We got the exact same score. Surprising, since San Diego and Los Angeles are worlds apart.

Don't take that quiz too seriously. I mean, it had only 20 questions.

And question 20 didn't allow for the fact that many people (like me, for example) pronounce two of those three words the same way.

I had the same problem Jon did.

I must say i'm more surprised that you're dixier-than-I, since I actually lived in Dixie for a while as a child. :)

Huh -- my first set of answers gave me 45/30/15/10, which is funny given that I've never even been to Dixie and have spent very little time in New England or the Upper Midwest. But then I went back and switched three answers that I could've gone either way on, and that brought me to 60/20/10/10.

One of the either-way items for me was "y'all," which does come naturally to me in writing at this point but only because I've taught myself to write it over the course of several years.

I use y'all, but I honestly don't know if that's the influence of the few remaining Real Virginians in Northern Virginia, or just my strong feeling that English sorely needs a second person plural.

English already has a second-person plural. Like German, traditional English had a second-person singular informal and a word which was simultaneously second-person-singular-formal and second-person-plural.

It lost the former.

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English
15% Upper Midwestern
15% Yankee
10% Dixie
0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

not sure how I feel about this. they should have asked how often one interjects "dude" or "awesome" into everyday conversation.

And “hella.”

And whether Interstate 5 is “5” or “I-5” or ”the 5.”

Rob, if English had a second person plural no one would ever have invented “y’all,” “youse,” or “you-uns.” (And the American Heritage dictionary also lists “you guys” as a separate form — I wouldn’t have thought of that, but they have a point.) What it has is a second person singular that happens to trace its descent to a plural.

That quiz is crap, but it's fun to realise how many bits we pick up here and there. (Especially for people like us who've lived all over the country.) Some phrases are just neater than others, like "y'all", and you absorb them.

In some cases I automatically adopt the local style. Like if I'm driving north through New England, I'm taking 91. If I'm driving west in California it's on I-90. And if I'm heading out to Verona, Wisconsin, I'm taking the PD.

Eh? Where, precisely, in California would you be driving on I-90? :) (It doesn't run into this state. :))

I've never heard of a freeway prepended with the letter I in common use here. In Northern California, i've heard "80", "280", "101", etc. In Southern California, it's "the 5" "the 101", etc. This particular verbal tick often stays with people after they move - so I have friends who grew up in southern california who are immediately identifiable because they still say "the 101", "the 92", etc.

I’ve heard “I-5” used in San Diego (as in the popular bumper sticker, THERE IS NO LIFE EAST OF I-5.) Maybe it’s a marker for San Diego vs. LA dialect . . .

I think Karen meant I-80.

Come to think of it, I think Seattle uses “I-90” for 90, but “5” and “405” for, you know. I could be wrong, though.

Yeah, 80 in Cali. Of course, when I lived in the bay area I was hanging out primarily with people who'd grown up in other places, so there wasn't a firm grounding in any true "local" usage. Also in Connecticut we did say "I-91" as well as just plain 91. You get the point I was trying to make about adapting to local terminology... but I think I may have inadvertently made the point that places with a more homogenously home-grown population (such as Wisconsin) do a better job of reinforcing the local terminology than, say, San Francisco.

I have to say that one of the weirdest things about Seattle is how many of the people in it grew up in Seattle.