Wither the American Accent

Have you noticed that the American regional accents are disappearing? I suppose it's a natural consequence of the American national project.

Every nation is an artifice, a necessary fiction used to convince people who've never met that they share identity with fellow citizens or subjects--it's what Benedict Anderson called the "imagined community." National identity is a useful construct which allows people with a common government (or aspirations to a common government) to believe they have more in common with their countrymen than with some other country's men. But a nation is not formed by sharing the same government, as survivors of colonialism will tell you. What really creates national identity is a shared culture. Enter mass media (and, to a lesser extent, literature).

Now, in most countries, the government sets up the television infrastructure and owns the major broadcasting newtorks. There are two reasons for this--first, the government wants to use national mass media to help foster (and in many cases, create) a national identity, and second, broadcast equipment is really expensive. It's a huge loss leader for the first couple years.

The only country (to my knowledge, please correct me) that didn't build its TV networks this way is the United States, where television was invented. And of course we have privately built networks; it's the American way, dammit! So our national media has worked a little bit differently than other countries'. And infact, our nation-building process worked a little differently than other countries as well.

American "patriotism" wasn't always this way. There's a great book about this called "To Die For" by Cecelia Elizabeth O'Leary which explains this much better than I can here, but suffice it to say that it took a long time for the America to move from the days of the Civil War draft riots to buying war bonds. Regionalism was the order of the day for the majority of U. S. history. I'm telling you all this to place the accent thing in a little perspective.

So, American regional accents are disappearing. My theory is that three things are happening simultaneously:

• National television is homogenizing the accents of America's youth. The American TV accent is a sort of modified Midwestern without any of the peculiar dipthongs or Canadian-style vowels. It's been smoothed out. I'm really not sure why they picked that one, but that's what it is. Consider, for example, that standard Italian is supposed to be more Florentine than Roman, for example--but if you go to Florence you'll notice that it's distinct from the Italian you learn in your textbooks. (I learned this firsthand--they don't pronounce the letter "c" in Florence, substituting the letter "h" and no, I don't know why that is.) I think that accelerating (or exacerbating) this homogenization is the fact that there's less and less local programming these days, especially in the face of the explosion of national content on cable. Again, there's economic pressure involved--it doesn't pay as much to spend all that production money for small markets. The smaller the market, the more likely the inhabitants of that market have a distinct regional accent.
• Increased geographic mobility. More people are moving to more places than ever before. Let's look at Atlanta, the largest city in the old South. Roughly 320 people a day move to the Atlanta metro area, which is still not as many people as move to the Las Vegas metro area a day, but remarkable nonetheless. Now, you'll notice that the Southern accent is disappearing literally in the heart of Dixie. Part of this has to do with the melting pot phenomenon--immigrants without American regional accents relocate and their children grow up with homogenized accents. But about half of the new Atlantans are northerners or midwesterners who relocate for work, and neither they nor their children are adopting the southern twang.
• Social mobility. There's something important about accents that I haven't told you yet--they're excellent indicators of social class as well as where you grew up. Working class people tend to have stronger regional accents; also, many times people will adopt different accents to talk to different classes of people (I know I do this all this all the time). Businesses, especially those with national aspirations, tend to discourage the use of regional accents, whether implicitly or explicitly. A fellow native New Yorker and I were talking about this once; she's from Queens and works in the financial industry, where a real Queens accent could put you at a competetive disadvantage at work. So when she's at the office, she "tawks propa," as she says. I do the same thing, and often in reverse--whenever I get into a cab, I reflexively talk Brooklynese, probably to communicate that I'm from here, so don't try any of that tourist bullshit on me. In America, middle class status and college education are closely related, as more people are going to college than ever before, their middle-class aspirations erase their regional accents. I actually watched this happen to a friend of mine who lost her accent almost completely while she went away to school.

I write this because I love regional accents, and not just American ones. There is so much nuance involved in accents that's being slowly lost in the long march to cultural homogeneity.

As a related note, when I was in Canada, people would ask me why I didn't have a Brooklyn accent.

"It's because I'm not on TV right now," I would always say. But the truth is that I do have a local accent (I have several, to be honest). When speaking to most people I meet, I use the same accent my father's family does, which is to say the old middle-class New York accent. I always joke that we sound just like Nero Wolfe. Plus, I grew up in a mostly black nieghborhood, evenly split between transplanted southerners and Caribbean immigrants.

Someone paid me what I thought was the highest compliment the other day--he said that I have a Prospect Heights accent. That made me very happy.

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