Dialects unite and divide us.

I just read an article on “who’s got the sexiest accent?’, and when I Googled the article, I discovered that “sexiest accent” generates over four million hits.

As Trump said about health care, who knew there were so many surveys?

The ones I skimmed through seemed mostly intended as tourism boosters, at least for the places with accents people like.

I didn’t see a survey conducted by any linguistics scholar I ever heard of. In the latest survey, from Big Seven Travel (Katey Psencik, The Columbus Dispatch), there are 50 accents — just like we have 50 states! Some of the accents are associated with cities, so presumably not every State was represented.