Two linguists – Jack Grieve of Aston University and blogging linguist Mark Lieberman – have been sifting through millions of tweets trying to uncover the “geography of filler words,” Quartz reports.
Their results show a clear preference for “um” in the Plains States and the central Midwest. “Uh” is preferred in the South, and the Uh territory sweeps up the Atlantic coast to New England, with some fuzzy undecided overlap in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The Upper Midwest – Northern Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, is on the Uh side of things. Out west, along the Left Coast, there is no clear winner.
The map doesn’t fit any other obvious linguistic or cultural patterns. Southerners will no doubt be appalled to learn how much they share with Yankees of the Northeast. Grieve says the results provide the first clear evidence of what he and other linguists have called the “Midland dialect.”
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