Vocabulary
Water Fountain, Drinking Fountain or Bubbler?
Most of the English-speaking world says drinking fountain or water fountain. Two places famously say bubbler: eastern Wisconsin and the Boston area in the United States, plus large parts of Australia. It is one of the strongest small-area vocabulary markers anywhere.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call a public fixture you drink water from?
The fixture sends a small stream of water upward.
- Drinking fountain
- Water fountain
- Bubbler
- Water bubbler
- Drinking tap
- 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.
Drinking fountain
Expected in 22 of the survey's accent profiles.
- Bristol
- West Country
- London
- Multicultural London
- Modern RP
- Birmingham
- South Yorkshire
- West Yorkshire
- Geordie
- Central Scottish
- Northern Irish
- Cork
- East Irish
- California
- Bajan
- New Zealand
- South African
- Spanish-accented English
- French-accented English
- German-accented English
- Italian-accented English
- Russian-accented English
Water fountain
Expected in 28 of the survey's accent profiles.
- Modern RP
- Scouse
- Mancunian
- South Wales
- Southern Appalachian
- New York City
- Texas
- Chicago
- Newfoundland
- Jamaican
- Canadian
- Indian
- Filipino
- Hong Kong
- Trinidadian
- Midland
- African American
- Hawaiian
- Philadelphia
- New Orleans
- Vancouver
- South Indian
- Liberian
- Sri Lankan
- 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.