Forget driver's licenses—whether you call athletic footwear "sneakers" or "tennis shoes" can essentially tell a person where in the U.S. you were raised. A mapping project from North Carolina State University took common regional differences in English words or phrases, or in the pronunciation of some words, and calculated where they were most popular.

Things like whether you call carbonated beverages "soda," "pop" or "Coke," and whether you would say caramel with two or three syllables, not to mention the great sneaker/tennis shoe debate, were particularly regional, according to the survey maps. Maryland, a part of the Northeast, fell in line with most other states in the region.