DialectGuessr

Vocabulary

Corner Shop, Convenience Store, Dairy or Milk Bar?

Britain and Ireland say corner shop, North America says convenience store or corner store, New Zealand says dairy, and parts of Australia say milk bar. New York adds bodega, and parts of the American Northeast use deli for the same thing.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

What do you call a small neighbourhood shop selling everyday items?

Imagine somewhere smaller than a supermarket and open fairly late.

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.

Corner shop

Expected in 27 of the survey's accent profiles.

Convenience store

Expected in 23 of the survey's accent profiles.

Dairy

Expected in 1 of the survey's accent profiles.

Milk bar

Expected in 2 of the survey's accent profiles.

Deli

Expected in 2 of the survey's accent profiles.

Something else

Expected in 5 of the survey's accent profiles.

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.