How THE DIALECT QUIZ WORKED FOR ME. I took the dialect quiz (Harvard Dialect Survey)—there is a link here—and I think it did a pretty good job.. The quiz identifies three cities that are supposed to have a dialect most similar to my own. For my dialect, the three cities were Minneapolis/Saint Paul; Madison, Wisconsin; and Yonkers. Not bad, because I grew up in the Chicago area and spent the last 50 years in the New York area. More specifically, I spent the last 30 years living in the Connecticut suburbs. I worked for 25 years in Westchester County, where Yonkers lies.
As I was taking the test, I noticed several words that didn’t really exist while I was growing up—tag sales or words relating to the highway system. I wondered whether that would throw off my results, but the quiz did pretty well at picking up the influences on my dialect after I was 25.