I (Randall) am studying linguistics, for officialZ, and as a result, we (Randall & Elizabeth) are linguistic Rain Men. We analyse every phrase for sound, syllabic structure, aspiration, etc. When you talk to us, 95% of the time we’re not really listening to you.

While we were waiting for Louis CK to come on, Elizabeth said, “Louis CK’s always restating what he just said in declarative sentences.” I was all, “Word?”

Turns out, she’s right. Take his bit on ‘the n-word’ for example:

When you say ‘the n-word’, you put the word ‘nigger’ in the listener’s head. That’s what saying a word is.

He does something like this again when he talks about slavery on Jay Leno:

I’ve heard educated white people say “slavery was 400 years ago.” No it very wasn’t. It was 140 years ago. That’s two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That’s how recently you could buy a guy.

His observations make us uncomfortable because they’re true, and what makes them so funny is as much about how he says them as what he says. “Here’s what I notice. That’s what it is.” It’s like a mirror that tells you you’re an asshole.

Thus ends our observation. Thanks London; it’s been real.

Image: ‘Portrait of chess players’ by Marcel Duchamp

A lightning talk is a peculiar form of self-applied torture in which you boil down your thoughts on a topic into 20 slides, which then advance automatically every 15 seconds, while you spiral into a state of anxiety in which time has no meaning.

There’ll be a video of my talk at some point, which will be unintelligible due to my talking at a rate of knots and my voice becoming increasingly high pitched.

And here is that very video, in which I discuss:

• My Irish early childhood
• Why storytellers are natural leaders
• Reading books
• Being afraid of public speaking but doing it anyway
• Why it’s rewarding to work with a creative partner (especially Randall Snare)
• Highland cows
• Architects in suspenders
• Learning to give and receive criticism
• Why watching people argue can be beautiful sometimes
• What we can learn from Google’s new design direction

Til then And here are my slides:

About the meetup

The London CS Meetup is a great group of people – if you’re in or near London later this month, come along to the next one.

Before we talk about the event, here’s a decree: ALL CONFERENCES SHOULD HAPPEN ON VINEYARDS.

The lovely and talented Kerry Anne, Irene and Nathan asked us to close CS Forum Cape Town (we went on right after the cheetah) and we immediately went out and bought togas.

As we’re obsessed with storytelling (we can’t stop writing about it), we thought we’d talk about our industry – content strategy/design/UX – in the context of the other industries that changed the way we tell stories.

We started at the ancient Greeks, took a stop at Newsies, Marshall McLuhan and The Net, and ended up in Cape Town at the third annual Content Strategy Forum (this year, it’s in Helsinki! Yay!).

Since we’re not going on tour (yet), we thought we’d let you read the script, if you’re so inclined. And bonus, you can watch a short video highlighting some of the awesome people who made CS Forum Cape Town so great.

The script

A Short History of Everything by

And the movie

Elizabeth will be talking about this, amongst other adventures, at the next Content Strategy meetup in London, on February 26th. You can get her autograph if you go. And if you miss that event, then there’s always Finland.

Hope to see you there!

I heard a friend say this recently, to no one in particular, while glaring at the back of a tub of soup.

This is what they saw:

Since the dawn of time, man has struggled against marketing’s attempts to cheer it up.

And in my own line of work, I prompt businesses to be more familiar and informal, to leave jargon behind, to be more ‘real’.

Where advocates for useful content may have once recommended simple plain speech, we now talk as much, if not more, about personality, voice and style – all that makes the non-human sound human.

So why does this kind of copy feel like a voice from the uncanny valley?

Voice and style are complicated and nuanced; and that nuance is hard to capture in two paragraphs in a style guide. And I say this as one who has written a fair few of those.

Virtual body language

Personality isn’t just about what’s projected, but what’s perceived.

In the real world, we deliver subtle messages we’re sometimes unaware of. Like a sort of vocal body language, we employ stock phrases and constructions that say as much about us, culturally and emotionally, as does our dress, the pitch of our voice, the hunch of our shoulders.

A friend finds the phrase ‘Are you well?’ – as opposed to ‘How are you?’ – an indication of an underlying character flaw. Her reasoning: that people aren’t really listening when they’re already feeding you their preferred response. That, or they’re afraid of the truth.

Over time, entire dialects form when these ways of speaking become common to a particular group. Online, I’ve seen this tendency toward dialect habit-forming in instances of linguistic inflation and hyperbole.

This might be because sharing excitement is a way of forming a bond, of lowering a fear of the other. It makes sense that this happens all the more in online communities, where turns of phrase are the only real way to distinguish ourselves as part of a distinct group. Our ways of speaking become like a massive in-joke.

And, maybe because we form communities and dialects more broadly and pervasively online, the shelf-lives of our web-based linguistic in-jokes are shorter. They’re too easy to co-opt and commodify; they start to seep into marketing, and the line blurs between what’s being sold excitedly and what’s just being excitedly talked about.

This is my theory, anyway. But is this a terrible thing? Is it even avoidable?

Probably not; but I find that a certain kind of online writing – even when it’s not overtly selling me something – feels un-genuine, even surreal. Everything sounds the same. Adorable and kooky. We say ‘you guys’ all the time. Where is the elegance?

(Not that it was all refined in the old days. But they did manage high keyword density:

Beef soup. You know, with beef in. It’s Big News.)

Emoticon wastelands

When I think of a brand, I think of a memorable tagline or irritating mascot. Even if its grip on my memory is grounded in annoyance, such tricks can lodge a brand in my head for months, even years. I find myself humming jingles from Canadian TV circa 1993 all the time. And we didn’t even own a TV.

But this earworm approach to language changes when it’s applied to brand language more broadly – to packaging, web copy, customer emails, or corporate blogs.

Still: surely a cute tone of voice is a lesser ill than a disjointed, undesigned one? Content strategy, after all, advocates a single, holistic tone of voice across channels. And we haven’t yet won enough battles to mount a counteroffensive.

It’s just that when brands master tone, they’re still only halfway there – because they’re still thinking mostly about speaking, rather than asking or listening.

I was once chastised by an ex for responding to Facebook messages with a smiley face (and words, too – I’m not that much of a millennial). ‘Since when,’ he asked, had I done this?

I was doing it to be nice (this is often a mistake in life). But it illustrates that a shorthand of niceties easily fails, especially without visual cues to calibrate the message. Also, you shouldn’t date people who judge your emoticon use (even though I do that too; just silently).

When brands misunderstand the balance of power in a relationship and assume a false sense of control by focusing on their personality at the expense of their elicited response, they can begin to provoke responses they don’t intend.

Knowing your audience

This rule is as old as the hills, but I think it’s the hardest to really carry through into writing practice. I went to a reading by the writer Philip Pullman recently, and he acknowledged he had no idea who he wrote for.

In the hands of those who write style guides, lapsing into what we feel to be ‘human’ language might be a lapse built on a shaky assumption.

“Every act of engaging with a text — even just reading — is an act of interpretation.” – and while a “brand’s personality provides the basis for our affection towards a brand by animating and humanizing it”, that affection really relies on whether we identify with the aspect of humanity it projects and the way it is animated.

A brand tone of voice is part of a design pattern, and should be tested as such. Were it up to me, I’d put brands and audiences in couples therapy to talk solely about language and feelings – a kind of content counseling centre where all responses have to be phrased as I-statements.

As a writer, it’s only when I step back and understand what’s happening when my words are read that I really begin to understand where my message lies. It lies in the interpretation. That’s not to say the driving force doesn’t start with me – it just means that drive only gets me to the first draft.

Graphs that lie

Many people (i.e. companies) visualise data in order to make the data say what they want it to. Which is pretty much the opposite of data. Here are two examples, of probably a million.

Our friend Des Traynor found this graph within a Kindle Press conference:

Amazon struggles with basic math

Apparently 8 is half of 12. If you want to empahsise the more-ness of something, all you have to do is make it seem bigger. We humans fall for this stuff.

Then there’s the famous Steve Jobs tilt-o-whirl from a 2008 keynote, pretending iPhone sales were high through an optical illusion:

Steve Jobs makes magic numbers

If you make 19.5 look bigger than 21.2, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t. I could have used this in my algebra class.

Narcissistic graphs

Finally, there’s the narcissistic graph, from Nicholas Feltron, a leader of the Quantified Self, a way to chart your everyday non-events into a grand reveal about your psyche. Here he charts his date activities.

The lie here is that you’re interesting.

An infographic of Nicholas Feltron's date activities in 2009

I know you make pretty things, Nick, but the only insight from this graph is that your dates were cumbersome.

Drawing conclusions from nothing

Want to make a point without the data to back it up? Look no further! I’ve made three graphs I happen to be very proud of.

1) If you chart natural disasters against places where gay marriage is recognised, you’ll see which natural disasters are used as punishment. Feel free to use this, Tea Partiers!

Earthquakes don't discriminate

2) And continuing with the specious, here’s how pitbull attacks generate spikes in Vegemite sales.

Think about that when you're enjoying your vegemite

3) And finally, If you can quantify yourself, you can quantify a cat:

cats are obsessed with the Crying Game

Don’t think, just look!

If you want to know how you should feel about something, data visualisation is your guy. Just be sure to cross reference it.

Main image by Chad Hagen

It’s a catchy tune; I’m not cool enough to deny this. Remaining uncool, I decided to investigate the lyrics like a forensic linguist would, forensic linguistics being a field with which I am obsessed.

Diagnosis? Disturbing.

Function word saturation = lying

There are 18 instances of the word “we” in this demonic ditty, which accounts for 5% of her overall lyrics. According to James W. Pennebaker, a psychologist who analyses function words (filler words like pronouns and articles) in various texts, the more you use the word “we”, the more likely it is that you aren’t telling the truth. 5% is way above average for “we” saturation in everyday speech: Swift is clearly lying.

Interlocking phrases = kidnapping

According to transcripts of what linguists call threat communication (for example, recorded calls to the police), calls for help display patterns of overlapping and often interlocking phrases. This “he” in this traumatic tale repeats “I love you” whenever Swift picks up the phone.

I say, I hate you, we break up, you call me, I love you

And his pleas have a symmetry not unlike overlapping phrases.

Baby . . . I swear I’m going to change . . . Trust me.

“Baby” and “trust me” have the same rhythm and vowel sounds (practically a palindrome). These are the sounds of pleading (probably to someone wielding a knife).

There are other clues.

We haven’t seen each other in a month
When you, said you, needed space, what?

He needs space, yet he hasn’t seen her in a month? She’s obviously locked him in a basement.

Repetition = manipulation

Repetition is one of the oldest rhetorical devices, used by politicians (who are also often violent criminals). It’s a way to add weight to a statement, where the words by themselves aren’t enough. Repetition can also steer us off the track of the meaning of the words, while emphasising the sound.

Swift says ‘never ever’ about 500 times in this song:

But Oooh, this time I’m telling you, I’m telling you
We are never ever ever ever getting back together
We are never ever ever ever getting back together
You go talk to your friends talk
And my friends talk to me
But we are never ever ever ever getting back together

This is to emphasise both the force of the statement and her distance from her ex (and alleged victim).

Tense discrepancy = murder

She says near the end of the song, “you called me up again tonight.” “Called” is past tense, while “tonight” is sometime in the future, or at best, present. Swift has mixed her tenses, in a way that shows premeditation in an obvious cover-up of her crime.

Court ready

Feel free to use this analysis as evidence. I’m not trained, but I listen to a lot of pop songs.

I’ve used it as a greeting:

Conversely, as a valediction:

Responding to birth:

And when dogs are anywhere near my thoughts:

OMG is short for ‘Oh my God’ (OMG duh). Because we actually say the letters, instead of saying ‘omjee,’ ‘OMG’ is an initialism (as opposed to ‘AIDS’, which is an acronym). But this is a distinction for the kinds of people who get enraged by the mispronunciation of ‘niche.’

Acronyms and initialisms shorten things – those things that are a pain in the ass to write or say. Most people attribute them to the late 20th century when the internet took over the world. But they were very common as far back as Roman times, when carving words into stone was just slightly more of a pain in the ass than the iPhone keyboard.

Acronyms are also things that must be in common enough use to be recognized as such. If we were to make an acronym/initialism into an equation, it would be

[pain in the ass] x [frequency] = acronym.

OMGs throughout history

The Oxford English Dictionary attributed the first OMG way back in 1917, to some Navy guy who bascially said “OMG I want to be knighted.” You can see the actual transcript on the OED site.

But OMG didn’t invade our vernacular until more recently. Because the phrase ‘Oh my god’ hasn’t changed, I have to conclude the frequency with which we say it has. And why is that?

If we look at the OMGs of today, we’re likely to see fuchsia and exclamation points.

OMG blog

OMG Blog - http://www.omgblog.com/

OMG Yahoo - http://omg.yahoo.com/

Here’s my easy conclusion that I’ve just made up. OMG is everywhere because everything is a big deal. Something isn’t news unless we’re panicking about it. Don’t even talk to me unless you’re shouting MAJOR GOSSIP.

OMG variations

I’ve come up with a list of OMG spin-offs for specific use. If we have ZOMG (an extra emphatic OMG, stemming from a typing mishap), then we should have further subcategorisations.

• FauxMG – a sarcastic exclamation; another way of saying “Really? I don’t care”.
• OMZ – getting really excited about going to sleep
• BroMG – OMG for dudes
• OMchi – excitement during meditation
• OM&G – enthusiasm about a merger and acquisition
• FoshoMG – An exclamatory confirmation
• OMP – You’re so excited, you just urinated a little

Feel free to use these; I want to get one in the OED by the year 2015.

Today, I think about content in broader terms, perhaps less PowerPoint-able but more intriguing. That’s because I’m thinking about content types more broadly: not just corporate and retail sites or apps, but content where the words themselves are the product, as with journalism, literature or nonfiction essays.

Because how can there be fixed rules for such vast fields of expression? Instead, maybe the shape content takes should depend on what it is – the big idea that inspired it – as well as what, or who, it is for.

This line of thinking doesn’t discount the old rules: we shouldn’t revert to treating web content like print. But as much as it’s a business asset, content is first a conceptual asset; it’s intellectual property, and as such it ought to have that intellectual purpose at its core.

Most industries are just starting to grasp this, not because the idea itself is so groundbreaking, but because it requires a shift in ways of working. Publishers, like other businesses before them, have entrenched habits. The habits that gave rise for the need for content strategy in large organisations are also present in publishing and creative industries – really, until I have evidence otherwise (because I am obviously the arbiter of this), in every large organisation that’s methodically run.

There are some designers answering the call to redefine content formats, either with hardware or software or just broad-strokes ideas. Craig Mod’s Hack the cover is a great example, as is Robin Sloan’s book review in javascript, which is charmingly close to the earliest ideas I had about interacting with computers using text, mostly attributable to 80s movies like War Games.

So. Show a designer a problem and they will work out 16 different ways to fix it – so we’ll probably figure out the book-as-object soon, or realise it’s now lots of things.

But writers (as far as I can see), outside a digitally-obsessed minority, don’t voice many aspirations about content formats. Which is a shame to me, because the people behind the concepts and styles of writing that are being created should ideally be inspiring the future forms they’ll take.

If you’re reading this blog you’ve probably also read this one, which lays out the case for an approach to formatting content based on semantic purpose – so that form follows meaning, not the other way around.

This is one of those things that seems blatantly obvious when it’s pointed out: and that’s because format and semantics have always been interlaced.

Our existing content formats were around for so long that we didn’t think twice before knowing that a long imagined story should go in a book, a short serious article should go in a magazine, a poem should be published in a ‘slim volume’ if you’re just starting out, or a chubby ‘collected’ edition if you’re an elder statesman (or woman). Form and purpose were so entwined it’s hard to know which came first (it was format, sorry – after all, the first writers were for-hire scribes filling pre-formatted scrolls).

And if writers have been loath to push against the constraints of format imposed by their industry, no wonder the corporate world has taken so long to relinquish its most familiar formats — the brochure, the advertisement, and the annual report.

I’ve found a lot of inspiration in the world of transmedia (though I hate that word) storytelling, over the past year. Like content strategy, it’s a vastly and aggressively misunderstood term for something rather simple: the notion that, much like conceptual art, a story should start with an idea, rather than a format. Instead of writing a novel, poem, TV show, movie or game, you start with a concept for a world, and see how far that idea will evolve. It’s based on something we already do, quite naturally – and something the internet has enabled, through allowing people to engage with stories at various levels outside of the main format or storyline (though ‘true’ transmedia could be seen as something without no single main narrative, only conjoining threads).

In a similar way, we have a chance now to do something wholly different with all kinds of content; to make it fit for purpose by making purpose the bedrock of its format; rather than dressing it up and pouring it into predefined blocks of type.

The thing is, I suspect a lot of writers like predefined blocks of type. Writers don’t always want to grow up to be content strategists; even in the design world, a lot are, quite reasonably, happiest producing words and focusing on the creative.

But that’s a risky position to take. It means we’re saddled with whatever the publishing companies and software companies, and of course Amazon, decide the size and shape of a format should be: website or ebook. Blog or tweet. Or something else entirely.

If we’re ever going to have the stability to focus on the ‘what’ and not the ‘how’, we need to get more involved in the design conversation, the roots of how digital things are made, not just managed and kept alive. We can do this by looking to other worlds making their work digital-first, like parts of the art world, and see what they’re trying – we don’t have to settle for reflexive, skeuomorphic text formats, much as our nostalgia for paper and ink might tug us in that direction.

Constraints matter, as part of any format; I know I found it a lot easier to write 600 to 800 word articles for a newspaper than I do to keep to limit-free, self-imposed blog post deadlines (and I sense I’m not alone in that). But unless we free ourselves from those constraints for a little while, we won’t see if there’s anything just beyond our limits that could provide an even richer platform for our imaginations to inhabit.

Image credit: ‘Bookmobile vespers in Vienna’, by The Shop House

Cities have soundmarks, like landmarks. In San Francisco, it’s the sound of a trolley bell. In New Orleans, it may be the muffled trumpet of a nearby jazz bar.

- from The Science of Quieter Cities, by Emily Badger

But the true tone of a city comes from the voices that inhabit it. We’ve collected four short clips from four different cities around the world. Can you guess each city from the sounds of their collective voices?

Guess these cities

Listen to the following four clips, no more than 30 seconds each. If you can correctly guess all four cities (in the comments), you’ll win a spectacular prize.

At first we tried to make the prize the mayorship of all four cities, but apparently democracy exists. So instead, you’ll get a Mapped T-shirt. Which also works as an invisibility cloak*.

Indicative Mapped T shirt

Send us your city

We’re looking for more sounds, more stories from more cities:

• Send us a sound clip from a city; make sure that it’s mostly voices. The more common the sound file format (mp3 for example), the more likely I’ll be able to listen to it.
• Send us your favorite story from a city where you live or where you’ve visited – what somebody said to you, or what you overheard or the sounds of voices that surprised you

Send them to mappedblog@gmail.com. We’ll publish the best ones, and perhaps create a piece of folklore for the future to see and hear, at least until the apocalypse.

*not actually true

Illustration by Hennie Haworth

Here at Mapped we’ve noticed a tonal shift, if not seismic, at least tremorous.

The way we speak online tends to blur together – on Twitter, on Facebook, in the blog posts we write and comments we leave – into a unified ‘online’ tone of voice (LOL).

And we – that is, the two of us – are the first to admit to that shift in our own writing, especially when we write to each other.

Take this email for example (indicative of 95% of our email/chat content):

If the way we wrote were like a jazz riff (and it clearly is), it would sound like Bibbity-boo-bop. BOP. A longer sentence, followed by a curt, short phrase.

We think this is all down to the #hashtag.

The purpose of the hashtag – to connect one idea to many others through a word or phrase – has spawned a communicative offshoot and become a comic rhythm, a way of visualising the punchline. Remember how people writing about Hollywood used to talk about ‘beats’, annoyingly? That’s what the hashtag is.

you could not find two people more open-minded to different kinds of chips and salsas then me and dad right now. #malibu

— Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling) July 1, 2012

I just want to get hammered and go watch the fireworks #priorities

— Darien Fehring (@Dfehrs) July 3, 2012

We (that’s us at Mapped, again, forgive the hive mind personification) didn’t start out speaking this way. Randall is from New Orleans (with varied roots) and Elizabeth is from Nova Scotia (born in Ireland), so we naturally bonded over our shared Cajun/Acadian non-heritage.

We met at work in Dublin and became friends, and did the thing of sharing catchphrases, ways of speaking, weaving them into a shorthand vernacular.

A shared interest in writing perhaps made the communication shift more rapid, but the way we wrote in longform remained unique, individual. Spoken language changed first, but given how much of our lives we live online, that soon seamlessly merged into a shared online tone. Since we couldn’t mimic tones of voice, we mimicked punctuation.

With nuanced differences, of course. We will still fight over stray semicolons.

The genesis of the online tone of voice

So where does the online tone of voice come from – the one shared by friends but also seemingly by everyone on Twitter? And how did it happen?

There are clues to this at the scene of the crime.

We all mirror the people we’re talking to – picking up accents, phrases, and the tendency to end our sentences like this?

It’s part of our adaptability as humans – we do it to form social groups by responding to the tone with which we’re presented. “What’s up?” elicits a different response than “I take it you’re well”.

In the same way, the way social media prompts us to engage sets our tone online.

Facebook's 'what's on your mind'? box

Twitter's 'what's happening'? message box

“What’s on your mind” is asking something different than “What’s happening” – the first is far more personal, and therefore we tend to write more personally on Facebook*.

The tone has been set. And then we also take our cue from those with whom we are connected, and those connected to us take their cue in turn, and eventually it’s a snake eating its tail.

The offline tone of voice

This tone of voice, this echo chamber, repeats itself in cities and communities around the world. History begets cultural attitudes begets turns of phrase.

We asked Mapped friend Martha Rotter, a Dublin expat from the States, how she found the shift in language after moving to Ireland, and whether she’d adopted any Irish turns of phrase.

“Just after X-ing” – [As in, “I’m just after leaving” instead of “I’ve just left”] – it took me a long time to get the hang of that one. I still can’t use it myself, it sounds so weird to me.

Also “Yer man” and “Yer wan” threw me for a while, now in my head I silently replace them with “that guy” or “that woman”

The sound of cities: close up

The spread of tone has borders: a city has its own online voice. It’s called language convergence. Elizabeth noticed it when she first moved to London.

I am still figuring out England (and probably will be so in a hundred years), but it seems to me that the London tone is obsessed with being cool – particularly young, urban, and cool. Even now that it is no longer part of their legitimate tourism campaign (we remember you, Tony Blair and the Spice Girls).

I was reading a literary blog awhile ago that kept saying ‘Respect’ – without apparent irony or humour – as a commendation for things that are good. Coming from Dublin – where you’d be jeered at for co-opting urban slang like that – it made me guffaw, a little. But maybe I’m just too square. Is that what the kids say these days?

Sidewalk (footpath) conversations

We can’t really blame London for bringing the street into its online tone, though – that’s where language convergence begins. Linguists have realised that in order to study language effectively, they need to study humans and what brings us in contact with each other – disciplines like anthropology, sociology and psychology (a paper called Linguistic Anthropology gives a great summary of this).

Conversation creates language. Anecdotally, you can tell a lot from a city by what you overhear. Those anecdotes become a mirror for its culture, or at least its stereotype.

Here are two scenes Randall observed in two very different cities. They each lasted no more than 5 seconds, but mirror local cliches we’re all familiar with:

On New York:

The stereotype goes like this: some guy shouting “I’m driving he-ah!” or “hey blondie!” out his car window. But this is the New York of fiction; fortunately, the real thing is far more interesting. Once someone said to my friend as he passed by us on the street: “Do you like Marilyn Manson?” When she said no, he shouted “Well he likes you!”

On Toronto:

I passed by two people fighting in the street in downtown Toronto. I was struck by it, not only because neither of them uttered a profanity, but because they were using “I” statements. They were like, “when you do this, I feel that”. Only Canadians would use conflict resolution techniques in every day life.

Language as collective sound

So, what happens when we zoom out from a city? When we look at language as a collective? When we analyze the hum? Randall started thinking about this on a recent trip to Japan:

One of the sounds that I started noticing a couple of days into my trip was something like “zeye-mas”. People would say it as I left restaurants and shops, and, it was always jumbled together with many other syllables, Later, we bought a phrase book and found out that it means ‘please’ – basically a polite suffix you can add to anything you’re saying. Politeness is rife in Japan, and it rings through the city.

Later I started to think about how I myself was speaking. One day I was in a restaurant and I wanted something that wasn’t on the menu. In English I would have said, “Would it be OK if I could just have the . . .?” – a lot of words to indicate attitude more than the subject itself. But here, I just said “Bread” in Japanese (then smiled).

What can we glean from all those words in between the words – those words Randall couldn’t say in Japanese? The hum of a city must reveal something about the thousands or millions of people speaking them.

With that in mind, it’s time to Guess That City!

Guess that city

If you can guess these cities (In order – Mystery cities 1, 2, 3 and 4), let us know:

• either in the comments
• or tweet us @mappedblog

There will be a prize. #nobigdeal.

We’ll reveal the answers next week via Twitter.

Share your citysounds and stories

It doesn’t end there. We’d like to build a map of collective language, and stories that go with them. Send us a short recording of the place you’re in and the voices you can hear. Tell us about it. Tweet it to @mappedblog. We’ll be waiting. #threat.

*this is anecdotal and a generalisation, but we’re going with it.