From the most recent two issues of Michael Quinion's newsletter:
15 Feb:
Subscribers who are native speakers of North American English are
likely to find the Dialect Survey of interest. This was created by
Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University. You can take a test and
view the collected results, which include maps. See where people
say the vowel in "cot" and "caught" the same way, where they use
double models as in "I might could do that", where they consider
"anymore" to be a standard form meaning "nowadays", or any of 120
other variations. See:
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/22 February:
A number of Canadian subscribers attempted to register
at the dialect site I listed last week, which describes itself on
its home page as "designed for speakers of North American English",
but found to their surprise and disgruntlement on trying to take
the test that they were not considered to be North American. Not
being in that category, I didn't try the test, so didn't discover
the error. I did assume, though, that a linguistic site would know
what it meant when it wrote "North American English"!
Bingley
