Brow Beat

Hear America’s Regional Dialects in Action

There’s a good chance you’ve seen the maps that grad student Josh Katz made depicting regional dialect differences across the U.S. Made with data from the Harvard Dialect Survey conducted by Bert Vaux in 2003, the maps became hugely popular online.

And if you’re a Yankee like me, you may have looked at the data and thought, “Nobody really sees rain on a sunny day and thinks, ‘the devil’s beating his wife,’ do they?”

Well, the Atlantic went ahead and called up a bunch of people in various parts of the country and recorded their answers to the survey, then edited a bunch of those answers into the enlightening video below. Enjoy.

(Via Kottke.)