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language meme
Apr. 17th, 2005 07:13 pm( dialect meme )
Hmm, 0% Midwestern? Now I don't think my speech has changed THAT much from being at Swarthmore for 4 years. Does St. Louis just not follow the typical midwestern speech patterns? Or did I just avoid picking them up? Or maybe a little bit of both?
Well, I guess the fact that people in St. Louis say soda instead of pop got rid of one thing that would be Midwestern. (Since Milwaukee is the only other city in the Midwest that says "soda", according to http://www.popvssoda.com/, my guess is that it has something to do with the fact that both cities were big beer-brewing towns...) And I remember saying before that there really isn't a distinctive St. Louis accent, so maybe that's true... (Well, except for random little things like saying, ie. "Highway Farty (40)" or "harse" on words with an "or", or "ice cream sun-duh". And I managed to stop doing those, at least on those particular words, after I found out that those things were weird when I was in middle school/high school... Yeah, now I might say that silly distinctive things like that are cool, but at the time I decided that they were silly. And, well, maybe I DON'T want to be that strongly associated with St. Louis anyway... ;) )
Edit: OK, after playing around with this a little....what DOES show up as a Midwestern dialect? (Except saying "pop"--that counts as Midwestern, according to this. But it's SODA, really! :) ) Considering that everyone who's taken this seems to have a 0% Midwestern dialect, and even picking other things that I've heard in St. Louis and don't use doesn't increase that (most of those things that I've heard but don't use are Southern, which I guess makes sense)...I guess this doesn't really give Midwestern on many things. Well that's kind of silly... So I guess it's actually just subtracting from the "standard" dialect for any answers where you don't follow the standard dialect, but each one only goes to one dialect? And there's different numbers of questions going to each dialect, I think. That's sort of misleading... Silly quiz...
Hmm, 0% Midwestern? Now I don't think my speech has changed THAT much from being at Swarthmore for 4 years. Does St. Louis just not follow the typical midwestern speech patterns? Or did I just avoid picking them up? Or maybe a little bit of both?
Well, I guess the fact that people in St. Louis say soda instead of pop got rid of one thing that would be Midwestern. (Since Milwaukee is the only other city in the Midwest that says "soda", according to http://www.popvssoda.com/, my guess is that it has something to do with the fact that both cities were big beer-brewing towns...) And I remember saying before that there really isn't a distinctive St. Louis accent, so maybe that's true... (Well, except for random little things like saying, ie. "Highway Farty (40)" or "harse" on words with an "or", or "ice cream sun-duh". And I managed to stop doing those, at least on those particular words, after I found out that those things were weird when I was in middle school/high school... Yeah, now I might say that silly distinctive things like that are cool, but at the time I decided that they were silly. And, well, maybe I DON'T want to be that strongly associated with St. Louis anyway... ;) )
Edit: OK, after playing around with this a little....what DOES show up as a Midwestern dialect? (Except saying "pop"--that counts as Midwestern, according to this. But it's SODA, really! :) ) Considering that everyone who's taken this seems to have a 0% Midwestern dialect, and even picking other things that I've heard in St. Louis and don't use doesn't increase that (most of those things that I've heard but don't use are Southern, which I guess makes sense)...I guess this doesn't really give Midwestern on many things. Well that's kind of silly... So I guess it's actually just subtracting from the "standard" dialect for any answers where you don't follow the standard dialect, but each one only goes to one dialect? And there's different numbers of questions going to each dialect, I think. That's sort of misleading... Silly quiz...
