American culture is, I believe, becoming more homogeneous over time as a result of information technology. Unless you're from either rural Appalachia or some deep part of the South, you just don't have an accent. Or rather, you have a generic "American" accent.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
81 points (100.0% liked)
Science
12955 readers
30 users here now
Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah I'm absurdly good at not speaking in my native Appalachian accent, opting instead for a sort of "generic midwest." Unless I'm tawking to ma day-ed-dy, n' then all bets is awf."
My sister and I cover so well and so often that none of her four children who are literally being raised in Charleston, West Virginia has even a trace of our accent.
Information technology - and contact, in general - is at most the "grease" smoothing out this sort of change, not the cause itself. The actual cause is usually social and ideological. Nationalism, lower prestige associated with the dialect in question, this kind of thing.
That happens because we use speech itself to highlight who we identify ourselves with.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of traits usually associated with Southern American English ended associated with African American Vernacular English instead - non-rhoticity, gerund in /n/ instead of /ŋ/, etc. So at least in this case this might have a component of racism (I do not know if it does), where locals would rather be associated with whites from another region than with black people in their own region.
The article also mentions another component - generations. People not wanting to speak like a boomer, and attributing the traditional dialect to boomers.
For contrast: in Brazil I've been informally noticing the opposite trend, at least in my region, with kids sometimes having a thicker accent than even me (and my own is already thick), with the accent levelling being mostly local between the rural zone and nearby urban centres. Info tech is still everywhere here, and those same bloody kids don't stop staring those bloody phones because of their bloody ~~zapzap~~ WhatsApp, but they still prefer to speak like locals instead of adopting somewhere else's accent. (I'm mentioning kids because dialect change is usually cross-gen.)
Like a melting pot?
This is happening to every country.
Yep, parts of my family have it and other parts do not.
Y'all itself seems to be spreading, though.
It's contagious as heck. I've never been to the South but somehow y'all fitted itself into my lexicon.
True story: in the early 00s, my company was acquired by a Large Silicon Valley Company. LSVC sent a "business integration" team across the country (to Dallas, Texas where we were at the time) to welcome us into the fold. At these meetings, these Perky Northern Californian Women - they were all Perky Northern California Women, for whatever reason - opened with the following sentence:
"We'd like to welcome y....ya.....y'y'y'y'y.....YA UL(!) to LSVC."
Repeated throughout the meeting, the integration team kept stumbling over "y'all" instead of just saying "you" when talking to us. Clearly, someone thought that - being Texans - we wouldn't understand them unless the did.
At one point, one of us spoke up and said something like, "First, thank you for attempting to use our local dialect to talk to us. But, we can understand you perfectly well when you speak your native Northern Californian. Second, by way of correction, the word is just "y'all". Also, if you want to use the plural second person, like vous in French, you may say "all'y'all", but it is optional."
Repeated throughout the meeting, the integration team kept stumbling over “y’all” instead of just saying “you” when talking to us. Clearly, someone thought that - being Texans - we wouldn’t understand them unless the did.
Absolute cringe.
Also, remind me what the difference between y'all and all y'all is again.
all'y'all is the plural second person form.
Sheriff, speaking to a number of bandits: All'y'all just put yer guns down and come out with yer hands up so we can end this all peaceful like.
Doesn't y'all refer to a plural group as well though? You can't call just one person y'all.
All y'all is broader, but I'm not sure how to characterize it. Like if you're talking to someone who is part of a team, saying y'all could ambiguously refer to the whole team, but all y'all unambiguously refers to the whole team.
Oh, okay, so just like "all of you" in other dialects, then.
Yeah, more or less.
I'd guess it's just not natural to have a missing pronoun like English has since the days of thou (which was the original singular).
Y'all been spreading for a long time. It's just easier to use.
I try actively not to use it, because I associate it with a backward culture.
I grew up in the southeast US and while I don't think I have a strong accent and have tried to cut other southern things out of my speech, I quite like "y'all". In my opinion it's the best gender neutral second person plural word. Most others are needlessly gendered or sound even weirder.
I hear you on the needlessly gendered words. I also try not to use words like "guys." Instead, I use words like "everyone" or just "you." They work just fine in most instances. On rare occasions, I sneak in a "you all." Same content without the southern sound.
Politics has always held sway over the spread of dialects. You'll be happy to know that the language lasts longer than any associations, most people don't even know about Willie the Bastard anymore.
I've actually seen this. I live in an area where people used to have a thicker accent.
Now everyone seems to have blended into sounding similar to the sort of West Coast TV accent.
You mean like this?
Hwhat?
Y'all believe this guy?
That boy ain't right
This is a little difficult for me to reconcile. Dialect is the best way to determine an ethnicity, and Southern culture is more than the stereotypes (although they indeed often apply). I have only ever lived in the Southern US, and there are cultural factors here which don't exist elsewhere. Our cultural heritage is significantly more based in West African tradition than for example the Northeast or the Midwest and the specific mix of influences we have here is different than anywhere else. Even though this is the case, there is also a very real association among white southerners to the Confederacy, and this African influenced dialect of white American English is associated with antebellum white supremacy among southern whites which certainly caused me to avoid speaking like that when I was growing up. I really wish the development would have been in the direction of embracing our entire cultural heritage with pride rather than abandon everything about it to assimilate to a generic white American culture. It's kind of an improvement, but the improvement could have been keeping the best aspects of what we have here. Reparations and reconciliation could have been a thousand times better, but white supremacy is what it is so here we are.
It makes me kind of sad to see so many people happy that the accent is going away. It's good to have diversity, and the thought of my "native" accent becoming extinct makes me sad. I don't want bad people to have a claim to an entire accent and culture, especially since the death of the accent won't do anything about the bad takes. There's a lot that good about southern culture - taking things slow, being laid-back in a world that wants you to run around like a chicken with your head cut off, and forming tight communities with the people around you. I just wish there was a way to reclaim that without feeling afraid that people would assume I support the bad parts, too.
Good. It’s horrible.
Great, now do it with all of the confederacy crap
I see that shit in Canada. Canada!