Why People In The South Say 'Coke' Instead Of 'Soda'

One of the age-old (and hotly contested) debates is if you call soft drinks pop or soda. But if you are from the American South, you don't say either of those words. Instead, it's a coke, no matter the product. But why? It all harkens back to Coca-Cola, the world's largest beverage company, which began its humble beginnings in a Georgia pharmacy before taking over the country and rising to international fame. Since then, its name became a genericized trademark in the South, where people use the word when referring to any soft drink. (It's like when someone uses the word Kleenex when referring to tissues or Post-it when talking about any sticky note.)

Soft drink terms are so unique to geography that a cartographer even made an interactive map for it. The map is labeled as Pop vs. Soda, but one look will show you just how ubiquitous the term coke has become in the South, with a pink hue stretching from Georgia to Texas. For the most part, you can clock it below the Mason-Dixon line, although responses are more mixed in Oklahoma, Florida and North Carolina, and Missouri, Maryland, and Virginia are squarely in the soda camp. You can still submit your own preference, with mapmaker Alan McConchie asking your hometown to make sure that the linguistic analysis is valid.

People in the South have been referring to their soft drink as a coke for a century, but originally, the Coca-Cola Company wasn't a fan of the nickname. In 1913, the company created an advertising campaign to try to get customers to ask for the drink by its full name instead of simply calling it coke because they didn't want confusion with competing brands (our survey shows that only about 1 in 3 people prefer Pepsi to Coke).

The campaign lasted 30 years before the marketing staff admitted defeat and finally trademarked the term "coke" for Coca-Cola beverages. This opened up the naming rights for one of its top varieties, Diet Coke, not to mention its famous 1971 song "I'd like to buy the world a coke." The nickname stuck, and since then there have been many Coca-Cola slogans with using the word.