Linguist Rick Aschmann is incredibly detailed when it comes to hearing, dissecting, and detailing dialects. He and his wife have worked as Christian missionaries in many regions, including Ecuador where, according to their website, they have helped translate the Bible into the Quichua Indian language. So when he created the map of North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns, it was with great complexity and care.
He shared on his site, “This is just a hobby of mine, that I thought might be interesting to a lot of people. Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins. I collect dialects.” And he most certainly does. In fact, his “dialect map” is so intricate, it might be rather confusing to some.
Just five words
Luckily, map expert Matt Forrest has come along to help simplify it. What’s even more exciting is that Forrest makes a bold proclamation at the beginning of his Facebook clip: “So this map can tell you exactly where you grew up based on how you pronounce five words.”
Forrest explains, “What it’s showing here is just every American English dialect, mapped by pronunciation patterns. The West is basically one giant region. California and Oregon. Washington. Most of the mountain West. Linguistically, they’re all pretty much the same and Rick makes it one zone.”
He then explains the logic behind why the region has similar pronunciations. “It kinda makes sense when you think about how this area was settled. It was settled in a very short window. There’s massive population mixing and everything just kinda leveled out and is the same.”
NYC has its own ’16 vowel system’
Forrest moves the map to the East to show the polarity. “Go over to the East Coast, you can drive 45 minutes, and you can cross like three different dialect boundaries,” he says. He then shares that New York City alone has its own “16 vowel system.” He gives the examples of the words “bad” and “had.” and points out those two words “don’t even rhyme for a lot of New Yorkers.”
Forrest also uses New Orleans to exemplify how quickly a dialect can change, even across one city. “Different neighborhoods, totally different sounds,” he shares while giving many examples all across the city.
Here’s where Forrest truly breaks down the sounds. “You’ve got the ‘pin’ and the ‘pen’ line,” which he claims crosses the entire country. “South of it (the line) the word ‘pin’ and ‘pen’ are the same sound. North of it, they’re different.” He notes that it’s not a state-by-state occurrence. “It doesn’t follow a single state border,” he remarks, explaining the Texas cattle drive in the 1800s possibly spread Southern pronunciation north along those trails.
Now it’s time for the South, which, again, Forrest points out has cities and states with their own vowel shifts. In some parts, they do pronounce ‘pen’ and ‘pin’ differently, which he notes “is unusual for that area.”
The words ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ are also telling. Back West in San Francisco, Forrest shares it’s one of the only places in the West where the two words are pronounced differently. “And the word ‘on’ rhymes with ‘dawn’ instead of ‘d-o-n.”
900 audio samples
“The craziest thing about this whole map is I don’t think it can ever be reproduced,” Forrest explains. “This guy built it in a program called ‘paint.net.’ It’s like a layered, personal project, so there’s no mapping software behind it. It’s just this one guy with decades of research. There’s 900 audio samples, so if you click on the map, it actually brings you to audio samples.”
So, what were the five words exactly? Many in the Facebook comments want to know and one commenter made it even clearer than Forrest did, based on Aschmann’s own “map notes.” They write, “Pin/Pen. Caught/cot. Dawn/don. Merry/Marry/Mary and Bad.”
Not everyone agrees
The comment section had a field day. One Facebooker joked, “Long Island generated its own new ‘æ’ diphthong that ends up in ‘bad’ and turns it into a grating 1.5- or 2-syllable word.”
Some add their own experience. One shared, “You can drive from Cincinnati to Cleveland and the word ‘crayon’ will completely change along the way. Crans, Kray-ons etc. all the way to Crowns.”
Clearly, it takes a map expert to decipher a linguist’s extremely detailed dialect map. And it takes thousands of readers to make sense of the expert. Some might say it takes a merry village, but how they pronounce “merry” is a different story.
