Category: Games, Tests & Quizzes

America by dialect

From Andrew Sullivan:

Bored of red and blue states? How about states where people say “Grammy Hall” as opposed to “Grandma Hall”? Or states where students call an easy course a “gut”? It’s all here, if it’s a very slow day in the office. Bonus fun: use the results to find out if you’re more Yankee or Dixie! Believe it or not, I came out marginally Dixie. It’s the residue of my English accent, I suppose.

The first three sites listed by Sullivan are the Harvard Dialect Survey; it’s informative and quite interesting. The last, the Yankee/Dixie quiz, is interactive. It takes just a few minutes and is fun.

NewMexiKen was a Yankee (barely) but a lot of the individual answers revealed my Great Lakes childhood.

To be complete, the quiz should have included — green chili or red?

Sometimes NewMexiKen writes like a girl

The Gender Genie uses an algorithm to predict with 80 percent accuracy the gender of the writer.

Crudely put, men talk more about objects, and women more about relationships.

Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program’s developers, Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and colleagues. Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more).

Source: Nature

The Gender Genie works best on texts of more than 500 words, so plan to cut and paste something you’ve written.