Say what? Harvard professor maps speech patterns

Regardless of what you say or how you say it, Bert Vaux, an associate linguistics professor at Harvard University, would like a moment of your time. Vaux (rhymes with hawks) is conducting an online survey to map differences in U.S. speech patterns.

The survey, to be used to compile an atlas of the nation's English dialects, has no right or wrong answers.

It seeks to discover distinct dialectical differences in pronunciation, grammar and usage. For each question (for example, do you say route to rhyme with hoot or out?) a respondent's answer is represented on a map by a tiny, colored dot.

Get enough of the same colored dots in one place, and linguistic patterns start to emerge.

What do you call a device in a park or playground where you can get a sip of water? If you're like most people in the United States, you call it a drinking fountain or water fountain. If, however, you live in Boston or Milwaukee, Vaux's survey shows, you likely call it a "bubbler."

Bubbler was once used in a continuous band from the Milwaukee to Boston area," Vaux said. "It just died out in the middle."

More than 30,000 people have taken Vaux's free survey. You can take it, too, at www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/. (It has 120 questions, so allow at least 20 minutes.)

To Vaux, the survey shows two main things: that mass culture has not stripped the United States of its regional identity and that language snobs need to lighten up and stop trying to quash dialectical differences.

"I think the most important point for laypeople is this survey shows pretty clearly that linguistic features that you thought were idiosyncrasies or local-yokel terms are actually quite widespread," he said. "So when people take the survey and look at the maps, I am hoping that they will see that they shouldn't be so dogmatic about the features of their speech being right."

Although strict grammarians may disagree, Vaux does not believe any sincere attempt at pronunciation is ever wrong — not even nook-u-ler or mis-CHEEV-ee-ous.

They're all part of our big rainbow of dialectical variations, he said. Proscriptive pronunciation, he said, can lead to hurtful cases of bias and stereotyping, such as sometimes happens when speakers of Ebonics are automatically and wrongfully assumed to be slower than other students.

James Hartman, an English professor at the University of Kansas, said he agreed and disagreed with Vaux.

"From a technical point of view, I agree with him," he said, "The point that he is missing is that people have attitudes about pronunciation. And to the degree that people think 'nook-u-lar' is wrong, that's the degree that it's wrong."

Pronunciation is like fashion, Hartman said. While it changes over the years, there always are definite dos and don'ts. In other words, if you are out of step with the accepted pronunciation, people may form negative opinions of you.

"Sounds very interesting," he said. "I'm going to check it out myself. This kind of contemporary information is not very easy to come by. It's the kind of stuff that would take a person years to collect if they had to go out and get it."

Vaux said he's not trying to standardize U.S. pronunciation. He's just trying to describe it.

That said, it's interesting to see how most in the United States talk. Some survey results to consider:

• More people pronounce "route" to rhyme with hoot than to rhyme with out. But the majority of respondents said they use the two interchangeably.

• Most people pronounce "poem" as a two-syllable word, not as a one-syllable word.

• Far more people report saying soda (57 percent) than pop (27 percent). Soda dominates in the heavily populated Northeast, while pop is strong in the Midwest. In the South, the most popular choice by far is to call any carbonated beverage a Coke.

• Tennis shoes or sneakers? Most in the United States say (drumroll please ... ) sneakers. But it's close. Sneakers (46 percent) dominates on the East Coast, while tennis shoes (41 percent) is more common virtually everywhere else.

• What do you put on top of a cake? The farther north you live, the more likely you are to call it frosting. The farther south you are, the better chance you say icing.

• Here's a close one — "caramel." It's pronounced as a two-syllable word — car-ml — by 38.02 percent of respondents, and as a three-syllable word — car-ra-mel — by 37.66 percent. But do you say caramel differently when you say caramel corn or caramel apple?

• Finally, here's one the folks at Webster's might want to notice. The preferred pronunciation of almond is without pronouncing the "l" — ah-mond. But 60 percent of respondents pronounced the "l" to sound like all-mond.

I did the survey, but you don't get personal results; it doesn't tabulate anything. But it does have maps of the different regions and how certain words are pronounced around the country.

Looks like this isn't a real hot topic tonight.

Regional accents? Who would have guessed? Next thing, this guy will reinvent the wheel.

Ok, I'll play because I like this sort of thing. I notice that most kids get into a thing where they try to talk in that accentless tv lingo, then as they get older they revert to their regions dialect.

My two cents:

Growing up in Eastern Massachusetts the word was "tonic" which I use to this day.

• Not many people use "sack" anymore. Ninety percent say bag.

I well remember when I first went to the Left Coast as a college freshman. When asked if I wanted my stuff in a sack, I didn't know what the heck they were talking about.

I think I'll make myself a frappe.

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