We all know social media has severely impacted the way we write and probably for the worst. When speed is the name of the game, nobody has time for full sentences, punctuation or spelling out numbers. That really is asking too much.
You don't really need all that stuff when you're just talking to your friends, anyway. Because using social media has a heavy conversational tone to it, it's no surprise that we write the way we speak. With that, even when we're writing, we apparently use a lot of words that come out when we hesitate to speak. For some of us, that word is "like," for others it's "uh" and "um."
But is one usage preferred over the other? Maybe you're of the mindset that saying "um" is more sophisticated since it's short and sweet, and saying "uh" can really drag on, making you sound like an idiot. Or maybe "um" sounds too meek for you, and you prefer the audacity of letting out an "uh." Luckily, we have the Internet to help us solve this battle once and for all.
Jack Grieve, a lecturer of forensic linguistics and the director of the research degree programs at Aston University in Birmingham, England, created a map showing where in the United States the use of "uh" and "um" are most popular. He came up with this map below. The areas in red show where "uh" is more common while "um" is more common in the blue areas.
Grieve used "a few billion word[s] of geocoded tweets" from 2013 to find the percentage of "uh" versus "um" in each state. As you can see, the country is pretty split over whether to use "uh" or "um." States on the coasts vastly prefer "uh" while Americans in the middle of the country are fans of "um." So now you know.
Our country is kind of obsessed with linguistic differences from state to state, so this probably isn't the first map of this kind that you've seen gain some traction on the Internet. It seems like almost every day a new map showing differences in how Americans speak pops up. A couple of the more notable ones to catch attention recently were these maps showing linguistic differences among Americans from a PhD student at NC State University and The New York Times' dialect quiz that told you which region of the country you speak most similarly to. Some of these findings are more important than others, but boy, it is always fun to look at.
