Survey: Tell Us How You Define Pa.’s Many Regions

If you know anything about Pennsylvanians, it’s probably that we hold strong opinions about our home.

Earlier this year, PA Local asked our newsletter and social media audience: “When people ask you which part of Pennsylvania you’re from, what do you say?” The question prompted well over 200 responses via Instagram, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky, Facebook, X and email.

They ranged from single-word social media comments to multi-paragraph emails explaining the nuances of local naming conventions. People shared their thoughts on when and whether you can say you’re “from” a particular city, which areas do and don’t count as part of [fill-in-the-blank region], and why where they’re from is the real “central Pennsylvania.”

After going through these responses and having follow-up discussions with Pennsylvanians by phone and email, studying maps and consulting geography and history experts, I arrived at a few general conclusions.

Regions do matter to Pennsylvanians, and we’re very willing to debate what to call an area and which qualities define it. Trying to delineate the boundaries of a particular region is a challenge that, in many cases, lacks a universal answer.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to at least try to find consensus — or discover where it’s impossible.

As part of a series exploring Pennsylvania regions, their names, their identities, and whether it all matters, PA Local needs you to weigh in on how you think the state’s areas should be defined.

Each question in the survey below gives the name of a region and four maps of Pennsylvania to choose from. The maps all have a different set of counties highlighted in purple and include cities and boroughs for reference. The highlighted counties are listed below the maps.

Pick the map that most closely represents your personal understanding of the given region. There are no “right” or “wrong” answers; the vast majority of options presented reflect some government agency’s, tourism bureau’s or other org’s interpretation of a particular region. So rest assured that someone, somewhere, probably agrees with you.

The survey takes between around five minutes to complete. Please submit your responses only once. Results may appear in future reporting. Click the button below to get started!

If a blue “Take the regions survey” button doesn’t appear above for you, click here instead. Send us an email (newsletters@spotlightpa.org) if you run into any technical issues.

Feeling inspired by this exercise? Draw us a map of how you’d categorize different areas of Pennsylvania, and email it to Asha Prihar (aprihar@spotlightpa.org). We may publish crowdsourced maps in a future newsletter, article or video.

To stay in the loop about future installments of this series on Pennsylvania regions, sign up for the free, weekly PA Local newsletter.

BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to Spotlight PA at spotlightpa.org/donate. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.