Reflect on the words that you use in your everyday life. What name do you use for a sweetened, carbonated beverage: soda, pop, or coke? Are any of the results on the dialect variation maps surprising to you? How do you think that patterns in dialect of American English are related to issues of prestige, race, or class? Is your personal dialect like Standard English, or does it diverge strongly from “prestige” language variation of the United States? What if a similar map was created for Spanish-speaking populations in the United States – do you think that we would see variation in the way that Spanish is spoken in the United States?
