Who says “We’ll be home at seven — “while” means “until””?

South Yorkshire English, West Yorkshire English.

Who says “I know it means “until”, but I would never say it”?

Birmingham / West Midlands English.

Who says “It does not make sense to me”?

Modern RP / Standard Southern British, Bristol / Southwest English, West Country English, London / Estuary English, Multicultural London English, Scouse / Liverpool English, Mancunian English, Geordie / Tyneside English, Central Scottish English, Highland Scottish English, South Wales English, Northern Irish English, Cork English, East Irish English, Southern Appalachian English, New York City 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, Nigerian English, Kenyan English, Pakistani English, Philippine English, Singapore English, Hong Kong English, Melbourne / Southern Australian English, Ghanaian English, Trinidadian English, Malaysian English, Midland American English, African American English, Hawaiian English, Philadelphia English, New Orleans English, Vancouver / Western Canadian English, Perth / Western Australian English, Chennai / South Indian English, Liberian English, Sri Lankan English, Spanish-accented English, French-accented English, German-accented English, Italian-accented English, Russian-accented English, Brazilian Portuguese-accented English, Japanese-accented English, Mandarin-accented English.

Vocabulary

“Not Home While Seven”: When “While” Means “Until”

In Yorkshire and parts of the north Midlands, “while” can mean “until” — “we'll not be home while seven”. Outside that area the sentence reads as nonsense or, worse, as its opposite. Level crossings in the region were once signed “do not cross while the light is flashing”, which is exactly as dangerous as it sounds.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

“We’ll not be home while seven.” What does that sentence mean to you?
Answer on your first reading, not after puzzling it out.

We’ll be home at seven — “while” means “until”
We’ll be out during seven o’clock
I know it means “until”, but I would never say it
It does not make sense to me

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.

We’ll be home at seven — “while” means “until”

Expected in 2 of the survey's accent profiles.

I know it means “until”, but I would never say it

Expected in 1 of the survey's accent profiles.

Birmingham

It does not make sense to me

Expected in 56 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.