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SALT LAKE CITY — A new visualization of a study highlights the differences between dialects throughout the United States and offers insight into Utah's own unique accent.
North Carolina State University graduate student Joshua Katz mined linguistics data compiled by Dr. Bert Vaux of Cambridge University to determine where in the country certain pronunciation differences were more common.
Vaux compiled the data using a 120-question survey that included questions ranging from the participants' pronunciation of "caramel" to whether they say "TP-ing" or "toilet papering" to refer to the Halloween prank.
"Dr. Vaux's maps showed each response as a single color-coded point, so you could see individual instances of each answer," Katz said. "I wondered if there was a way to take the existing data and create maps that gave a more complete picture of national dialect differences."
Katz's project does just that, using a statistical algorithm that weighs responses around a particular location. The responses can be broken down into percentage points in select cities, including Salt Lake City.
A pattern appears throughout the 120 maps. Some show pronunciation and usage common to much of the Western U.S., but many show obvious differences between how Utahns speak compared to the rest of the West. An area that includes all of Utah, southern Idaho, the southwestern corner of Wyoming and the eastern half of Idaho typically shows a difference in pronunciation — whether slight or dramatic — from the rest of the West.
Some of the differences are surprising (the darker the color, the stronger the response). Utahns apparently feel strongly about the second syllable of "cauliflower" being pronounced to rhyme with "sit" over "see," for instance.
Utahns are also more likely than the rest of the West to pronounce the "ai" in "Craig" to rhyme with "set" instead of "say." The last syllable of "handkerchief" also has a vowel sound that rhymes with "sit," rather than "see."
"Miracle" is much more likely to be pronounced with the first syllable rhyming with "knit" instead of "near," which is how most of the rest of the nation pronounces the word.
Utahns are more likely to pronounce words like "grocery," "nursery" and "anniversary" with an "sh" sound instead of an "s," with the biggest difference from the rest of the West being over the pronunciation of "nursery."
You're more likely to hear "hoagie" in Utah than in most of the rest of the nation, although "sub" is still the more popular term. And Utahns seem to feel strongly about the small gray creature that rolls up into a ball when touched being called a "potato bug" instead of a "roly poly," a preference shared with the extreme Pacific Northwest and parts of the Northeast.
Utahns feel less strongly about a sweetened carbonated beverages being called "soda" over "pop" than the Southwest, although the split is nearly even: 46.4 percent for soda to 41 percent for pop. And "caramel" is slightly more often heard as "car-mel" in Utah than in the rest of the West — barely.
All 120 questions are available online and can be broken down by major cities. Only the four most popular answers for each questions are displayed.
