Random: Accents Quiz

[nebroadwe]

I'm fascinated, in a couch-potato way, by linguistics -- I've studied several different languages, dead and alive, and enjoy a good discussion of how they relate to one another or how regional and class variations arise and differ and merge. (I'm the person who, when the occasion arises, will start demanding of everyone in the room "All right, what do you call those sugar-bits on top of the ice cream?" or "How do you pronounce the word that describes that period of time when the sun is just rising?" or "What's the plural of 'you'?") So I found this quiz identifying American accents quite interesting; it seems to be sufficiently well-constructed to yield a reasonably accurate answer. Such as ...

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Philadelphia Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. If you've ever journeyed to some far off place where people don't know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn't have a clue what accent it was they heard.
The Northeast
The Midland
The Inland North
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

... which just about gets it right: my parents were raised in several of the areas noted and I picked up my composite accent from them rather than from voices native to the place where I grew up, I believe. Must forward this on to some family members to see if they come up with the same answer (particularly the sibling who lived for a good number of years in Texas and whose speech-rhythms, if naught else, started to slip southward after a while :-).

Thanks to canarynoir for the pointer.