So a lot of times people will say, "hh, well, this is just bad grammar." You know, you can't you can't say "ain't" it's just bad grammar. No one will be surprised that when he called the same apartments sounding Black or sounding like a Chicano English speaker, he didn't get as many appointments to see them as when he sounded like he was speaking mainstream, even though he was the same person in the same body. And then he also called in this kind of where he calls like a Chicano English, Latino accented variety. And he called in African-American English. And he called in his, you know, Stanford professor, like, mainstream voice. So one really famous study that was done by the linguist John Baugh has a illustrative example of this, where he was in Palo Alto because he was at Stanford at the time, he called around to get viewings to see a potential apartment. Linguistic profiling is kind of like this, but imagine that you just have the language to go on. So a lot of people will be familiar with racial profiling, which is like frequently, you see the kind of case where like a Black young man is pulled over because he, quote unquote, fit the description of some, you know, person who committed a crime. And so it's not the case that if you spend a bunch of time on, you know, Alabama sorority Tik Tok, that you will suddenly start sounding like an Alabama sorority girl. But the thing that's really interesting about language acquisition is that we talk like the people that we actually talk to. But we are hearing more people that are different than us. We live in media bubbles that's been well documented, and most people don't live very far away from where they were born, still. So I think it's very tempting to be like, well, we're all just like consuming the same media now and we're all talking to each other and we're all traveling. And so this is the kind of language contact situation that can cause change, but it doesn't necessarily cause disappearing accents. Also, people move away from the place that they're born more frequently for, you know, economic opportunities, jobs, things like that. ![]() So if you look at the difference in number of people that have been on a plane in their lifetime, it's definitely more in 2022 than it was in 1992 or 1972, which means people are able to move around more. It is the case that people are exposed probably to more varieties than they used to be because we're just increasingly mobile. I wanted to compare my answers with someone from a different state to see if we really are starting to talk the same. A dialect, on the other hand, refers to the grammar and specific words we use. An accent refers to the way a word sounds across a country. We often use those words interchangeably, but if you ask a dialect coach, they mean different things. Now, the New York Times quiz uses your answers to pinpoint both your dialect and your accent. Then using that data, it predicts where in the United States you're from. It's 25 questions long, and it asks what word or words you use to describe different places, things or scenarios. Our journey starts with one of my favorite little gadgets on the Internet. And if so, what else is getting lost along the way? But before we talk about where accents are going, let's talk about where they've been. As social media connects us all is a little part of what makes the different parts of America unique, dying along with it. So today we'll figure out what's happening to regional accents in the United States. Because just like me, some of you listeners don't admit to having an accent.Įntirely neutral, huh? We'll see about that. And what I found on my journey is far more complicated than I thought it would be. 80% of Texans they interviewed had that accent. Researchers at UT-Austin have been tracking the decline of the traditional Texas accent in the 1980s. ![]() One piece of data suggests that we are losing our regional differences. This got me thinking are regional accents such as mine disappearing? There's surprisingly little information on this. There's even a phrase for this quote unquote, "general American." It's a bland accent that doesn't seem to be tied to any place in particular. These commercials can make you think that all Americans sound alike. We don't sound like the people you hear on most national commercials, on TV or in the movies. ![]() Indeed, my father and I share the New York accent. And although he has gone to the other side of the rainbow, I'd like to think that part of him lives on through me.
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