Early this summer, statistician Joshua Katz of North Carolina State University took data from a dialect survey administered by Bert Vaux of Harvard and used it to create a series of maps that quickly went viral (You may remember some multicolor maps clogging up your Facebook newsfeeds this summer).
   Dialect differences like the use of “y’all” versus “you all” versus “you guys” and “fireflies” versus “lightning bugs” are all mapped out in reds and blues and greens on a map of the 48 continental United States. Recently, Katz released a new addition to the project in which the public can take the original survey to receive a map showing which parts of the country they most resemble. Both Katz and Vaux did beautiful work on this project, but the question of why so many people and media outlets of varying backgrounds flocked to a website hosted by the crawling server of a research university still remains. What makes this project so special?
   People are fascinated by the idea that the same language can be spoken in so many different ways. How many hours of the first month of freshman year are spent comparing dialects among new people you meet? College is a learning experience all around, perhaps most of all a lesson in tolerance for those who say the word “caramel” wrong.
   The most memorable trip to Mugshots I’ve ever taken was a few semesters back. Some friends and I sat next to a large group of students and a girl who, it became apparent, they had invited down to Starkville for the weekend. We had started in on our fried pickles when the conversation at the table over got extremely loud. One of the boys yelled how silly it was that the girl called soft drinks pop, while the girl yelled back an argument about the confusion that could come from calling them all coke. The amount of emotion each put into the arguments about this issue was astounding.
    There’s a reason emotions run so high when we talk about accents and dialects. From a young age, we are taught that the way we speak can carry power or stigma. Linguists know all dialects are equally valid, complex and rule-governed. Nevertheless, racial, regional, and political bigotry extends to the way marginalized peoples speak. In order to succeed in school and the workforce, it is necessary to learn to speak like a white Midwesterner, at least some of the time.
       Teaching speakers of other dialects, especially racially charged ones like African-American English, or AAE, to be able to code-switch into Standard American English (the flat tones and grammar of the Midwest and your English papers) is one of the great inequalities of education. White kindergarteners come in with a dialect similar to the one taught by their bright-eyed English teacher, while speakers of AAE experience much more disconnect between the dialect they have acquired and the one they will have to use to succeed in school. The stigma that comes with having a different way of speaking in America, especially when that accent comes stacked on top of the racism still prevalent across the country, is meaningless and terrible, and it holds many back.
      Racial bias can be seen with even more fervor in the accented speech of people whose first language is not English. In the few classes I have been in with professors with foreign accents, I have cringed multiple times at the crass comments my classmates have directed at them. You would think people who speak in Southern dialects, which carry such a stigma across the country, would be more accepting, but even they seem to think that because these people don’t speak like they do, they are undeserving of their respect and patience.  
      Here’s a newsflash: everyone has an “accent,” even those white Midwesterners with grammar training we constantly try to imitate in our professional lives. The dialect someone speaks with has no bearing on his or her intelligence or worth. If we could all look past the way people speak to focus on the message they send, “there ain’t no telling what we might could learn.”