Presumably, many of us have been to other parts of the country and heard things that sounded weird to our ears, other than just an accent. There are many normal differences we are often aware of, such as the name for a sweet carbonated beverage. In fact, people often rally on this debate, claiming that one of “pop” or “soda” is clearly better than the other. Website popvssoda.com lists a relatively current map of what different parts of the country that call the beverage. But there are noticeable changes in grammar within the country that also seem important for discussion.

“The car needs washed.” If that sounds right to you, then you’re most likely from a narrow band in the middle of the country extending from the east coast to Montana. You also might be from southern Georgia or a small area encompassing central New York and northeastern Pennsylvania. The notable thing here is that these small areas that are completely surrounded by people who wouldn’t use this grammatical structure continue to use it.

The same thing happens with the use of a positive ‘anymore,’ for a meaning somewhat like ‘nowadays.’ One might say, “a good job sure is hard to come by anymore.” This is said in approximately the same narrow band of land from the east coast to Montana, as well as an isolated area in Phoenix, Arizona. The fact that even people in an area close to Phoenix, who probably have a lot of contact with people in Phoenix, don’t use ‘anymore’ in this way says something important.

Why is the threshold for spreading of lexical items or grammatical structure so high? It’s possible that there just isn’t enough intermingling of people who say these terms, but then how did they spread to different separate areas in the first place? There is a good deal of space between the people who say “the car needs washed” in southern Georgia and the people in the main continental drag of people who say it, yet there must have been a good deal of intermingling at some time. It’s also possible that people have developed a high tendency to stay with what they’ve been saying for a long time. Personally, if I heard “the car needs washed,” I would think that the person had forgotten to add “to be” before “washed.” Likewise, I would not even understand the use of a positive “anymore.” Even if I move to an area where this is said, I am unlikely to pick it up for dozens of years.

If we really wanted to answer this question, we might want to look at the map here from popvssoda.com and look at the counties where the large concentrations of “pop”-sayers and “soda”-sayers meet. What motivates their choice and why doesn’t “pop” or “soda” take over? Would there really be two clusters of people, refusing to change their term? Are the areas where pop and soda clash constantly in oscillation? Is it possible that one term will eventually win out, and if so which? To me, “pop” seems less likely to win, but then again, I grew up saying “soda.” However, it is possible that if there ever exists a true “official dialect” of American English, these differences could disappear. Until such a thing happens, there is unlikely to be a winner in the cases of “the car needs washed,” “anymore,” “soda,” and the like.

(Geographic distribution of positive “anymore” and “the car needs washed” from the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change: A Multimedia Reference Tool by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg) 2006. Mouton de Gruyter.)