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Showing posts with the label #HarvardDialectSurvey

Mapping How Americans Talk - Soda vs. Pop vs. Coke

#Coke #HarvardDialectSurvey #Pop #Soda What's your general term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? What word or words do you use to address a group of two or more people? What do you call it when the rain falls while the sun is shining? Former Harvard professor Bert Vaux asked tens of thousands of people across the U.S. these questions and released the results as the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey. The data are fascinating; they reveal patterns of migration, unexpected linguistic kinships between regions, and the awesome variety of words we say and how we say them. The study has wormed its way into popular consciousness and periodically morphs into a meme (just search "accent tag" on YouTube). Last summer, North Carolina State University graduate student Joshua Katz turned Vaux's geographical data into a set of stunning heat maps that went viral. For the video above, we called people across the country to ask them a few of Vaux's questions, then layered