DIALECT SURVEY RESULTS.

The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes has put its results online (link is to a mirror site, since the original crashed due to, presumably, unexpectedly massive interest):

The composite map gives a picture of the overall distribution, coloring each cell according to whichever answer is estimated to be most likely at that location. The more clearly one answer dominates, the darker the color. Individual maps show estimated probability of each particular answer at a given location, with larger probabilities shown in red and smaller probabilities shown in blue. At the moment, only the four most popular answers for each survey question are displayed.

The linked page shows the soda/pop/coke map; use the pull-down menu at the upper left (labeled “Question:”) to see the others. There’s a selection here. Only vaguely related, but I can’t resist passing it along: here‘s “Chaffinch Map of Scotland,” a poem by Edwin Morgan (quondam Poet Laureate of Glasgow and since 2004 Scottish National Poet) showing “the different names used in Scottish dialects for chaffinch, varying from chaffinch in the north over shielyfaw in the middle to britchie in the south.” As the site says, “a cleverly multilayered combination of poetry, cartography, ornithology, linguistics, and maybe just a hint of Scottish nationalism.”

Comments

  1. Joshua Katz’s maps (publicized by the Business Insider article you link to) are based on the Harvard Dialect Survey conducted by Bert Vaux back in the early aughts. The Cambridge survey is a newer Vaux project.

  2. I’ve posted further details on Language Log.

  3. dearieme says

    As I may have mentioned before, in childhood we called soda/pop/coke “lemonade” so that you really could have a conversation that went
    “Which lemonade would you like?”
    “Oh, raspberryade, please.”
    In East Lothian I found that they called soda/pop/coke “juice”.

  4. marie-lucie says

    dearieme: lemonade, raspberryade
    I have seen the word ade used in writing, a back-formation from lemonade, etc. I don’t mean serious writing, but things like grocery store signs or ads.

  5. dearieme says

    m-l: the product range of a Glaswegian manufacturer of pop
    http://www.agbarr.co.uk/ces_brands.nsf/brands/brands-barr_raspberryade.html

  6. the word ade used in writing, a back-formation from lemonade, etc.
    I’ve seen it in crossword puzzles, but I don’t believe it is in the Scrabble dictionary.

  7. marie-lucie says

    Me too, actually I may have seen it more in crossword puzzles than elsewhere. Crossword puzzle makers tend to be innovative this way, taking advantage of recent vocabulary trends before most other “media” notice them. ADE is very useful as a short word with the very common vowels A and E, and D which is not rare at all as a consonant.

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