Dialectology: Linguists studying language variation across regional areas identify life-long inhabitants and collect samples of language from them. They then plot the variant pronunciations, words, and phrases on a map, identifying where each token of a language form was spoken.
Can we tell if someone is from Iowa or Wisconsin, the south, the east coast?
Every aspect of language varies across geographical regions.
(1) People in a certain area have a particular accent; the way that they pronounce words and phrases is peculiar to the speakers in that area.
(2) The lexical items that speakers choose also differ from place to place. In western Pennsylvania, people who are always into other people's business are nebby, in Minnesota, they're nosy.
(3) The syntax, the way that words are combined into phrases and sentences, also differs in different regions. In Minnesota, if the floor is dirty 'the floor needs to be washed'. In western Pennsylvania, 'the floor needs washed'.
So how do linguists determine what a dialect area is?
According to Encyclopædia Britannica:
Dialectology is the study of dialects. Variation most commonly occurs as a result of relative geographic or social isolation and may affect vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation (accent). Dialectology as a discipline began in the 19th century with the development in western Europe of dictionaries and grammars of regional dialects. Much of the work of dialectology has consisted of gathering information about the types of variation that occur in different dialects and the construction of linguistic atlases showing patterns of distribution for a series of varying features within a language. Such work on the geographic patterns of linguistic variation is also known as linguistic geography.
The further away from your area the more pronounced you find an accent. The closer you are to an area the more you can differentiate an accent locally.
When I first came to Minneapolis, I was startled to hear people say "da rainch" -- "da iron rainch" -- and "Dulut." I noticed the Northern Minnesota dialect as sharply distinct from the local Twin Cities sound. I was amazed because the Northern Minnesota dialect is oddly similar to the dialect used in my home area near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Now I am seeing that this may have to do with similarities in the speech of certain types of working class people, because, like "da iron rainch," Pittsburgh also has a long history of iron mining, iron works and steel mills.
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