Comment by jmwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmwilson | Hacker News Reader

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In the case of Louisiana, I'm guessing the Cajun and Creole areas were never wealthy compared to the cities. Young people from the country seeking jobs and money in urban centers has been a theme throughout the 20th century, and geographic mobility was actually higher in the past [1], so what's causing these cultures to evaporate so quickly now?

It seems like wherever you look in the US, regional cultures are vanishing at an accelerated pace. From Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, and everywhere in between, shops and restaurants that not outright bland national chains have converged around a common contemporary hipster aesthetic optimized for Instagram. Is the Internet and social media that powerful that they are the real cause of this cultural compression, or are there other factors?

[1] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/02/american-mobility-has...

A lot of us learned that repressing the dialect what we're comfortable with made people take us more seriously. Rather than any pidgin or trade language forming to communicate effectively, it was safer to just assimilate.

The true problem is, we're unintelligible to anyone that doesn't care enough to listen. Anything with different vowels and archaic grammar and pronunciation gets tuned out immediately, or the listener gets angry (which at least shows an attempt at listening).

I was having this very conversation a couple of months ago with a colleague.

She is of Mexican descent and grew up relatively poor in Stockton, CA. I'm of Scot descent and grew up in a relatively poor area of rural AR. We mentioned that I acquired most of my vocabulary in my teen years through reading, and as a result sometimes use words that I've never heard spoken and am therefore apt to mispronounce them. It was much more of an issue when I was younger, but it still happens occasionally. She said she had much the same experience, and called it "code switching". I had heard the term before and knew approximately what it meant, but until then had never considered that it applied to my own experience. It absolutely does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

I'd say that it applies to Cajun and Creole as well, only more so.

I wonder if telecommunication advances have sped up accent homogenization

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