by Dan Moren
What part of the UK/Ireland are you from, based on linguistics
I’ve always prided myself on being conversant with many terms from the English spoken in Ireland and Great Britain, having read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies and TV from those countries while growing up.1
However, this quiz in the New York Times has revealed the sad truth: my ability to pass for a native of those countries is limited not only by my lack of a reliable accent, but also my mishmash of terms from all across the countries. While I can recognize a lot of the words and expressions here, I can’t put them together into a single consistent profile, which the quiz correctly pegged.
Folks in the U.S., however, should check out the author’s similar quiz from 2013, covering our own country. I found it scarily accurate, as it identified not only where I was from, but its second-place guess was where my mother grew up and much of my extended family is from. Language is endlessly fascinating.
- And, of course, I lived in Scotland for six months during college, which really brought home the old “two people separate by a common language” chestnut. ↩