The accent quiz that tested the world
Jul 21, 2015, 05:45 PM
When linguist Bert Vaux posted a corpus of words and questions on his Harvard website back in the early 2000’s, little did he know that he would spawn an international meme. The quiz was supposed to test his students’ regional American accents. Did they say soda or coke or pop? Was it a roly-poly or a doodlebug? Do they wear sneakers or gym shoes or tennis shoes? His quiz went viral eventually becoming an international trend on YouTube. In this podcast I speak with writer Debbie Nathan who traced the origins of the meme for the language journal Schwa Fires. And I get to chat with linguist Vaux about what it's like to spark an internet phenomenon.