Language in the United States

Taking these two quizzes was a real wake up call for me. I never really thought I was that oblivious to regional dialects and the sound of the spoken word until I took these two quizzes.

The first quiz in which we were asked to identify regional dialects took me completely by surprise. It seems to me that when I think about regional dialects they always sound completely over-exaggerated; the southern drawl, the mid-atlantic "Boston" accent, the New York accent, and even the north and midwest "Fargo" accent all seem so obvious when used in films or other popular media, not nearly as subtly similar or vaguely different as those represented by the audio samples in this quiz. This showed in my final results, which were somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% accurate.

Perhaps the oddest, yet telling result of this first quiz was the fact that I got all of the midwest and northern dialects wrong. At first this surprised me. I thought, "I should at least be able to guess the dialects that are from my region." However, after thinking this over, I guess it makes sense. Usually, we see others as having accents or dialects, and think that our way of speaking is "normal" or "correct." It would then be easy to mistake our own dialect for something else if we think of it as nothing different. Especially in the cases of the audio samples provided for this quiz, there seemed to be only very subtle differences between many of the dialects, so much so that I only got one right in each region other than the midwest and north region (where I got both wrong). I guess this just goes to show that making assumptions about people's dialects can often be a tricky endeavor, and might be more difficult than just applying the exaggerated notions of dialect traits we normally associate with a certain region's dialect.

For the second quiz in which we were asked to identify certain words, I again was way off in my guesses, getting only "Desk" and "Buses" right, and even those only came after listening to the phrase hints. In these instances, it is truly amazing how the pronunciation of a vowel can completely change the word's meaning. For instance, the first word sounded to me like "black" when the real answer was "block." Similarly, the second word sounded to me like "sacks" when the real answer was "socks." These two examples show how knowing the contexts of the speaker's dialect is crucial to understanding what they are saying. In these two examples, if I had been given the information that the speaker was from New England or the east coast, then my attention to specific sounds might have produced different answers. However, even in the phrase hints, it was often too difficult to figure out the contexts within which the words were being used, and ultimately had an impact on the answer I submitted.

What seems to be important in both quizzes is coming to a better understanding of the unique dialectic perspectives of the various speakers. I think we often take the English language for granted, and these quizzes show us that aside from the various linguistic challenges faced by people who do not speak English as a primary language, they must also face the challenge of interpreting regional dialects. This can become confusing if the way a word is pronounced in one region makes it sound like a completely different word. Overall, these quizzes were very eye-opening, allowing me to gain a better perspective on the subtleties of regional dialects and word pronunciations.

Questions:
1. What region was the hardest for you to figure out?
2. How can word pronunciation lead to miscommunication?