So You're an American?

Honestly it's probably more evenly distributed than you may think. I grew up in one state in the North East, currently living in another, and I've been to two states in the South East, South mid, South west, North West, and every single time has been a very noticeable difference in culture.

Probably from/related to https://colinwoodard.com/books/american-nations/

It's probably some variant of this argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Am...

> One thing that strikes me travelling in America is the homogeneity.

The only thing your comment spoke to is the homogeneity of accents and language. There’s a lot more to culture than just that.

I think television has had a massive effect on the overall, "average" American accent. The stereotypical Boston accent can still be found in Massachusetts, but it isn't nearly as common as you might think.

Similarly, the thick Southern drawl is still a thing in some places, but when I travel it seems that a light twang is more common.

This might also be due to geographic mobility, but I think media is a more likely culprit.

Relatively (geographically) small countries with (effectively) a single native language tend to develop the most extreme range of dialects as groups seek to differentiate themselves. The UK is a particularly extreme example of this (but not unique).

I am also from the UK, but have lived in the USA for 34 years. When I first came here for a visit, I remember thinking there was more cultural variation between shellfish fisherman in Louisiana and Maine than there was across all of Europe, even though they had very similar jobs, spoke the same language, drove the same cars, watched the same TV shows (back then, at least). 34 years later, I stand by that assessment, though it has become a lot more nuanced.

I think this is relatively new phenomena. Most people have seemed to have converged upon the West Coast accent. The same you'd see from Hollywood. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, but one being that if you speak with other accents you may come off as dumb. Same thing seems to happen with Canadians. But when you get the people drunk, they'll tend to slip back into their native accents.

Here's a video that went viral awhile ago because these people are speaking kinda like Boomhauer from King of the Hill: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_OS7hzGxi0o

I am able to understand these people but for others it is unintelligible. I think America is such a melting pot that it also affects our accents. People travel all across the country and thus those accents converge. But certain regions tend to have much thicker ones than others.

A few notes:

First, there's a lot more to culture than accent. The cultures of the states you passed through are radically different, in ways that wouldn't be obvious to someone passing through.

And even if we take accent alone as evidence of cultural homogeneity, your road trip would likely have only passed through relatively highly populated areas if you stuck to the highways. Feel free to correct me if I'm, but I imagine you didn't take detours out into Appalachia, or head out into the swamps in Florida. Assuming you stuck to the interstate, it's not surprising that you wouldn't have encountered much diversity of accent, because the thick accents tend to reside in isolated areas. Population centers homogenize much faster.

And one more note: Michigan to Florida may sound like a large cross-section of the United States, but you really only passed through what we in the US would consider two distinct regions: the Midwest and the South. You missed New England, which is a hot spot of linguistic diversity in the US, with as many dialects in that small region as in the rest of the country combined.

This changed through television and an intensive effort in schools to standardize spoken English, including speech therapy for people that had accents too far outside the prescribed American access. Even people learning English as another language often undergo accent remediation lessons (my wife is from Thailand and had to take accent improvement lessons as part of her TOEFL and ESL studies). Growing up the variation was extreme - there was a “middle” dialect that span the Midwest and western, but the north east, south, and various regions like the dakotas and others had very distinct dialects that were often unintelligible. This also ignores Ebonics, or urban black dialects, as well as other sub dialects.

As others point out TV and Hollywood also played a huge influencing factor here, but TV and Hollywood also existed before the convergence of dialect happened and were just as if not more important. It really came to a head in the 1980’s through 1990’s with the mandatory educational standardization of language and dialect, partly exemplified by no child left behind and related standardization efforts.

But I think culturally there are hundreds of cultures in the US, not just by region, but my demographics within a region. Black culture in Atlanta is very different than black culture in rural Georgia, is very different than Vietnamese American culture in Atlanta, etc. People from Europe are always looking at their monoculture and it’s internal variance and looking for a similar single dimensional variation. But America is culturally extraordinarily varied along many dimensions owing to its enormous communities of minorities from every other culture on earth, adapted over generations into something unique in the world to that geography plus ethnicity plus other dimensions. I’d almost say it’s so varied that it’s easy to overlook and just focus on the Generica experience presented by mass retailers and franchises.

I wouldn’t classify the coastal south as the Deep South. Accents get stronger the farther away you get from the ocean (except for Louisiana).

Accents won't change to the point where you would have trouble understanding them, but cultures and values can be radically different. Living in NYC for example, I would consider many bible belt sates to almost be a different country.

I don't have any problem telling folk I'm an American now. I will never apologize for it and never apologize for actions that are not my doing.

I have traveled and lived abroad full time for almost a decade. I have never encountered anyone who attacked me or expected me to defend the United States because I was born there. Not once. I’m pretty sure most people around the world understand I don’t represent all Americans, or the actions of my government.

I have several times encountered other Americans pretending they come from Canada, or complaining constantly about the USA. And I have witnessed Americans abroad starting arguments about politics or guns or something about another country or culture they know nothing about.

If you need to pretend you come from Canada to feel comfortable traveling maybe look at yourself. I don’t have any shame about my nationality. And I don’t feel any need to defend my country or engage in comparisons or criticisms that would lead to that kind of talk.

It is an ostrich reaction to deny that sentiment toward Americans even among our closer allies in the West has been eroding. These efforts made by the State Department are indeed timely, regardless of any historic precedence. In very recent news, we see these perceptions discussed openly in US media: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/world/europe/brics-expans...

2020 could be considered a much more urgent time for such cultural framing for American travelers.

The Salamancas and Hermanos are regrouping.

… Well, how is life in Mexico these days, what with the cartels and so forth?

I would say "I live in New Mexico, which is in the southwest US between Texas and Arizona."

It helped that I lived in Santa Fe which, (unlike where your bio implies you live), is a pretty-well recognized US place name in Europe.

One Swedish taxi driver was a fan of Louis L'Amour, and many others know about it through other westerns. An English hotel clerk, base on its reputation, guessed the population was 200K-300K (it was 65K then, 90K now).

I wouldn't try it for most other states, but in my experience they usually know California, and if they do know it, they tend to have positive feelings towards it.

What's embarrassing is choosing to reside in a country you are ashamed of.

> I still don't understand how you can be "proud" to have been randomly born in a specific country.

I never said that

Being proud of being a certain nationality is a function of many things. Your ancestors migrating, or staying in the same place, founding values, current and past culture etc.

Following your reasoning, one could say “I don't understand how you can be ‘embarrassed’ to have been randomly born in a specific country.” I think your frame misses whats actually being said. We agree no one should place the value or fault on random birth origin.

There is the same concept in America.

Per capita consumer spending, Germany 2021: $21,704

Per capita consumer spending, USA 2021: $47915

Have you ever been to France or Germany? That’s obviously and clearly very not true.

First thing I did when becoming a US Citizen was apply for my passport.

None of my US friends have one. It's so strange to me.

I wonder how the numbers compare between countries when normalized for "distance/time required to reach another country".

Embarrassing that more Americans haven’t or that more Americans can’t afford it? International Travel can be prohibitively expensive for many Americans.

People have definitely asked me all sorts of interesting questions about mine!

Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's outright triggering. Part of talking with people from all over!