Good question. Turns out that people talk about the same objects with different words, depending on where they live.
Joshua Katz, from North Carolina State University has created a series of 120 dialect maps covering the United States. Your carbonated beverage is a “soda” in Florida and California, in Oregon it’s “pop” and in Alabama they call it all “coke.” His maps are so cool they’ve gone viral.
Data from Bert Vaux, Cambridge University
Joshua’s maps are not only fun, they're useful. If you live in California and you want to search optimize your carbonated beverage website to be found by people inside the state, you may want to use the word “soda.”
Wherever you live, you need to understand the language of your customers.
In a world where 30% of all searches are local, online marketers need to know the words their neighbors are using to search. Anyone need a soda?
The dialect maps can be found at http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jakatz2/project-dialect.html
