Vocabulary
“Man's Getting Emotional”: Man as a First-Person Pronoun
In Multicultural London English and related urban varieties, “man” can stand in for “I” — “man's getting emotional” means I am. It behaves as a genuine pronoun rather than slang for a person, taking its own agreement, and it is one of the clearest grammatical markers of the variety.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
“Man’s getting emotional.” Who is “man”?
Answer on your first reading, not after puzzling it out.
- The speaker — it means “I’m getting emotional”
- Some other person the speaker is describing
- I know it means “I”, but I would never say it
- It does not make sense to me
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.
The speaker — it means “I’m getting emotional”
Expected in 1 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 five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.