I grew up a military brat and lived all over the country. My parents are from California and said tennis shoes or tennies. That's what I remember from my childhood. We ended up in the northeast when I was 13 and I stayed thru college, and I have said sneakers ever since. My 3-years-older brother still says tennies, so a critical age for having the term cement in our brains may be between 13 and 16?

I have one friend from NYC who says kicks, and he's the only one I know who does. He's in his 70s now.

I grew up in NJ where they were always sneakers; I was aware of the term “tennis shoes“, but grew up thinking it was either an obsolete term or just snooty. I didn’t realize it was a regional thing until a year or two ago, when my partner, who grew up in AZ and HI, started saying “tennis shoes” to our kids. I thought she was just being silly the first few times.

To be fair, coming from the South, I think what most people are actually saying is "tennashue."

I switched from saying "pop" to "soda" when I moved to CA and then NY, but I've never grown out of "tennis shoes".

I've also noticed (or rather, a friend noticed) that I insert an "ell" sound into the word "both" so it comes out like "bolth". No idea whether this is a upper midwestern thing or just a me thing. I've passed the pronunciation along to my daughter (but not my son) — I recently ran across a story/drawing she did when she was 5 or 6 years old in which she spells "both" as "bolh". 😂

See also XKCD's Dialect Quiz.

So although my mother and father both grew up in Detroit, Michigan (as did I), they have fairly different dialects. My mom (whose family had longer Midwestern/American roots) liked to call them "tennis shoes" or "tennies," and my dad (whose parents were from Ireland) usually just said "shoes," sometimes "sneakers," every once in a while "trainers," which feels very British Isles to me.

I switched from "tennis shoes" to "sneakers" sometime in junior high, when I stopped buying generic casual shoes and started buying basketball shoes. And since I now live in Philadelphia, I'm in sneaker country full-time. Although as often as not now, I will call my shoes by their brand names: "let me put on my Skechers/New Balances/Birkenstocks" etc.

Love these dialect maps. I grew up in Green Bay, WI. We called them gym shoes or "tennies".

I'm a lifelong pacific northwest dweller, and I always said tennis shoes until fairly recently, when I overthought it. I remembered how much I hated the feeling of failing to make racket-to-ball contact, over and over, in that one high school gym class, the only time I've ever attempted tennis. For whatever reason, my brain can't do the calculus required for ball sports.

So I've started saying sneakers, a bit self-consciously, although usually I can just say "shoes" without fear of ambiguity. We have boots, we have shoes (which are sneakers), and we have sandals. Sometimes I mix it up and say trainers, like the British.

Wait WHAT?!? I always thought a few randos said “tennis shoes”, not like almost the whole US except the northeast?!? I swear I don’t even remember hearing Jason say “tennis shoes”. Sneakers. Always and forever.

It tracks in Cincinnati. Saying anything other than gym shoes feels foreign.

I grew up in Virginia and we definitely said tennis shoes! I didn't even think it was weird until I moved to NYC. I'm a full on sneaker person now though.

Los Angeles born and bred. Never said anything but sneakers, though NY-born mom would sometimes say tennis shoes. I think it also depends on the decade for the olds, as well as the place.

I’m from NJ but lived as an adult in CA and WA. I heard “tennis shoes” sporadically enough that I thought it referred to some vague, ill-defined subcategory of sneakers that clearly didn’t seem like things you’d wear to actually play tennis.

Had zero clue this was a regional thing.

From Saskatchewan, it was gym shoes at first, then runners or running shoes (regardless of whether they were your Air Jordan basketball shoes, or whatever).

As an aside, it wasn't until I moved to the west coast that I realized that we (from Sask.) were the only people in the world, apparently, who called a hoodie a bunnyhug.
(Which, come on, you have to admit is a WAY better name.)

Well, for those who haven't seen it - I have wasted hours looking at this map and website:
The "Pin-Pen" Merger!
The "On Line"!
https://aschmann.net/AmEng/
https://aschmann.net/AmEng/#LargeMap

Tennis shoes in Texas, but it was fun when my kids were playing tennis and we had to clarify what type of shoes we were talking about. We'd call them 'actual tennis shoes,' 'tennis tennis shoes,' or when not in a hurry and able to organize thoughts better, 'shoes for tennis.'

In Queens NY, the genus was definitely “sneakers” but we usually referred to our specific footwear by species:

Keds
P.F. Flyers
Cons (Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars)

…and later, after the huge innovation of leather:

Adidas

Growing up in the UK It was plimsolls, then trainers.

Before I moved to the US I knew Americans called them sneakers (perhaps from Back to the Future? Seinfeld? Is that possible?), and it felt slightly pejorative (sneaking, as you say). But my first 5 years in the US were spent in Denver and I never once picked up that it wasn’t sneakers. Maybe I was stubbornly holding on to “trainers” and didn’t pay attention to whatever else I might have heard. Maybe I moved in the wrong circles. Or maybe I’m even less aware of the world around me than I imagined 😬 To be honest, after 25 years of living here, this is my first time learning that it’s not always sneakers this side of the pond.

Western Canadian here. Runners.

Tough to compare across different languages, but for what is worth, I grew up in Italy and we called them ‘scarpe da ginnastica’, which translates to ‘gym shoes’.
I have been living in the US since 2000, in Florida and Georgia, but I honestly never realized that most people call them tennis shoes. I heard the term sneakers in movies, and I thought that was the right term. I learned something new.

I'm from South Florida, which in nearly every one of these dialect maps is a strange anomaly. Sneaker territory. We also say Interstate instead of Freeway or Expressway or (since I now live in NYC) the unforgiveable "Highway".

I mean, they call obsessive collectors "sneakerheads," not "tennisshoeheads," so...

Having grown up in a gym shoe enclave, I had no idea it was so limited in usage. I also would have guessed that sneakers were more popular than tennis shoes.