Ithaca, New York
The Ithaca Accent
Ithaca sits inside the Chicago dialect area, which covers Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, United States. The nearest other area is Boston, about 206km away.
Take the quiz and see how close your accent is →
What people in Ithaca sound like
- Raised “trap” vowel — “cat” towards “kee-at”.
- Fronted “lot” vowel — “block” towards “black”.
- “Cot” and “caught” stay distinct.
- Chicago-specific vocabulary: “gym shoes”, “pop”, “the expressway”.
These are the markers of the Chicago accent as a whole. No survey claims every speaker in Ithaca has all of them — the full Chicago profile sets out where the region varies.
Ithaca against Boston
Ithaca is close enough to the Boston area that the two get confused. These are the questions where the survey expects a different answer on each side.
| Question | Ithaca | Boston |
|---|---|---|
| When you say “car” by itself, do you pronounce an R sound at the end? | the R at the end of “car” is pronounced | “car” ends in a vowel, with no R sound |
| How do “Mary”, “marry”, and “merry” compare in your natural accent? | “Mary”, “marry” and “merry” all sound the same | “Mary”, “marry” and “merry” all sound different, or two of “Mary”, “marry” and “merry” match and one differs |
Dialect areas near Ithaca
Is your accent from Ithaca?
There is no way to answer that from a description. The test asks 29 questions about the words you use and how you say them, scores your answers against the Chicago / Inland North English profile and every other profile in the survey, and shows you where people who answer the way you do actually live.