Who says “Waiting in line”?

Southern Appalachian English, California English, Texas English, Boston / Eastern New England English, Chicago / Inland North English, Newfoundland English, Jamaican English / Patwa continuum, Bajan English, Queensland Australian English, New Zealand English, Toronto Canadian English, Johannesburg South African English, Delhi Indian English, Philippine English, Melbourne / Southern Australian English, Trinidadian English, Midland American English, African American English, Hawaiian English, Philadelphia English, New Orleans English, Vancouver / Western Canadian English, Perth / Western Australian English, Liberian English, Spanish-accented English, Brazilian Portuguese-accented English, Japanese-accented English, Mandarin-accented English.

Who says “Waiting in the queue”?

Modern RP / Standard Southern British, Bristol / Southwest English, West Country English, London / Estuary English, Multicultural London English, Birmingham / West Midlands English, Scouse / Liverpool English, Mancunian English, South Yorkshire English, West Yorkshire English, Geordie / Tyneside English, Central Scottish English, Highland Scottish English, South Wales English, Northern Irish English, Cork English, East Irish English, Nigerian English, Kenyan English, Pakistani English, Hong Kong English, Ghanaian English, Malaysian English, Chennai / South Indian English, Sri Lankan English, Spanish-accented English, French-accented English, German-accented English, Italian-accented English, Russian-accented English.

Vocabulary

Waiting In Line or On Line? New York's Quiet Giveaway

Almost all of the United States waits in line. New York City waits on line, and the Harvard Dialect Survey found the pattern thinning with distance from the city rather than stopping at a border. Britain, Ireland and most of the Commonwealth queue instead, which sidesteps the preposition entirely.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

You are waiting your turn behind other people. What are you doing?
Whichever comes out of your mouth without thinking.

Waiting in line
Waiting on line
Waiting in the queue
Queuing
Something else

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.

Waiting in line

Expected in 28 of the survey's accent profiles.

Waiting on line

Expected in 1 of the survey's accent profiles.

New York City

Waiting in the queue

Expected in 30 of the survey's accent profiles.

Queuing

Expected in 1 of the survey's accent profiles.

Singaporean

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.