Study Says the Yooper Accent is One of the Hardest For AI to Understand

As a native Yooper, I am offended! (Okay, not really.) However, a study released recently revealed that the Yooper accent is one of the hardest for AI to understand.

In fact, out of the thirty accents listed in the study, the Yooper accent came in at number eleven.

What is a Yooper?

For those not in the know, a Yooper is a person from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Now, what makes a person a Yooper (born there, lives there, moved there from elsewhere) has long-been a topic of discussion, but that's another article entirely.

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What is the Yooper Accent?

The answer to this question isn't exactly cut and dry. The Yooper accent is different depending on where that particular Yooper is from.

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When most think of the accent, they think of the way that folks talked in the cult classic movie "Escanaba in Da Moonlight".

And that's true of some Yoopers. (And likely the accent that the study was referring to.) Primarily those from the middle and western end of the Upper Peninsula.

READ MORE: 24 Bridges to Enter the Upper Peninsula of Michigan That Aren't the Mighty Mac

I'm not sure if it's due to geography, or what, but those Yoopers who reside on the eastern side of the Upper Peninsula (where I am from) have a similar accent, but more... Canadian?

But, a Yooper accent is one that's kind of hard to explain in general. In fact, there's an entire Wiki page dedicated to it.

Yooper Accent Named One of the Hardest Accents to Understand

Recently, the folks at Guide2Fluency released a study about which accents are the hardest for AI (artificial intelligence) to understand.

They say the list was determined by,

Online panel survey of 3,000 adults based on age, gender, and geography. Internal data sources are used to obtain population data sets. We used a two-step process to ensure representativeness through stratified sampling and post-stratification weighting.

While the Yooper accent wasn’t the most difficult to understand, it did come in at number eleven.

According to the study, the hardest accent for AI to understand is the Southern accent, followed by the New York City accent, the Texan accent, and the Boston accent. You can read the full ranking here.