When you want a carbonated sweetened beverage, do you say “soda” or “soda-pop” or “pop”? Or do you call it something else.
When I order, it depends on where I’m eating, if it’s a restaurant, I’ll order a Diet Coke or Mountain Dew, sometimes I get asked “What do you want to drink?” other times it’s “What kind of beverage would you like?”
If I’m at someone’s house in the Minnesota/North Dakota area, I’ll usually hear, “Do you want a pop?” that’s what I always heard growing up in Minnesota. The first time I heard someone asked me if I wanted a “Soda” I said sure, expecting to get something from a “Soda fountain” like in the old west, maybe a sasparilla aka root beer. Instead, I just received a regular can of “pop”.
Now, that’s just one word for a simple sugary beverage. There’s tons of other examples of this, including the way we say things. Some would call this dialect, but for the most part in the United States we all speak and sound the same. Sure, if you’re from the south you may have a “southern drawl” or if you’re from the east coast you also might talk a little bit different.
These are all examples of colloquialisms, if you want to read more about it, check out the wikipedia entry.