Joshua Katz's visualizations of American dialect data (edited 11/30)

I love American dialects. There might be a Starbuck's in every city, but our regions are still uniquely identifiable by the way we talk. Joshua Katz (graduate student in Statistics) at NCS created graphical representations of data from Cambridge that identified dialectical differences in how Americans speak. Here is a story about the maps and here are the maps themselves. AND: You can even take the Dialect Similarity Quiz that tells you (via map) what parts of the country tend to have language patterns like your own.

I think this demonstrates that 1) graphs are interesting ways of conveying information, 2) data being used to make predictions (of what portion of the U.S. you hail from), and 3) statisticians and social sciences gather interesting and varied data.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...hoagies...

Edited to add: The Atlantic has a created a video that contains the audio of folks providing examples of their awesome accents whilst completing the original surve.