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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone archiving these accents ?

As much as I’m happy that kids now have access to YouTube, and thus can use the neutral influencer dialect, something about our culture is being erased.

I grew up speaking both a neutral California accent and bits of AAVE. AAVE itself is drastically different depending on the part of the US you’re in. I can barely understand southern AAVE. NYC AAVE is much faster, but I think NYC people think faster in general.

I really do believe YouTube can bring gaps. If your a kid in Albania you can see life though the eyes of someone in Oakland.

And hop on a zoom 30 minutes later to chat. This would be unimaginable 50 years ago.

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They have audio samples if that’s what you mean. The ones from where I grew up were spot on but rare even when I was growing up in the 90s.

https://aschmann.net/AmEng/#AudioFilesOfLocalDialects

I looked through and found one rejected video from Montreal. It's crazy to me, to reject someone with a French accent. It's how people talk here! Many consider themselves perfectly bilingual and grew up speaking both languages. Even the more Anglo-Quebecois have a very specific vocabulary and accent heavily influenced by French.

I used to visit French speaking Canada when I was in college. I found it interesting to see people who could switch between an Anglo-Canadian accent and a French-Canadian accent, to my ear sounding native at both. This wasn't everyone obviously, but there were people like that.

Radio followed by television has done a lot of homogenization even if you don't have the more formalized received pronunciation you had/have in the UK. Even something stereotypical like a "Boston accent" was mostly a Southie accent on the one hand and an essentially English (Boston Brahmin) on the other. Most urbanites in particular never had others and many weren't even from Boston.

I am the type of person to notice accents a lot, one interesting thing I've noticed is how much NYC AAVE has the vowels of other NYC accents, like the stereotypical "cawfee" vowels. A lot of AAVE across the country sounds kind of like the south to my ear, but NY is one place where the local AAVE has a lot in common with other local accents.

This is even more true if you find old recordings.

Check this out if you haven't seen it before:

https://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=find&lan...

Yes, this is being done, and has been done. A variety of linguistic atlas projects record audio and make written phonetic transcriptions: https://www.linguisticatlasproject.org/ There are also many dialect and accent arechives, such as https://www.dialectsarchive.com/ and https://accent.gmu.edu/.

Wikitongues is doing this with languages.

https://www.youtube.com/@Wikitongues/videos

> And hop on a zoom 30 minutes later to chat. This would be unimaginable 50 years ago.

It was pretty easy to imagine 50 years ago. For example, Star Trek started airing 60 years ago. The Jetsons started airing a few years before that.

The video call sequence in 2001 from 1968 comes to mind too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwo6JpMceg

Picturephones were developed in the 30s and demoed at the '64 world's fair.

And it would be basically free and accessible to anyone? Two 50$ cell phones can Zoom using library WiFi across the globe

I think the conflict is on the term unimaginable. People back then definitely imagined the equivalent of Zoom and it being free even if they didn't know technically how it could happen.

Remember when long distance calling was really expensive.

It was for serious business, not small talk. If you somehow knew Zoom would happen you could have created Zoom and you’d be very rich.

TBF, unimaginable is a strong word. Impractical would be better.

It was on the way there even before Star Trek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#AT&T...

The next one down is a home system on a subscription, though just after Star Trek and expensive at the time.

Back in the 80s, Zortech was located in London while I lived in the Seattle area. International phone calls were too expensive, so we would communicate by fax. Late at night, sending a fax cost about a dollar a page. (No email then.)

An unanticipated result is I have a record of our conversations, which would have all been lost if it was phone calls.

Some of the YouTube links are broken or have moved Private. Too bad.

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