Map of American Dialects

Original article here.

Do you pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd? Do you refer to multiple people as “dey”? Is a jelly doughnut called a “bismark,” or is everything that comes out of a soda fountain called a coke, even if it’s really 7-Up? Do you root for Da Bears?

The way we speak, both the phrases we use and the accents that inflect those phrases, come from our upbringings. And in a nation of more than 300 million people, it’s little wonder that those accents vary widely. More than a decade ago, Robert Delaney, a reference associate at Long Island University, put together this map of the 24 regions of American English:

Dialects and Subdialects of American English in the 48 conterminous states, image copyright Robert Delaney

Here’s a quick rundown of the regions Delaney identified:

Eastern New England: These are the cah pahkahs, the blue collar residents from Maine to Massachusetts who drop their Rs and substitute an H. Think Jack Donaghy when he hangs out with Nancy Donovan on “30 Rock.”
Boston Urban: There are a few sub-dialects in the Hub, from the stereotypical Southie dialect (Sully and Denise on “Saturday Night Live”) to the Boston Brahmin (John Kerry). The differences are more determined by class than anything else.
Western New England: Outside eastern Massachusetts, it’s the T that gets dropped. The last Democratic president was Bill Clin-n, for example. It’s not as distinctive as the eastern accent.
Hudson Valley: Dutch settlers, Delaney says, influenced language development north of New York City. The sitting area in front of your doorstep is a stoop, and the best-sellers at Dunkin’ Donuts are crullers and olycooks.
New York City: The mix of ethnicities that built the Big Apple created their own dialect that doesn’t sound much like the rest of America. TH sounds become Ds, and words get smashed together easily. There’s no better example than Marisa Tomei and Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinny.”
Bonac: A small and dwindling dialect on Long Island, which was once a part of New England. Combine New York City and Eastern New England and you get the idea.
Inland Northern: Upstate New York and Vermont combine Western New England and the Midwest, and words like marry, merry and Mary are all pronounced identically. Delaney points out another doughnut difference: Here, they’re called friedcakes.
San Francisco Urban: The city by the bay has more in common with the East Coast than the West Coast, thanks to the settlers who originally made their way to the Bay Area. San Franciscans speak a mishmash of Northeastern and Midwestern English.
Upper Midwestern: Home of the Midwestern twang, influenced by a combination of Northeasterners and Southerners who migrated up the Mississippi River, as well as the Scandinavian immigrants who settled the area. A subdialect in and around Minnesota reflects more of that Norwegian influence. Think “Drop Dead Gorgeous.”
Chicago Urban: Bill Swerski would be proud. Chicago’s distinctive dialect is influenced by what linguists call the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, when short vowels started sounding like their longer cousins. Chicago’s dialect was influenced by migrants who traveled along the Erie Canal, west from the Northeast. They root, of course, for Da Bears.
North Midland: Here’s where the European immigrants who didn’t move to New York City start playing a role. The Scotch-Irish, German and Quaker settlers from Pennsylvania to the central Midwest created what Delaney calls a “transition zone” between the north and south. Doughnuts are dunkers or fatcakes.
Pennsylvania German-English: A small but distinct dialect in the center of the Keystone State, probably spoken by Dwight Schrute’s ancestors. The grammar system is the most distinctive remnant of the region’s immigrant populations; it sounds more like German than English.
Rocky Mountain: Think Montana, Colorado and Utah. Heavy influences from frontier settlers and Native American languages.
Pacific Northwest: More influence from Native American languages. An example is the potluck, a gathering where everyone brings a dish, a derivation of the Native American “potlatch.” Muckatymuck, known elsewhere as a big shot, is another Native American term adopted by Northwesterners. But there’s less of an accent here than elsewhere, given the fact that the region was settled relatively recently.
Pacific Southwest: The settlers who showed up came to California for the gold, and that still shows in some of their slang — Delaney cites “pay dirt,” “pan out” and “goner” as phrases that started in California. Sub-dialects of Valley Girls and Surfer Dudes are ripe for parody, as in Cher and Travis from the timeless classic “Clueless.”
Southwestern: Mexican dialects of Spanish infuse Southwestern English, though the region is still what Delaney calls a melting pot of other dialects. Words like “patio” and “plaza” became a part of everyday English thanks to the Southwest.
South Midland: West of the Appalachians and into North Texas, speakers here sometimes put an A before a word ending in -ING, in place of words like “are.” TH is often replaced with an F. Delaney says this region retains more strains of Elizabethan English than modern British English has, including words like “ragamuffin,” “reckon” and “sorry,” meaning “inferior.”
Ozark: Southern Appalachian settlers developed their own dialect, best embodied in pop culture by the Beverly Hillbillies.
Southern Appalachian: The “g” in gerunds doesn’t survive often here. But overall, the accent is pretty similar to the South Midlands.
Virginia Piedmont: A syrupy drawl starts to develop south of Washington, where the letter R, when coming after a vowel, becomes what Delaney calls a slided sound. So “four dogs” sounds like “fo-uh dahawgs.”
Coastal Southern: Similar to the Piedmont drawl, but with more remnants of Colonial English. Something diagonally across the street is “catty-corner.”
Gullah: A Creole mix found in coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina combines English with West African languages brought over by slaves who entered the U.S. in the 1700s and 1800s. Words like “peruse,” “yam” and “samba” all entered the country here.
Gulf Southern: Basically the Deep South minus Georgia and New Orleans. It’s a result of mixing English settlers from the southern colonies with French settlers in Louisiana, and it’s where we get words like “armoire,” “bisque” and “bayou.”
Louisiana: The French settlers who first traveled up the Mississippi River brought a whole mess of dialects. They include Cajun French, which incorporates some Spanish, and Cajun English, which makes New Orleans “Nawlins.”

Here’s another way linguists view the English dialects spoken in the U.S.:

A new clue to the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance?

original post here. I never heard of this island or this theory before this article - wonder if it could ever be solved.... Seems like an interesting, but hostile, island to visit (do a wiki search on Gardner Island).

Left: An undated photograph of Amelia Earhart in the cockpit of an airplane. Right: Earhart’s twin-motored monoplane on June 1, 1937. (AP)

On June 1, 1937, a Miami Herald photographer arrived at the Miami Municipal Airport to document the most famous female adventurer in national history. Amelia Earhart was in town on the fourth leg of her doomed trip across the globe. The image the photographer snapped wasn’t much to look at — just a plane resting on the tarmac as dawn’s light punched through a darkened sky. So it’s no wonder the picture remained forgotten for decades — until it suddenly reemerged this July and rekindled one of the most enduring mysteries in American history: What happened to Amelia Earhart?

The image had a very unusual detail, unique among thousands of pictures of Earhart’s aircraft. On the rear of the plane was a patch of shiny metal a shade lighter than rest of the plane’s exterior. “Could it be a clue — the clue — to what happened when Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished somewhere over the trackless Pacific Ocean three months later?” the Miami Herald asked.

This was the final bit of information prolific Earhart sleuth Ric Gillespie had been waiting for to finally substantiate suspicions he has harbored for decades. He doesn’t think Earhart ran out of gas over the Pacific Ocean and crashed and sank, as others contend. He thinks she and her navigator made it miles beyond their last confirmed position to arrive at the uninhabited Gardner Island, where they starved to death. This unearthed picture was important, he said. It appeared to match an otherwise unusual metal fragment recovered from the island.

This week, he claimed he proved the connection. “During Amelia Earhart’s stay in Miami at the beginning of her second world flight attempt, a custom-made, special window on her Lockheed Electra aircraft was removed and replaced with an aluminum patch,” wrote Gillespie, the director of an Earhart search organization called Tighar, which Gillespie at one point ran out of his garage. ” … The patch was as unique to her particular aircraft as a fingerprint to an individual. Research has now shown that a section of aircraft aluminum Tighar found on [the island] in 1991 matches that fingerprint in many cases.”
...... Gillespie’s conclusion, neither academic nor peer-reviewed, is based on comparing the metal fragment found on Gardner Island to a model replica of the Electra.

Researchers probing Earhart’s disappearance of famed American aviator Amelia Earhart said they believe a slab of aluminum, above, found decades ago on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean came from her aircraft. (REUTERS/The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery)

 Their investigation unfurled as follows: The team huddled around a clipboard, pictures show. Then they held the metal fragment against the interior of the plane where they think the hole in Earhart’s plane might have been. It appeared to be a perfect fit, but could they be sure? “Because the artifact is necessarily several inches closer to the camera than the skin of the aircraft, it appears to be a bit too big to fit,” the team wrote in their analysis. “That’s an illusion.”

The ongoing drama over the metal fragment hints at the longtime clash of wills and theories between Long, who authored a book purporting to show Earhart crashed at sea and sank, and Gillespie, who thinks she starved to death on Gardner Island. To Gillespie, Long is “the patron saint of the crashed-and-sank school,” and he published a full takedown of Long’s book. “Rather than reach a conclusion which flows logically from the evidence, Long began where most researchers hope to end,” Gillespie wrote.

A location designated by TIGHAR as the Seven Site on the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro, formerly Gardiner Island, in the South Pacific, where researchers say they found bone fragments that could help prove Earhart died as a castaway. (AP

He thinks the Electra was “torn apart” and now lurks in fragments along the underwater reef slope off the island’s shore. His team has already trolled those waters twice — and found nothing. But now, after someone on team Tighar “spotted an unusual feature in the sonar imagery,” he reiterated this week the plane is down there, 600 feet beneath the surface.

“The new research on [the metal fragment] may reinforce the possibility that the anomaly is the rest of the aircraft,” he wrote. “The artifact is not, as previously suspected, a random fragment from an aircraft shredded by the surface.”

So Gillespie, with the release of his new research, has gone into fundraising mode. His team is slated to return to the island in 2015 to finally put this mystery to bed once and for all. As he told Discovery News: “Funding is being sought, in part, from individuals who will make a substantial contribution in return for a place on the expedition team.” He added: “Is the anomaly the aircraft? The only way to know is to look.”

Forget Facebook, Abandon Instagram, Move To A Village

Great NPR Article, from here by Diane Cole. I especially support the conclusion at the end.


"In the parts of the world that we cover in our blog, many people live in villages.
Villages have their problems, to be sure. There may not be a doctor or clinic nearby. Girls may not be able to go to school. Clean water might be a long walk away.

But a new book points out that village life has its advantages.

We asked psychologist Susan Pinker, author of The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier and Smarter, to explain the benefits of living in a community of about 150 people, the average population of traditional villages throughout history around the world.

What is the village effect?
The village effect is a metaphor for the social contacts we all need as humans in order to thrive. These are the strong social ties that develop naturally in a village, where by necessity you cross paths with each other repeatedly every day. When you think of most villages, there is a central square, a public area where everyone converges or passes by going to the grocer or the post office or city hall or to sit at a cafe. And that is something we have less and less of today in our era of online connections. Commerce is moving online, everything is moving online, and these traditional village spaces are disappearing.

Why is 150 the ideal number for a village population?
One-hundred-fifty is the number that comes up time and again in the types of social interactions that work smoothly. We see it throughout history — whether we're talking about the number of people in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, Neolithic villages, an English country village or the number of Christmas cards we send out. These are people with whom you have strong enough ties that you could ask to borrow $10 until the next payday.

How do these 150 "village" ties compare to online ties?
Not all types of social ties are created equal. Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar posits 150 as the maximum number of meaningful relationships that the human brain can manage. We know from our own lives there are only so many people that you can invest in that way, that you can call and invite to dinner or check in on when sick.

 

These are the types of social ties that develop naturally in a village, where by necessity you cross paths with each other repeatedly every day. When you think of most villages, there is a central square, a public area where everyone converges or passes by going to the grocer or the post office or city hall or sit at a cafe. And so these ties develop naturally through frequent in-person contact.
These are different from the weak contacts that you might have in your online social networks. You could walk by some of these online contacts on the street without even recognizing them. These weak contacts are great if you need a recommendation for a restaurant in a strange city, for instance, or [are] looking for a cleaning lady or other types of information. But in terms of social ties, it's the difference between your mother's lasagna or homemade chicken soup compared with fast food.

Why is the village effect so important?
If you have a cohesive community, you will have extra helping hands for the young and the old and everybody in between. The village effect impacts not only those who are vulnerable but it helps people feel they belong somewhere.

And if we know anything from all of the demographic studies in neurosciences, if you are lonely or isolated, it is almost a death sentence.

When you are getting together face to face, there are a lot of biological phenomena: Oxytocin and neurotransmitters get released, they reduce stress and allow us to trust others. Physical contact unleashes a whole chain of events that make us and make the other person feel good, and affects our health and well-being.

By contrast, according to research, we've never been lonelier as a society than we are now, and this can take a toll on our health.

Those of us who don't live in villages — are we out of luck?
 You can create your own village effect. Get out of your car to talk to your neighbors. Talk in person to your colleagues instead of shooting them emails. Build in face-to-face contact with friends the way you would exercise. Look for schools where the emphasis is on teacher-student interaction, not on high-tech bells and whistles.

We need to recognize that digital connections should enhance but never replace the real-life connections. I don't think we all should throw out digital devices and move back to the village. I'm not romanticizing village life but using it as a metaphor as what is disappearing: deep social ties and the in-person contact we all need to survive."

Jack-0-Latern Sun image taken from our old friend SDO

NASA SDO Image: Jack-o-Lantern Sun From here

Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space.
The active regions in this image appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy.  They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. This image blends together two sets of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths at 171 and 193 Ångströms, typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance

Lego Batman to get his own movie - and another Lego movie coming.....

Batman Gets His Own LEGO Movie

Master Builders, rejoice! Warner Brothers has announced Will Arnett’s return as the voice of Batman in a LEGO Movie spinoff coming in 2017.

With The LEGO Movie standing firm as the highest-grossing animated film of 2014, an eventual sequel in development and a LEGO Ninjago film coming in 2016, the LEGO-verse is having a pretty great year. Now, The Hollywood Reporter has announced that the LEGO Movie version of Batman will be getting his own film as well.

The LEGO Batman movie is due out in 2017.

Family Halloween Ideas for the Yard

Here are a few things that were on the web. Maybe we can do something similar?

From geekmom

Coywolves, coyote-wolf hybrids, are prowling Rock Creek Park and D.C. suburbs

from here,  By Sadie Dingfelder July 1, 2014

Perfectly adapted to living among humans, coywolves eat just about anything, including deer, mice, feral cats and last night’s leftovers from your garbage can. (Photo by Jonathan Way)

On an overcast morning in May, Melissa Farley, 25, and her dog, Kai, went for a hike in Rock Creek Park. They were walking on the outskirts of the public golf course when two creatures emerged from the woods.

“At first, I thought they were stray dogs or lost dogs,” Farley says. “They were really beautiful, kind of grayish and cool in color, and almost as big as Kai.”

Kai, a 60-pound German shepherd mix, took off after them. Farley listened helplessly as the animals fought in the underbrush. When Kai returned, dog and owner sprinted back to their Brightwood condo.

When Farley reported the incident to rangers the next day, they told her she’d had a run-in with Rock Creek Park’s resident coyotes.

Farley, however, isn’t so sure.

“I’ve seen a lot of coyotes out west,” says Farley, who recently returned to D.C. after six years in Los Angeles. “This was no average coyote.”

Farley probably saw a coywolf — a coyote-wolf hybrid — says Javier Monzon, a genetics researcher at Stony Brook University in New York.

Regular coyotes, which are native to the American Southwest and the Great Plains area, tend to be tawny-colored and weigh around 25 pounds. Coywolves run upward of 45 pounds and come in an array of hues, including gray and black.

“We’ve known for a while that most Eastern coyotes are hybrids to some degree, and now we’re finding a greater degree of hybridization than anyone expected,” Monzon says.

In lay terms: The coyotes in Rock Creek Park are probably coywolves.

Just a few hundred years ago, coyotes stuck to the plains between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. As humans killed off wolves, coyotes took over their territory. The coyotes that pressed north into Canada came across the remnants of wolf populations and interbred, creating a hybrid creature that’s small enough to live undetected among humans, but large enough to feast on fawns (though perhaps not full-sized deer).

In other words, they are perfectly adapted to the I-95 corridor, Monzon says.

“The more deer there are around, the more wolf-like the coywolves tend to be,” he says.

Coywolves are about 62 percent coyote, 27 percent wolf and 11 percent dog,according to a 2013 paper by Monzon published in Molecular Ecology. Researchers have found them as close as Quantico, Va., and surrounding Prince William County, and game-management officials have confirmed their presence in Laytonsville, Md., in Montgomery County.

A Rock Creek Park spokesman denies their existence in D.C., however.

“We don’t have any evidence to suspect that our coyotes here in Rock Creek Park are anything other than just normal coyotes,” says the park’s acting deputy superintendent, Jeremy Sweat.

Game officials tend to shy away from the term “coywolf,” since it sounds scary, like “werewolf,” says Megan Draheim, a professor at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources, National Capital Region.

“It’s not my favorite term either,” she says. “To be a coywolf sounds like half-coyote, half-wolf, and that’s not really what we’re talking about. We are talking about coyotes that have interbred with timber wolves and have some wolf genes in them. It can be fairly negligible or it can be more,” she says.

Wolf genes seem to be spreading quickly and thoroughly through the Eastern coyote population, Monzon says. His 2013 study found that even Ohio coyotes had wolf genes, a surprising finding that suggests coywolves are moving south from New England through the D.C. area and circling back westward.

We won’t know the precise genetic makeup of Rock Creek Park’s canids until someone conducts a study, but they look pretty wolf-y to D.C. resident Gareth Wishart.

The 28-year-old conservationist, who’s tracked coyotes in Montana and wolves in Spain, says he’s seen coywolves in Rock Creek Park on two different occasions, most recently in January.

“It came to within about 8 yards of us,” says Wishart, who took a friend to the park for some wildlife spotting one evening.

“Their size is really noticeable — how much bigger they are than coyotes out west. They are much stockier and you can notice the difference in the size of their skull.”

Wishart, who wrote about an earlier coywolf encounter for Gizmodo.com, was thrilled to find the apex predators in such an urban park.

“It’s a presence you can really feel when you’re out in the woods I think,” he says. “It’s one that I appreciate, at least, and I hope others do as well.”

Farley has a different perspective. Though Kai escaped with just two puncture wounds on his hindquarters, both dog and human are wary of the woods these days.

“I liked it better when I was growing up in D.C., and we didn’t have any coyotes or coywolves or whatever,” she says. “But they’re here now, so what are you going to do?”

Are they dangerous?

Not to humans, though outdoor cats and unattended dogs have reason to be concerned.

The most important thing is to walk your dog with a leash, says Rock Creek Park’s acting deputy superintendent, Jeremy Sweat. Coyotes have been living in Rock Creek Park since at least 2004, and there have been only two reported attacks, both on dogs that were running through the woods off-leash, he says.

“Especially in the spring and early summer, a lot of these coyotes might have dens in the park. They might have young pups. If a dog approaches them off leash, they are much more likely to act aggressively to protect their young or protect their territory,” Sweat says.

If the presence of coyotes or coywolves makes D.C. slightly scarier for pets, that goes double for rodents, says Megan Draheim, a professor at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources, National Capital Region.

“They eat a lot of rats and mice,” she says. “That’s something we can all appreciate.”

Full Lunar Eclipse - right before dawn 10/8

We were up early to witness this. It was very pretty; and 'insanely nerdy' according to at least one of my kids.

Image from Nelis Du Toit, GSFC Astro Club, this one taken at 6:16AM.

Cool Pictures from Newsweek.com 

A "blood moon" was once a terrifying event for our ancestors, who struggled to explain the orb's sudden transformation into a fiery red ball. Modern-day observers understand the science behind the event, but it still provides an opportunity for people to gaze in wonder at the night sky.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, depending on where in the world you were, a total eclipse made a “blood moon” visible for observers in Asia, Australia and North and South America.