Map by Joshua Katz, Department of Statistics, NCSU. 

WPRO Newsroom

It’s a bubbler, not a water fountain.

As least that’s what we call it in Rhode Island according to data compiled by North Carolina State University Graduate Student Joshua Katz.

For his end-of-the-year project, Katz compiled data from Bert Vaux’s dialect survey – an exhaustive list of 122 dialect-based questions – to make maps that regionalized dialect variations.

Here are some of the most interesting ones:

In New England, they’re “sneakers” not “tennis shoes”

In RI and Wisconsin, it’s a “bubbler” not a “water fountain”

In New England, it’s “soda” not “pop”

In Michigan, the night before Halloween is “Devil’s Night”

In RI and Mass. we use “firefly,” never “lightning bug”

“Scrap paper” is a Northeast thing, elsewhere it’s “scratch paper”

A “sun shower” is “the devil beating his wife” in parts of the south

We’ve never heard of drive-through liquor stores or a “brew thru”

In New England, we like the word “cruller”