Jane Doe
American History
Professor Shmoe
12 April, 2015

Question: What areas of the U.S. do you consider to be the North and what areas in the South: Geographically, culture, history, etc. And why?

I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer to this question because everyone has different composed views about it. We label areas of the United States commonly as the north, the south, and the Midwest. Yet, there is more connotative labeling that divide up the nation according to each state’s geographical features. These other regional terms are New England, Middle Atlantic, Pacific Northwest, plains, the Deep South and so forth. I am in that category. My criteria for surveying states are geography as well as linguistics and culture. I am from New Jersey, which is considered to be a Middle Atlantic state. In my area, we generalize New Jersey and the bordering states around us as the “metro area” (short for metropolitan) or “tri-state area,” depending on where you live. By definition, these terms generally mean that a triangular area from southwestern CT, down through New York, and into parts of northern/eastern New Jersey, as well as Pennsylvania are in typical commuting distance of Manhattan. Each region of state will have varying accents, especially in the middle Atlantic or tri-sate area. In New Jersey, when it comes to pronunciation, you can tell if that person is from North or South Jersey just by how they say a word. This can have an obvious linguistic divide and applies the same for the rest of America between the North and South regions. Regional accents and schisms are apart of America and it is what makes American English so interesting, especially the use of slang terms. Set of words will be used interchangeably the same way, but have two different meaning between states. In north New Jersey, we refer a sandwich as a “sub,” but our bordering