"1. Oregon 2. Minnesota 3. Massachusetts 4. Kansas 5. Iowa 6. Vermont 7. Alaska 8. South Dakota 9. New Hampshire 10. Nebraska 11. Connecticut 12. North Dakota 13. Washington 14. Wisconsin..."
How far down the list do you need to go to get to a southern state? To #17, Florida. But you have to go to #28 to get to another southern state (Virginia), and a lot of northerners relocate to Florida.
How far up from the bottom of the list do you need to go to get to a northern state? To #41, Ohio.
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Words spoken per second have little meaning when compared to thoughts per statement.
I'll take a Texan country boy stating an opinion about his son's high school football team over a fast-talking Portland meth-head demanding my wallet, any day.
Did upstate New York somehow average out New York City?
Ohio got a lot of southern transplants from Appalachia during the 40s, 50s, and 60s looking for jobs in the industrial north.
Calling Florida a 'southern state' is something a Southerner would not do. Do you mean Northern Havana, a.k.a. Miami? Do you mean Southern New York, a.k.a. Boca?
The center of that state and the panhandle, a.k.a. Lower Alabama, are southern.
Also not southern: Louisiana and Texas.
So New York was first and California was second with most words per consumer call. Assholes and flakes are loquacious
The ranking was done before Oregon made marijuana legal. That not only will slow things down but dumb things down as well.
At one time when I was first in the US, I was the fellow answering the phone providing tech support (that's what you would call it these days) for our industrial systems. I got calls from many states. IMHO, the fastest talkers were from North Carolina, and also IMHO the most attractive accent too.
There are two Florida's. The Florida of the "South" is north of Orlando and it has everything in common culturally with the Deep South. It was one of the original seceding States of the Confederacy. Florida below The Tampa - Orlando - Cocoa Beach geographical fault line is another State all together.
I'm surprised Washington wasn't ranked higher. We are the home of Starbucks.
@surfed:
As a lifelong Tampa native, I largely agree with your north-south divide. However, there's still a lot to the south that is culturally Deep South (e.g. Desoto County). I think it's more a matter of interior Florida versus coastal Florida.
How much does Marco Rubio raise the talking speed for Florida?
And how much does Jeb Bush slow it down?
Virginia usd to be a southern state, but now, with northern Virginia being a suburb of D.C. it isn't (or at least, not so much).
Is it words per minute while talking, or total words per day?
@Sammy Finkelman
I've noticed Jeb's problem is that he speaks too fast, mainly in beginning his next sentence way too early when he should be letting what came before breath a bit.
Oregon is north of Ohio.
"The variation here [who talks the most] is significant."
That implies that the speed difference is insignificant; they supplied some values for wordiness but not the (apparently insignificant) speed differences.
We Minnesotans learn early to avoid frostbite - tongue included.
One may be amused by comparing their maps to "Some visualizations of ancestry.com’s genetic data"
Jeb does not speak too quickly (not "too fast"). He says the wrong things.
Politicians are...taught...to...speak...slowly...because that apparently is taught as the modern way to communicate with the populace.
Consider the pace of speech in Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech. Compare that to Obama, Hillary, or any other jerk talking today.
mikee said...
Words spoken per second have little meaning when compared to thoughts per statement.
I prefer quality over quantity in most things. Conversation is one of those things.
People don't understand why Southerners tend to do things slowly. It's genetic. In the days before air conditioning (all praise Willis Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning!), people in the South with those defective fast genes tended to die before they could have offspring (13 or thereabouts). What survived were those with well adapted slow genes. Even today, going quickly about your business outside on a hot Summer day can leave you with heat exhaustion or worse.
Journalism is really sick. Every time we turn around, another list appears and even rankings on the identical subject matter results in yet another listing order.
We consumers of the written word must be downright stupid.
And as usual, Indiana is right in the middle!
This is why we should be America's first primary.... Iowa and New Hampshire are weird. Embrace the power of average!
Do Southerners really talk slower? Which Southerners? Black Southerners can talk so fast to each other they are barely comprehensible to others, while the whites scratch their heads and say waaaah? The white Southerners actually talk pretty fast too, but slow down for an occasional word just to let the Yankee brains catch up.
I would call East Texas "southern," and west Texas "southwestern.
Is it west of Wichita Falls? Then it isn't southern.
@ Rachel correct
This is a very racist study. White states talk fast and states with lots of blacks and Hispanics talk slower. I guess because they have a lesser intellect?
They need to get a lecture from a Univ of Missouri prof.
Silent Cal really brought Vermont's word count down.
Interesting to see how the state-wide averaging effect works out. Most people don't realize how much of Appalachian culture penetrates southern Ohio and Illinois and even up into western New York state. Eastern Oregon, on the other hand is cowboy country, but those folks, like Wyoming and Montana types don't talk anywhere near as slow as Texans.
On the other hand, I can't explain the West Virginia and Pennsylvania discrepancy with New York. That just seems wrong to me based on my actual experience.
James Carville said that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, with Alabama in between. New York is two states. If you cut off the part that dips below the main Penn/NY line, you would have Ohio, and you could easily annex the Adirondacks to Maine, skipping Vermont and NH.
I never have trusted fast talkers from New York who
talk too much.
Makes it difficult to trust Trump.
I grew up in the Kentucky part of PA, we speak just as fast as those in Philly. However, there is a line in Harrisburg, west of that is really OHIO, east is Philly. I was on the Philly side.
Went to New Orleans once for business, traveled north about an hour and went to a restaurant. The waitress could not understand what I said, spoke too fast. I was confused by the whole thing
IwasborninMassachussettsandthenmovedtoOregonasakid(#s3and1)butI'msureIspeaknormally.
I don't understand Oregon, and I lived there for 9 years. It's probably just Portland, and the rest of the state doesn't count.
I've lived in OR for five years now, and this is just ... off. Nobody in Salem speaks especially quickly. I agree with others above that it's probably a Portland thing.
When I've been in Oregon, I haven't found them fast talkers either. North Dakota, neither. I'm disbelieving this whole thing!
Lots of coffee in Oregon, from the PDX to Grants Pass to Ontario. And only the indica smokers are really slow, not so the sativa.
Of course, there are also a lot of methheads, because, this is a white state. Culture.
Texas is more west than south and Louisiana is it's own geographic region.
Texas is Texas. It is not south, west or southwest. Texas is Texas.
Justice Thomas grew up speaking Gullah Geechee. They speak very quickly. I wonder if they were included in this survey. Videos are available online if you have never heard it.
When I was in high school I moved from Massachusetts - #3 - to Illinois, #40. It took me a while to adjust. People couldn't understand me, and I got very impatient and started completing other people's sentences when I talked to them.
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