Followup to the Schedule poll

Wow, nearly 80 people filled in lethargic_man's poll about how to pronounce schedule. As of midday today, the results are as follows:

Country	sh	sk	other	total
England	26	21	2	49
USA	1	13	1	15
Scotland	1	2		3
Canada		2		2
Australia	2			2
Other		3	1	4
Total	30	41	4	75

(Excuse the ugliness of the table HTML; I auto-generated it from Excel — yes, I know — and I tried to clean up the output a bit but I know it's not wonderful. Data also available as comma separated format in case anyone wants to do anything clever with it.)

Conclusions:

• The normal US pronunciation is sk-.
• English people are about equally likely to use either pronunciation.
• Several people use both pronunciations interchangeably; most but not all were able to pick one that they favour.
• Scottish people are liable take offence at the use of the word England, even if it is in fact being used to refer to England.

Anyway, now I'm really into this whole poll game, and some of the interesting clarificatory responses from that poll set me wondering. So, for your delectation, a poll about how to define one's dialect.

Just to make things clear, when you tick the factors that are relevant, I mean you to choose factors that are relevant to your dialect, not factors that you think people in general should take into account when describing their dialect. So if you think, for example, that having non-native speaker parents would be likely to have a major effect on your dialect, but your parents are both English speakers, you shouldn't tick the "Parents' first language other than English" option. Likewise, if you have always lived in the same country, you shouldn't tick any of the former country options.

[Poll #336176]

Book: A suitable boy

Author: Vikram Seth

Details: (c) Vikram Seth 1993; Pub 1994 Phoenix; ISBN 1-85799-088-9

Verdict: A suitable boy is a rewarding read.

Reasons for reading it: I'd been meaning to read A suitable boy for ages, because I had lots of recommendations including my mother raving about it. What finally gave me the push to read it was that zdamiana convinced darcydodo to read it and she was reading it when I saw her in Oxford. So it's mainly Zoe's fault, but there are other factors too!

How it came into my hands: One of the lovely second-hand book shops in Dundee.

( detailed review )

But overall, I enjoyed aSB a great deal, though I can see it would only appeal to some tastes and not all.