Linguistic Profiling Quiz

The quiz was harder for me than I had thought it would be! I was able to correctly identify on first try the white, Middle Eastern, and Indian speakers, but the black and Hispanic speakers were a lot harder. In fact, it was a third try each time for the Hispanic speakers before I got it right. I suspect this is because living in the self-professed whitest city in America has not exposed me to a lot of different ethnicities. In my mind there is a very set way that Hispanics speak, which I probably have garnered from TV shows or movies such as "Napoleon Dynamite," and the three Hispanic speakers did not fit the bill perfectly. But by far the hardest one was Black Caribbean - I asked friends to listen to it as well, and we had to look at the answers before it made sense. My only notion of Caribbean accents comes from watching "Pirates of the Caribbean," but most of those characters were white and the black characters did not sound at all like the man's recorded voice in the quiz. Overall, I think my lack of exposure to the different American ethnicities of black and Hispanic (I do frequently speak to first-generation Middle Easterners and Indians) made it hard for me to guess correctly. I did not realize that Portland was so insular! But then again, I didn't realize there were even such things as Chicago and Bay Area and Northeast accents before coming here and taking this class.