I have come across this dialect quiz.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/british-irish-dialect-quiz.html
Interestingly, when I tried it, the answer came as the Midlands (I lived in Coventry for the first 11 years of my life) and the north west of England - I did live there for about 5 years but I spent longer in Cambridgeshire, including my secondary school education.
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I tried it too. It came up with Portsmouth as the main area - way off for me! I grew up on the London/Essex borders and now live in north east Essex!
No-one I have long-term contact with came from there either, so it's a bit of a mystery! Lol!
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How interesting, Alison. Most comments I have read have suggested it is very accurate but it is rather vague in my case.
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Blackpool/Manchester for me which is pretty good (actually Warrington/Manchester). From the little map that shows how individual answers locate you, it seems that the ones that narrowed it down most were 'grid' for the thing the rainwater goes down in the gutter, which surprised me a bit, and 'corporation pop' for water, which didn't. What may have made it slightly less precise are words that I've picked up later in other parts of the country - for example words for being drunk, when I never drank before I left home so didn't have much need for that sort of vocabulary, and similarly words for an attractive person, which I used much more after I'd moved away (maybe there weren't any in Manchester
).
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Very interesting. I suppose many of us speak hybrid dialects as we move about. What you say about certain kinds of terms becoming more relevant at certain ages seems to ring true for me too.