The guy who runs the Pop vs. Soda page has really improved it. You can look at county level metrics just by hovering over the county. You can see counts, to get a good sense of the confidence in the representation of the underlying demographics. One thing that must be amended is that it’s not just soda vs. pop, there’s also coke in the South.
It is now very clear from these maps that there is an extremely sharp cline between the Middle Atlantic/New England region and the Great Lakes/Midwest on this dialect difference. I grew up in a soda region of upstate, though in the upper Hudson valley (95% soda), closer to New England than Syracuse. But in west-central New York you have counties right next to each other which are 60% vs. 15% pop, with reasonable sample sizes. Pennsylvania is similar. Clearfield county is 83% pop. Centre county just to the east is 19% pop (I know Centre county has Penn State, but the other counties around it are mostly soda as well).
In some places state lines matter a lot. Look at Oregon vs. California. The two “soda counties” in Oregon are more tied to the far north of California than the Willamette valley (the state of Jefferson). The Wisconsin-Illinois state line is a huge barrier as you approach Lake Michigan. But in other areas borders don’t matter so much. South Florida is part of soda territory, but that makes sense with its cultural history (lots of Jews with family roots in the Northeast). And there’s the huge zone that radiates out of St. Louis.
But in some ways the distribution of coke is the most interesting. First, state lines matter a lot in some areas. In the west there is a sharp drop off as one moves into Oklahoma, but an even sharper one into Kansas. Basically it’s the old Confederacy states, as Missouri has very little coke. As you move east it becomes more complicated. Northern Florida is part of the south, but you see in parts of Indiana that coke is a very common term for soft drinks. Why? It’s the “butternut” folk; descendants of Southerners who had settled large swaths of the Old Northwest. They retain connections and affinities with the South to this day.
Finally, on the Atlantic coast, you see the impact I suspect of border position and Northeastern migration into Virginia and North Carolina. The far west of North Carolina is like eastern Tennessee. West Virgina has an Appalachian extension in eastern Kentucky. State borders are less important in the east, just as is in the case further north. Cultural patterns that emerged organically when states were rather inchoate exist today in these regions, while newer states to the west were defined partly by their borders in terms of their cultural background (e.g., Kansas as a free state would be less appealing to Southern settlers culturally than if it was a slave state).
Those will more local knowledge can probably say more.
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