The United States has dozens of dialects of English and many Americans use more than one of them — think about how you speak to your boss vs. a stranger who just rear-ended your car. @Smithsonianmag looked at three areas of the U.S. — California, Appalachia and New Orleans — to highlight the complexities of this.
"This book does not attempt to answer this seemingly unsolvable puzzle either but aims to shed light on a simple fact usually overlooked by linguists and laypeople alike: the conceptual pair is not a timeless given but has a history, and a much shorter one than one might assume."