DialectGuessr

Vocabulary

Chips or Fries? The Transatlantic Potato Problem

Britain and Ireland say chips, North America says fries or french fries, and Australia and New Zealand say hot chips to distinguish them from crisps. The complication is that chips means a completely different food depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

What do you call thin strips of potato served hot and fried?

Think of the kind commonly served with a burger.

Answer it yourself and see where you land on the map →

Who says what

Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.

Fries

Expected in 20 of the survey's accent profiles.

Chips

Expected in 29 of the survey's accent profiles.

Hot chips

Expected in 4 of the survey's accent profiles.

French fries

Expected in 7 of the survey's accent profiles.

  • Indian
  • Filipino
  • South Indian
  • Spanish-accented English
  • Brazilian Portuguese-accented English
  • Japanese-accented English
  • Mandarin-accented English

Why this question is in the survey

Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least two people there have answered.

See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.