In my speech class last week, we had a discussion about differences in regional speech. I knew that different regions of the United States have different accents but I never realized to what extent we have the same name for different objects or a different name for the same object. For a visual on this post I wanted a dialect map, and I found a whole article of them on the Huffington Post’s site. 
This dialect map shows that largely, we pronounce Mary, marry and merry the same. I was surprised that this was even a map at all; I always just assumed they were homophones, yet if you live in a limited region on the East Coast you pronounce a variation of the Mary/marry/merry differently. How do they pronounce it differently there? And why does their pronunciation differ from their neighbors?
Neighborly word disputes happen a lot here along the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Because the campus is so close to Minnesota, the student population is fairly half and half with each state. We are now in environments where we may mean the same thing but are saying something else and leading to a lot of confusion. For whatever reason most Minnesotans say hot dish instead of Wisconsinites casserole. To my way of thinking as a Wisconsinite a hot dish is something you put a casserole in, not something you eat. But to my Minnesotan friends, calling it a casserole is just wrong. Even within Wisconsin the whole bubbler, water fountain, drinking fountain debate is a hot one. Here’s a map for that…
As you can see about half of Wisconsin calls it a bubbler while the other half tends toward water fountain. I can’t begin to answer this question, but it is very curious to me the trends in this map. The West Coast largely calls it a drinking fountain, the East Coast goes by water fountain and the Midwest is somewhat mixed up in the middle. There are a few oddities like the east side of Massachusetts that say bubbler and the state of Michigan being surrounded by people calling it a water fountain. The Kohler company of eastern Wisconsin marketed it as a bubbler and that may be why people of eastern Wisconsin largely refer to it as a bubbler. With the bubbler, drinking/water fountain debate, if anyone says any of these three terms we all know they mean the same thing. Here’s a term I was surprised to learn differed so much by region…
If you are at a restaurant in the green region and the waiter comes to ask for your beverage they will ask “Would you like a coke?” If you say yes, they will say “What kind of coke would you like?”The actual Coca-Cola drink was first manufactured in that region so maybe they say coke as the soda or pop because that is their way of advertising coke is the staple sweetened carbonated beverage. The rest of the country seems to be evenly divided amongst people who call it soda and people who call it pop. And once again, Wisconsin is split in half. This map also seems to have less of a pattern: instead of the east coast being the opposite of the west coast this time they are both the same. The Northwest coast down to the Midwest calls it pop, and then there is that one random blob of people saying soda in the middle of Illinois and Missouri.
I attached the link to the article I discussed if you are interested in looking at that. For me, I’m curious what you think. Other than the reasons I touched on, what do you think might contribute to these differences in word choice? Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your thoughts.
Ponderings and Queries of Kylie Bowman 