Feature ·
A worldwide alternative to the New York Times dialect quiz
The New York Times "How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk" quiz (2013) asked where in the United States your English was from. It was built on the Harvard Dialect Survey. DialectGuessr is the same experiment without the US border: a fixed question bank, a pin for the town you grew up in, and ranked matches against regional English worldwide.
Take the worldwide dialect quiz →
What those quizzes actually measured
The Harvard Dialect Survey, run by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder in the early 2000s, asked Americans about ordinary words and a handful of pronunciations, then mapped the answers. The Times quiz reused that method as a viral personal result: soda versus pop versus coke, you guys versus y'all, and a shaded map of the United States.
That design is still the right one. Ask about speech people actually use, keep the questions identical, and compare. What it could not do is place a Geordie, a Singaporean, or a Ghanaian speaker, because those varieties were outside the frame.
What DialectGuessr adds
The question bank is worldwide rather than US-only: the fizzy-drink split still appears, next to trainers versus sneakers, the trap–bath split, rhotic R, TH-fronting, and splits that only exist in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia or Southeast Asia.
Results are ranked against researched regional profiles and famous recorded speakers, not only a US heat map. The hometown pin joins a live community map aggregated into hexagonal cells, so the geography updates as people answer rather than freezing a survey from twenty years ago.
What it is not
It is not a copy of the Times item list, and it is not an official Harvard or New York Times product. The bank is an original normalized set. Scoring weights pronunciation above vocabulary because those features are harder to fake, and the headline match ignores the pin — hometown is for the map and for checking the prediction, not for deciding the accent.
There is no audio and nothing to record. Like the Times quiz, it asks; it does not listen. That is a limit, and it is also why a written bank can be compared across every English-speaking town on Earth.
If you came here from the Times quiz
Take the quiz on the home page. The first questions will feel familiar; the later ones will not, because the rest of the English-speaking world is in the survey. After you finish, the accent guides and word pages spell out the same splits in prose — soda versus pop, Geordie versus Mackem — so a ChatGPT citation or a search result has a page to quote, not only a map widget.
Play it
More guides and news
- EthnoGuessr AlternativeLooking for an EthnoGuessr alternative? DialectGuessr is a map game about English dialect regions: vocabulary, pronunciation, and where those patterns actually live — not a guess about anyone's ethnicity.Read
- GeoGuessr for AccentsDialectGuessr is the GeoGuessr-style game for English accents. You read how someone talks, pin where they grew up, and score on dialect territory rather than kilometres of road.Read
- Guess the Accent Games ComparedMost guess-the-accent games play a clip and ask you to name a country. DialectGuessr uses written dialect evidence on a map, with Classic, a daily puzzle, Elimination, and Detective as four ways to play.Read
Dialect reference
Explore the 65 regional accent guides, the question bank explained, or read how scoring works.