Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1i611hm/americas_digital_dialects_how_reddit_reveals_the/
From the author:
"Hi, everyone—This map is based on my 2024 Linguistics PhD dissertation, A geographic analysis of lexical variation in North American English using Reddit corpora. (You can read it here.)
For this project, I extracted huge amounts of text data from top-ranked posts for subreddits dedicated to cities in the US, Canada, and Britain (although my project focused on North America). From each subreddit, I counted the usages of particular synonymous word pairs, like cute and adorable, or forest and woodland. I then calculated the ratio between the two words in each pair for each city subreddit. With each city subreddit corresponding to a real-world geographic location, I was able to run statistics to identify regional clustering in the usage of each word pair, and aggregate the overall patterns. This map shows the groupings of cities in the US that emerged from that analysis.
During my time as a grad student, I taught a course on the history of the English language for several years, and one of my favorite topics to cover was variation in American English. So when I did a dissertation project that combined linguistics, social media, and geography, I knew that I wanted to share my findings with others in order to promote engagement with linguistics and maybe help spark someone’s interest in language.
I have a Twitter thread up where I talk a bit more about the project, and I also have some slides on my personal website where I go into more detail about the methods and findings. You can also find maps of results for some of the individual variables on this page of my website."
Many of these terms are not true synonyms.
May vs might and freeway vs highway jumped out at me right away.
May can imply permission, while might is unambiguously up to chance or whim.
A freeway, at least as I understand it, is a highway with no stoplights or intersections to stop traffic. It has ramps for entering and exiting the flow.
A highway could be a freeway, but it also describes larger roads that may or may not have stoplights and intersections. Highways are any major roads that connect cities, towns, or counties.
I thought the same thing but it could be the misuse that makes the dialects distinct.
Agree. Esp. highway vs. freeway. At least in my region, anecdotally, people refer to them correctly and thus they are not synonyms.
Also the use of regional subreddits seems like a weak dataset. There are a lot of transplants on those subs who wouldn't have developed the same regional dialect. Perhaps that is why so many pairs were 50/50.
They mean slightly different things in places too because of regional need. In Texas, a "freeway" is a road without tolls on it, which would be a tollway. Because there's a lot of private, pay-as-you-go roads in TX.
Likewise "highway" is sometimes literally an elevated multilane road.
I wonder if the traditional exemplars of this (yall vs yous guys vs you or coke vs soda vs pop) have been so flattened out by the internet that they aren't as divided in use any more? People all over use yall now, I guess pop v soda is still a thing but southerners refer to generic "coke" less than they did in my youth.
TIL I had not hear the term "tollway" before. In PA we have one major toll road that spans the width of the state, from Philly to Pittsburgh, called the Turnpike. We also have several highways a freeways that are elevated in different areas. Pittsburgh has it's own unique version of "yous" which is "yinz." I haven't heard that anywhere else. It's supposed to be a shortened "you all ones" or "y'all unz" which became "yinz".