wrong.

― Spectrum, Thursday, June 5, 2014 7:40 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not about getting it wrong, though. It's about variations in dialect.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

I grew up all over the US, so the potential results were pretty up in the air. I'd like to find a similar test that tried to ascertain my regional dialect.

its prob based on IP address

scottish, english, norn irish.

rangers fan iirc

This test had Steven Pinker written all over it, although most likely it was designed by some of his grad students.

I found the instructions to be unclear, which was maddening, because the lack of clarity could have been avoided fairly easily had the designers given them further thought. Instead of reinforcing the point they make prior to the test, that one should just go with what sounds right to you at first blush, the instructions within the test ran counter to this and specifically asked the test taker to select everything that was grammatical. Had they phrased this more in the spirit they requested at the start, such as "select everything that sounds like what you might say in a conversation", then my answers would have changed., damn their eyes.

I know I will fall into a very tiny minority of the test takers who think this, but I can't help noticing that kind of stuff.

The use of the word "grammatical" should have been avoided entirely, imo, because the test purports to be interested in dialects, and grammar runs much deeper and embraces much more than the superficialities of dialect.

because the lack of clarity could have been avoided fairly easily had the designers given them further thought.
it's interesting that you think that you know more than the people at MIT who study language and designed this test?!

i took the "how large is your vocabulary" test and found their questions to be quite well written -- they went back and forth between things that well-read people know and more colloquial 2nd and 3rd definitions of words to see how deeply a person knows what the word "keep" means, for instance.

Are there really dialects where passives work the other way round? "The dog was pushed by the cat" meaning the dog pushed the cat, etc. Likewise "an sky"?

I assumed those first questions and some of the possible answers of later question were mostly to ascertain how well you spoke actually spoke English, regardless of dialect.

Oh I guess they're also trying to identify L1s for non-native English speakers, might be more relevant there.

Anyway, I redid the test and chose the opposite of my intuition/accepted everything as grammatical:

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. North Irish (UK)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Scottish (UK)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. Portuguese
2. Arabic
3. Spanish

LL, all I can say is that the design of the test was poorly matched to its stated goals. I make no claim to knowing more than the designers of the test. I only claim to see what was there written on the screen at each step.

I consider it entirely possible that the design concealed certain goals of the test and only a few of the answers were actually germaine to the algorithm used by the computer, with the rest of the test designed in order to facilitate that concealment. God knows what the designers really think they are doing. That's beyond my knowledge.

But I stand by my critique that the instructions and the test contained ambiguities that made it difficult for me to understand what they were instructing me to do.

i don't know either, i just know that generally people who design tests have put a lot of thought into the instructions and the way the questions are worded, and there's a good chance that everything is there for a reason. maybe you aren't privy to that reason, but there's probably a reason.

I'm pretty sure I'd be an outlier to their intended sample anyway. I note that I tried as best I could to follow their instructions exactly, and the result was that English appeared third on the list of guesses of my first-learned language after Norwegian and Swedish, and Ebonics showed up third on my list of my current dialects.

The "Every guide climbed a hill", "Every child rode an elephant" questions made me hesitate for about two more seconds than the other questions.

In those cases, either picture illustrated a possible sense of the sentence equally well, given that the sentence was context-free. There was no "best" answer, and that was apparent to me at once, but I was instructed to select a "best" answer anyway.

Every picture tells a story, don't it?

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Welsh (UK)
2. English (England)
3. South African

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

I'm not Welsh but I did spend three years there. #themoreyouknow

I eventually chose the illustrations that showed each guide on its own hill and each child on its own elephant, reasoning that if only one hill or elephant had been involved, the speaker had the choice of saying "the hill" or "the elephant" instead.

Ok a bit of Googling reveals that distributive and/or collective readings of quantifiers (as in "everyone read some book") are not always available for native speakers of East Asian (and other?) languages. And the weird examples with "also" are based on Singlish.

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. Singaporean

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

well, yeah

Are there really dialects where passives work the other way round? "The dog was pushed by the cat" meaning the dog pushed the cat, etc. Likewise "an sky"?

― popchips: the next snapple? (seandalai), Thursday, 5 June 2014 19:18 (35 minutes ago) Permalink

I assumed those first questions and some of the possible answers of later question were mostly to ascertain how well you spoke actually spoke English, regardless of dialect.

― silverfish, Thursday, 5 June 2014 19:22 (31 minutes ago) Permalink

Oh I guess they're also trying to identify L1s for non-native English speakers, might be more relevant there.

― popchips: the next snapple? (seandalai), Thursday, 5 June 2014 19:22 (31 minutes ago) Permalink

1. Irish (Republic of)
2. Scottish (UK)
3. English (England)

lol

Aimless not liking intended ambiguity vmic

"Up the audience's expectations, the critics built." lol

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. American (Standard)
2. Singaporean
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch
- See more at: http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/#sthash.RFxMek7u.dpuf

Up the audience's expectations, the critics built - lol i saw this and thought what dialect is that? dagobah?

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. Canadian
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Dutch

Up the audience's expectations, the critics built - lol i saw this and thought what dialect is that? dagobah?

― balls, Thursday, June 5, 2014 9:14 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

anyhow i got english (standard), australian, ebonics w/ english/norwegian/dutch rising. i kinda changed how i answered some of them, progressing from 'this is gramatically correct (to me)' to 'this is correct + sometimes might say this' to 'this is correct + sometimes i might say this + i have heard this usage/it makes sense to me'. the ny times had one a little while back that pinpointed it geographically, it gave me the city my mother grew up in.

^I took that NY Times one, as well, and it placed me in New York/Boston and I think New Hampshire? I'm not from the States, though.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. American (Standard)
2. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
3. Canadian

the question after the quiz ended about "ebonics" -- made me a bit uneasy

what was the question? ebonics was not one of the guesses for my dialect so it didn't ask me anything about that.

It was basically whether you considered yourself a speaker of ebonics

a native speaker of English, American Standard dialect

There were a few constructions that sounded right to me even though I would never say them, and I think it's because I've read 20+ Ngaio Marsh novels in the last two months

Is "ebonics" a technical term? I'd have expected "African American vernacular" or something

maybe they were testing for people who use the word "ebonics"?

To be perfectly fair, though, there are greater leaps than going from Romanian to French.

Quiz in OP:

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. Canadian
2. American (Standard)
3. US Black Vernacular / Ebonics
Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English
2. Dutch
3. Norwegian

I'm guessing that sentences like "I'm done my homework" and "I'm finished dinner" (with no prepositions) tipped it towards Canadian?

I suppose so. It might be a Montreal-only thing, but 'I'm done my homework' sounds perfectly correct to me, whereas I have lingering doubts about 'I'm finished dinner'. I'll ask around when I get the chance.

Idk if the latter was the best example, actually, ha.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:
1. Scottish (UK)
2. Welsh (UK)
3. Australian

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:
1. English
2. Norwegian
3. Swedish

Identified the jock nae bother. Also guilty of dropping prepositions.

i just dug the opie book out and to be honest the issue even of internal mobility doesn't seem to be explored at all: it's *very* empirical -- they talked to kids and wrote down what the kids told them, then gathered it into topic types and lists structured regionally, noting continuities and novelties, and that's kind of it, they don't really draw conclusions. the subject matter is what it is (basically lots of funny and silly rhymes and language games and pranks) that no one had systematically studied this way before this book, and they were evidently generously excited about and keen to dig out what they saw as evidence of semi-autonomous curational agency on the part of this overlooked child-led micro-culture -- but today the relative privilege of the area under study is very obviously a dimension you'd want to explore and account for (as are the assumptions about the parochialism of the interested readership the book was directed at)

anyway as i'm feeling a bit under the weather i'm going back to bed to reread some of it with these question in mind!

so i leave you with this artefact, which i remember from reading the book as a kid myself without looking it up, and also remember thinking a mighty excellent contribution to the arts at large:

"ladies and gentlemen, take my advice
pull down your pants, and slide on the ice!"

Ha! It thinks Swedish is my first language, which is extremely odd. I'm Irish-American and my dad did have a slightly Irish manner of speaking in terms of his cadence and some of his usage, but the test didn't pick this up...instead I'm a Swede, whatever that means! A Swede who occasionally lapses into Black English Vernacular. Which is funny because I did grow up around a few Swedes and had a number of black friends growing up.

A-ha! Grandparents lived in Wisconsin - and the other test says I'm from Milwaukee. That's where the Swedish came from, I'll bet.

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:?
1. Scottish (UK)
2. English (England)
3. Irish (Republic of)

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:?
1. English
2. Swedish
3. Dutch

OK. I mean, my dialect is definitely not scottish tho my speech patterns -- via my mum and her mum may be a bit?

Wisconsin is more German. For Swedes, you need to go a bit further West.

(xp) can't say I'd noticed, mark!

Thru the legs game = stuck in the mud in Hull. Growing up in Staffs we was all about British Bulldog tbh

― CDU next Tuesday (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 16 February 2019 11:50 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Both very much familiar games in 80s Hackney although British bulldog pretty much banned; possibly the imperialist overtones but more likely that any game had a better than evens chance of ending in hospitalisation.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3mucidygqe1tyj1/IMG_3194.JPG?raw=1

Fairly generic Home Counties splodge for me, seems reasonable especially since, during my formative years, my dad was doing his level best to suppress any vocal link with Liverpool.

Very tightly on Merseyside/NW England/N Wales for me but perhaps I was answering the questions as if it was 1982 and I was talking in the playground.

Surprising how localised tick, maiden and grid are.

Where do people still say maiden?

Bulldog was frequently banned at my school and yes it was about the high casualty count

...I was answering the questions as if it was 1982 and I was talking in the playground.

Yes, it wasn't always clear what answer to give. I think I denied that I would call someone a 'wazzock' because I probably haven't used that word since I was about 11.

We played British Bulldog in Florida. I loved it, it was one of the few sport activities at which I was any good.

there used to be a football game that was referred to as "English" when I was a kid. I can't even remember the rules and was totally shit at it and had zero enthusiasm to learn it. I can just remember hearing other kids saying : "we're off lecking English" and thinking: fuck that - I'm off to do something else then.

incidentally my favourite line from the intro to the OP quiz is this one: "scientists have discovered that many of the 'rules' taught in school are wrong anyway"

Using the prestige of "scientists have discovered that..." is a common rhetorical device to sell you something that even scientists are not above employing.

not really abt dialect but i found it rereading the opie book mentioned above:

for 200 yrs (until the 1950s) 25 July was called GROTTO DAY and londoners ate oysters and the children built little shrines with the shells and asked passersby "penny for the grotto"

probably it actually belongs on Real England

xp. that's very picturesque

http://i.imgur.com/bpUdqIN.png

via

Their guesses for my native language were 1. Norwegian 2. English 3. Swedish ... I grew up in Minnesota and a lot of my ancestors were Swedish and Norwegian so ha.