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One thing that strikes me travelling in America is the homogeneity. I'm from the England and I've been to places in England where I genuinely couldn't understan

One thing that strikes me travelling in America is the homogeneity. I'm from the England and I've been to places in England where I genuinely couldn't understand the accents (I used to find the Geordie accent the hardest until I lived up north for awhile). But I took a road trip from Michigan down to Florida (through the 'deep south') and then back up to New York and although accents changed, I never had the same kind of communication problems. And that's without counting the places in the UK where they natively speak Welsh or Scottish. The dialects (which is a massive part of culture) are mutually intelligible without a huge struggle. I'm however broadly aware that there are many Spanish speakers in the US, and that in parts of Louisiana they speak Louisiana French...

WoodenChair 3y ago
> 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.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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- drewcoo 3y ago
  > 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.
thomascgalvin 3y ago
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.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Last time I visited San Antonio (20 years ago), I had trouble understanding the server asking me if I wanted a coke with my food. The drawl was just too strong for me, it wasn’t as neutral as (relatively) next door Austin at all.
  - fmajid 3y ago
    I’ve always found even the strongest Texas or Arkansas accents intelligible, unlike some regional UK accents. The US used to be more varied but being one national market for media and immigration has had a homogenizing influence. It’s not simply a question of age, some parts of the US are 500 years old, and in some ways it’s British English that has drifted, not the other way round.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > I think television has had a massive effect 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-turned-its-news-anc-1824233490 https://deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local-tv-owner-tur...
- nunez 3y ago
  its plenty common in western Mass
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
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.
- yongjik 3y ago
  People don't just decide to speak differently to feel different from their neighbors. The reason why the British English is more diverse is very simple: they have been speaking English for much longer than Americans, so they had more time to diversify. 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.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    > People don't just decide to speak differently to feel different from their neighbors. 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.
  - conductr 3y ago
    > Give America a thousand years and chances are that some people will end up speaking something completely unintelligible to others. 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.
godelski 3y ago
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 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.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  West coast accents are actually just a slight variation on Midwest accents, so most people these days are speaking closely like they are from Wisconsin or Ohio. Neutral American broadcast English is basically a midwest accent.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > X is just Y but slightly different. 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.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
lolinder 3y ago
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.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
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.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
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).
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
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.

WoodenChair 3y ago

> 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.

candiddevmike 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
drewcoo 3y ago
> 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.

thomascgalvin 3y ago

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.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Last time I visited San Antonio (20 years ago), I had trouble understanding the server asking me if I wanted a coke with my food. The drawl was just too strong for me, it wasn’t as neutral as (relatively) next door Austin at all.
- fmajid 3y ago
  I’ve always found even the strongest Texas or Arkansas accents intelligible, unlike some regional UK accents. The US used to be more varied but being one national market for media and immigration has had a homogenizing influence. It’s not simply a question of age, some parts of the US are 500 years old, and in some ways it’s British English that has drifted, not the other way round.
drewcoo 3y ago
> I think television has had a massive effect 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-turned-its-news-anc-1824233490 https://deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local-tv-owner-tur...
nunez 3y ago
its plenty common in western Mass

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

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.

yongjik 3y ago
People don't just decide to speak differently to feel different from their neighbors. The reason why the British English is more diverse is very simple: they have been speaking English for much longer than Americans, so they had more time to diversify. 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  > People don't just decide to speak differently to feel different from their neighbors. 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.
- conductr 3y ago
  > Give America a thousand years and chances are that some people will end up speaking something completely unintelligible to others. 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.

godelski 3y ago

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 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.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
West coast accents are actually just a slight variation on Midwest accents, so most people these days are speaking closely like they are from Wisconsin or Ohio. Neutral American broadcast English is basically a midwest accent.
- godelski 3y ago
  > X is just Y but slightly different. 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.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago

lolinder 3y ago

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.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

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.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

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).

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

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.