Vocabulary
Soda, Pop or Coke? What English Speakers Call a Fizzy Drink
This is the most famous dialect question in English, and the divide is not only American. The United States splits three ways between soda, pop and coke; Britain and Ireland say fizzy drink or mineral; Australia and South Africa say soft drink or cool drink. Almost everyone assumes their own word is the neutral one.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you usually call a sweet carbonated drink?
Pick the closest term you would use in everyday conversation.
- Soda
- Pop
- Coke (as a general term)
- Soft drink
- Fizzy drink
- Mineral
- Something else
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.
Soda
Expected in 12 of the survey's accent profiles.
- New York City
- California
- Boston
- Kenyan
- African American
- Hawaiian
- Philadelphia
- Liberian
- Spanish-accented English
- Brazilian Portuguese-accented English
- Japanese-accented English
- Mandarin-accented English
Pop
Expected in 10 of the survey's accent profiles.
Coke (as a general term)
Expected in 3 of the survey's accent profiles.
Soft drink
Expected in 14 of the survey's accent profiles.
Fizzy drink
Expected in 16 of the survey's accent profiles.
- Modern RP
- Bristol
- West Country
- London
- Multicultural London
- Scouse
- Mancunian
- Central Scottish
- Highland Scottish
- Northern Irish
- New Zealand
- Spanish-accented English
- French-accented English
- German-accented English
- Italian-accented English
- Russian-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.