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How a 19th century "human transcribing machine" inspired generations of linguists. A 1900s-era bicycle—Edmond Edmont's tool of the trade. (Image: Public Domain)Back in 2013, millions of Americans spent a few minutes clicking through this dialect survey. They threw their lots in with "crayfish" or "crawdad." They marveled at the number of words for rubbernecking. At the end, they likely received their geographic diagnoses with pride. Despite coming out on December 20, this quiz was the New York Times's top-trafficked story of that year. A decade earlier, when linguist Bert Vaux wrote the questions that inspired the quiz, he was thinking about...

Mulberry Street, where New York's "Little Italy" is centered, c. 1909.  (Photo: Library of Congress)“Don’t eat gabagool, Grandma,” says Meadow Soprano on an early episode of The Sopranos, perhaps the most famous depiction of Jersey Italian culture in the past few decades. “It’s nothing but fat and nitrates.” The pronunciation of “gabagool,” a mutation of the word "capicola," might surprise a casual viewer, although it and words like it should be familiar to viewers of other New Jersey-based shows like the now-defunct Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey, where food often drives conversation. The casts are heavily Italian-American, but...

An order of the Virginia Colonial Council dated May 4, 1725, concerned an allegation that "divers Indians plundered the Quarters of Mr. John Taliaferro near the great mountains [i.e., the Blue Ridge] . . .[and carried off] some of the Guns belonging to and marked with the name of Spottsylvania County . . . ." The Council concluded: "It is ordered that it be referred to Colo. Harrison to make inquiry which of the Nottoway Indians or other Tributaries have been out ahunting about that time . . . ." Now, the Colonial Council was an august body and its...

The first thing theatergoers will notice about the revival of "A View of the Bridge," Arthur Miller's 1950s drama about a working-class Italian-American family in Red Hook, is that the characters are speaking a different language: Brooklynese. You got a problem with that!? You can hear the mellifluous — some might say grating — dialect being celebrated on Broadway by Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber. But that may be the only place. Linguists say features of the classic accent are heard less and less in the city itself, especially among the younger generation. Mocked and stereotyped, the long o's and...

Some believe that the Southern drawl has expanded to the point where, arguably, more than half of all Americans now glide their diphthongs and hush their R's like modern-day Rhett Butlers. Some professionals who travel around even adopt different regional dialects as they go, knowing it's one of the best ways to get ahead. But other experts believe mass communications and urbanization are cutting away at the distinctiveness of the Southern voice, resulting in a more mono-pitch America.

Cows also 'have regional accents' Cows moo with a regional twang Cow moo recordings(Click on site to hear) Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested. They decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from. John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London, said regional twangs had been seen before in birds. The farmers in Somerset who noticed the phenomenon said it may have been the result of the close bond between them and their animals. Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said:...

The Dialectizer takes text or other web pages and instantly creates parodies of them! Try it out by selecting a dialect, then entering a URL or English text...

In a June appearance on NBC's Today Show, singer Marc Anthony made an unusual but, according to some linguists, not-so-surprising word choice. When co-host Matt Lauer asked Anthony how he'd spend the upcoming weekend, Anthony said, "Y'all know I don't talk about my personal life." A New York native of Puerto Rican descent using "y'all," a distinctly Southern term? Linguists Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery would say Anthony is exhibit A in a national trend that is spreading the uses of "y'all" beyond the South. The two, who teach at the University of Texas at San Antonio, wrote an article...

PIKEVILLE, Ky. (AP) - A new class that seeks to teach youngsters how to lose their Appalachian accents has set off an age-old phonetic debate: Should mountain natives drop the drawl or hold tightly to their twang? The class, put on by an eastern Kentucky theater group, is designed for children in middle and high schools who want to reduce their accent to "broaden their performance opportunities and improve overall marketability." "We don't want people to be held back just because they have an accent," said Martin Childers, managing director of Jenny Wiley Theatre in Prestonsburg. "If you want to...

Holy whah! Some Yoopers fear colorful dialect may be fading By JOHN FLESHER The Associated Press 2/21/2004, 7:50 a.m. ET HOUGHTON, Mich. (AP) — Dan Junttila is a proud Yooper. So proud that he teaches a course at the local middle school on the history and culture of his beloved Upper Peninsula. So he would mourn if one of the most notable characteristics of da U.P. — dat colorful way of talkin' dey got up dere — were to fade away, eh? Holy whah! "I love the dialect," says the 51-year-old Junttila, born and bred in the western U.P.'s mining...

Michael Stravato for The New York Times John O. Greer is an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University. But when a couple of researchers sat down and talked with him recently, they were less interested in what he said than in how he said it. COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — "Are yew jus' tryin' to git me to talk, is that the ah-deah?" That was the idea. John O. Greer, an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University, sat at his dining table between two interrogators and their tape recorder. They had precisely 258 questions for him. But it waddn what...

THE MERLIN DIALECT The Merlin Dialect is spoken by a mixed population which inhabits a triangular area on the western littoral of the Chesapeake Bay, bounded roughly by a line commencing at Towson's Toyota, then westward to Frederick Mall, thence following the western border of the cable TV franchise and the string of McDonalds' along Route 50 to the Bay. All of these lands and the natives thereof are known as the Land of Merlin. They divide it further into semi-tribal areas called "Cannies" (e.g., Ballmer Canny, PeeJee Canny, Hard Canny, etc.). The dialect area is centered on a market...