It's official: Maryland is a NORTHEASTERN state! (Midland: sale, live)

[sniffablecow]

Originally Posted by Tezcatlipoca

Looks like calling it a "Sunshower" is a very NYC area thing to do, and is probably responsible for the Yonkers placement. I'm curious what set off that huge spike around Albany.

Yeah, I learned sun shower from my grandmother, who never talked like someone in her state, but she learned how to talk from tv.

[westsideboy]

Well, in three samples, we have shown 3 major dialect regions in Maryland.

Tez is firmly placed in the coastal south, his map cools down signficantly when you hit PA to the North and the Allegheny Front to the west. He slowly grades out as you head south into SC and GA.

Cow's map lights up in three places, central MD, south Florida, and New York state. I'm going to guess Cow's has family in New York, or at minimum has relatives that grew up there. He has picked up enough of the downstate transplant dialect to glow red here, but the map is showing heavy influence from a very particular northern dialect, New York (which is why South Florida is red too, lots of New York tranplants there.)

My map is classic Midland with an Appalachian twist. I glow deep red in SW PA, Western Maryland, and WV. The map turns blue extremely quickly in the Southern tier counties of PA, where the Northern dialect region begins, but stays orange through most of the highland south, picking up in intensity again around the Ozarks......which makes sense since the Appalachian and Ozark dialects are similar.

Now we need long timers on the Eastern Shore and Baltimore City, and we should be able to complete our picture of the major dialects regions in our state.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by Tezcatlipoca

Me neither. The quiz is partially randomized (It picks 25 out of 30 or something like that) so I didn't get that question when I took it this afternoon though.

It seems to strongly associate the Caught-Cot / Don-Dawn distinction with Baltimore. Curious, it seems the distinction is heavily restricted to the North, Mid-Atlantic, and Coastal South which is less than I remember.
I did undergrad in Central PA, so most of my class had the merger. My Intro professor's attempts to explain the merger proved futile as over half the class not only were convinced Caught and Cot had the same vowel, but they also couldn't hear the difference when the professor pronounced those words.

The cot-caught merger is spreading rapidly. If a young person has it these days it is a pretty good diagnostic way of narrowing down where they are from.

And you are 100% right on vowel mergers. Once they are complete, a person can not only not reproduce the difference, but can't hear it either.

Thanks to my dear wife, my daughters have learned their daddy can't tell apart the vowels in pull/pole/pool, and had endless fun for a few days substituting one for the other in context and watching me respond normally because I can't hear the difference. The only way I catch it now is because they are under 10, and start laughing before they finish the sentence.

It's actually frustrating. It's the one part of my dialect I would change if I could. It's really hard to go to job interviews and talk about "you're ghouls in life." I have to work around a lot of words that I have learned other people hear differently, even though they sound identical to me.

Oh, I call easy classes "a blow off class." I don't think that is a regionalism, but it is the term I use, so I marked it accordingly. Same with sunshower.

[sniffablecow]

Originally Posted by westsideboy

The cot-caught merger is spreading rapidly. If a young person has it these days it is a pretty good diagnostic way of narrowing down where they are from.

And you are 100% right on vowel mergers. Once they are complete, a person can not only not reproduce the difference, but can't hear it either.

Thanks to my dear wife, my daughters have learned their daddy can't tell apart the vowels in pull/pole/pool, and had endless fun for a few days substituting one for the other in context and watching me respond normally because I can't hear the difference. The only way I catch it now is because they are under 10, and start laughing before they finish the sentence.

It's actually frustrating. It's the one part of my dialect I would change if I could. It's really hard to go to job interviews and talk about "you're ghouls in life." I have to work around a lot of words that I have learned other people hear differently, even though they sound identical to me.

Oh, I call easy classes "a blow off class." I don't think that is a regionalism, but it is the term I use, so I marked it accordingly. Same with sunshower.

I pronounce pole different from pull and pool, but pronounce pool and pull the same. I also call the curl up bugs pill bugs, but I thought that was the name of the bug.

[ialmostforgot]

Originally Posted by Richard Martin

Actually what I meant is that Marydel is a typical Southern town. A much slower pace of life, clean and polite but a little on the poor side.

What I was saying was that you were talking about a town. U146 did not understand this.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by sniffablecow

I pronounce pole different from pull and pool, but pronounce pool and pull the same. I also call the curl up bugs pill bugs, but I thought that was the name of the bug.

Too much science as a young kid for me on that dialect question. I have called them isopods since I was in elementary school, so "other" is what I have to mark.

[ialmostforgot]

Originally Posted by sniffablecow

I pronounce pole different from pull and pool, but pronounce pool and pull the same. I also call the curl up bugs pill bugs, but I thought that was the name of the bug.

We call 'em roly polies. Pull=/=Pool=/=Pole

[ialmostforgot]

Originally Posted by westsideboy

The cot-caught merger is spreading rapidly. If a young person has it these days it is a pretty good diagnostic way of narrowing down where they are from.

And you are 100% right on vowel mergers. Once they are complete, a person can not only not reproduce the difference, but can't hear it either.

Thanks to my dear wife, my daughters have learned their daddy can't tell apart the vowels in pull/pole/pool, and had endless fun for a few days substituting one for the other in context and watching me respond normally because I can't hear the difference. The only way I catch it now is because they are under 10, and start laughing before they finish the sentence.

It's actually frustrating. It's the one part of my dialect I would change if I could. It's really hard to go to job interviews and talk about "you're ghouls in life." I have to work around a lot of words that I have learned other people hear differently, even though they sound identical to me.

Oh, I call easy classes "a blow off class." I don't think that is a regionalism, but it is the term I use, so I marked it accordingly. Same with sunshower.

I never really had a name for an easy class. It's just an easy class.

With vowel mergers, the only one I think I have is the Mary/merry/marry merger (they're all "mury," because in my dialect the R does funny things to the short "u" and long "a" sounds. I can hear the difference, though, when people say "mehry" and "mærry."

[ialmostforgot]

Originally Posted by Tezcatlipoca

You'll notice in most dialect studies or maps they have no samples from SoMD, and generally few to none from the eastern shore. There's often a lack of samples from the Tidewater area outside of Hampton Roads too. So the mappers will tend to put these areas where they 'think they belong', due to bias or their idea of common knowledge or whatever. Labov (4th Map) had NO samples from SoMD or the Eastern Shore, and the closest Aschmann (1st Map) has to SoMD is Clinton, PG County, which is at the edge of SoMD at best. For the Eastern Shore he has Frank Perdue, and Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio who to me sounds like she just has your educated General American accent with the Maryland pronunciation of "on" as "awn" tacked on.

I know on YouTube somewhere there is a video taking about hurricane Sandy and there were some good Crisfield accents in there.

Rock Newman has a good example of VA Piedmont (He's from the area around Brandywine, MD), and is part of an old triracial family from SoMD. Don't know how they missed those...

[sniffablecow]

Originally Posted by ialmostforgot

We call 'em roly polies. Pull=/=Pool=/=Pole

suprisingly, roly polies are quite generic. My friend from indiana calls them potato bugs, but anyone else I have met calls them roly polies. I just call them pillbugs because thats was what I learned in school in books and from teachers.