Sometimes I wonder how much the average human is prepared to answer questions about the culture of their birth region, though.
The USA is huge and comprises at least 11 drastically different cultures. I know other countries also have similar "yeah, same country, different culture" circumstances. I'm not sure how many people realize this.
I'm however broadly aware that there are many Spanish speakers in the US, and that in parts of Louisiana they speak Louisiana French...
The only thing your comment spoke to is the homogeneity of accents and language. There’s a lot more to culture than just that.
There's Walmart. There's the universal decay of the small town.
There's the stark difference between rural and (sub-)urban populations that's exactly the same across the country, south to north, west to east.
Other than sports there is no more local culture. And the biggest teams are part of national organizations.
There is the vast gap between the haves and have nots wherever you go.
We're a consumer society, so consider how marketing defines us. That's US culture.
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.
It started with radio. With national networks.
Broadcast TV continued that, but cable meant TV no longer controlled by local folks with their local accents and opinions.
TV anchors all learn to spike with a bland accent. And now Sinclair's "local" stations have tightly scripted news, so local news is becoming more of a simulacrum of national news.
https://deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local-tv-owner-tur...
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.
Go a little back more in time, and the daughter languages become diverse enough that they get their own names, like English, Dutch, or German.
Give America a thousand years and chances are that some people will end up speaking something completely unintelligible to others.
Actually, it seems that they do, when they don't get on with their neighbors for one reason or another. And this seems to be accelerated when they are geographically close to the neighbors they don't get on with.
So yeah, in 1000 years the US will likely have more diverse dialects (and actually, a very different form of english (or spanish). But that doesn't eliminate the cause for the highly variegated dialects in small regions like the UK. Time has something to do with it, but not everything.
I wonder how much some simple tech by today’s standards will alter this course. Given media and mass communication it’s in our interests to reduce variation to increase our communication capabilities which hasn’t been the case for as long but I can see in the US anyways we’ve become more similar than we once were when we had stronger geographical anchors in our speech or culture.
The English spoken in America is from immigrants from the UK. American English was not suddenly invented out of whole cloth in 1783.
> Give America a thousand years and chances are that some people will end up speaking something completely unintelligible to others.
It doesn't really work that way now. The US has only had a relatively unified spoken language with the advent of national radio and television networks. Regions largely lost their dialects once everyone started consuming the same media.
Yes, but immigration involved language mixing. It's not like a remote village in Scotland could elect two hundred people to hop on a ship, cross the sea, and settle down in another remote village in Montana. For their kids born in America, they would have been lucky to find one other family that spoke the same dialect.
So the differences averaged out, in the same way kids growing up in London speak London's dialect regardless of where their ancestors came from.
There is a reason New Yorkers want to vacation in London and not Dallas.
This is very interesting. Can you share the source of this claim?
https://www.britannica.com/topic/dialect/Social-dialects
These 2 papers are more at the language level rather than the dialect level, but acts as a good jumping-off point for research and ideas about how social structure affects the development/evolution of language:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5805949/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2798932/
Neither specifically address the development of dialects as a reinforcement of social subgroup differentiation, and right now I can't find the original place where I read about this idea.
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.
Neutral American broadcast English is basically a midwest accent.
Sure but I'm not sure how this is helpful. I think most people are very familiar with the standard west coast accent given it's prevalence in Hollywood. But the are even regional accents. PNW is different from NorCal which is different from SoCal. Rural Oregon and Washington are different from Portland and Seattle. Sure. Tbh most of the difference wouldn't even be noticed unless one listens carefully, especially because there's such a mixing.
> Neutral American broadcast English is basically a midwest accent.
Are you referring to the North Atlantic Accent? This is an entirely fictional accent the was created for radio and not born from an evolution of social speaking behaviors. This is the accent you hear in "old timey radio" (Legend of Korra is a good example). Pretty cool accent if we're being honest though.
Hollywood doesn't use a west coast accent (which isn't even one thing, a Calfifornia accent is distinct from an Oregon accent), they use a midwestern accent to be as easily understood as possible to international audiences.
Actors take classes on this, it very specifically is not a west coast accent that Hollywood uses.
Quick question. Did you read my comment in full or just a few lines? Because I can't make sense of you disagreeing by stating the same thing I did. There's are hierarchical classifications/categories. I feel like you're being overly pedantic and thus it's not an honest conversation. Is this a conversation or you telling me I'm wrong and nothing I say matters?
Actors take classes on lots of accents.
You seem to imply there is an overall westcoast accent with minor reigonal variations. I'm saying that isn't the case at all.
> I feel like you're being overly pedantic and thus it's not an honest conversation. Is this a conversation or you telling me I'm wrong and nothing I say matters?
I'm not being overly pedantic, this is an honest conversation, it's not that I think nothing you say matters, but I absolutely think you were wrong with what you said. I think I made my point in a civil way. I wasn't trying to start a fight.
> Actors take classes on lots of accents.
Of course. Most will be more specific. Most actors will be taught the midwestern accent to be as clear as possible to the largest audience. That isn't true for other accent classes. It's funny you accuse me of being pedantic and not engaging in good faith when I feel this point was very obviously implicit in what I said.
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.
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'd argue most countries fall into that description. It would need to be either extremely small (Luxembourg, Andora, Iceland ?), have a very strong drive towards unity (South Arabia, North Korea ?) or be so poor/inhabitable that not much people movement ever happens.
Otherwise any viable country that's not trying to kill anyone different from them will see a vast number of drastically different cultures coming in and staying for the long run.
I haven't actual been outside of the US myself so I don't have a frame of reference for that, but different regions in the US really are quite different from my limited perspective.