[jay1949]

Right on point, H. Television will eventually kill off most of our regional dialects. The next generation, like, will all go, like, like, youknow. All the more reason to voice-record dialectical speakers while we can. Not just in Appalachia -- DownEast Maine also, for example (I love the DownEast accent!)

[Hawthorn]

>> Television will eventually kill off most of our regional dialects. <<

Yep. And it’s not only “our” regional dialects:

I had a chance at Christmastide to exchange views on the matter with a woman who spent most of her childhood in Yorkshire and still has family there — a place whose traditional dialect is very nearly a foreign language for us spearkers of “standard” English.

My friend said — with apparent sadness — that her teenaged nephews and nieces in Yorkshire now speak entirely with a “London” dialect. So it seems that Merry Old England will also lose her regional dialects over the next 50 years.

[Tupelo]

Jay, you are dead on right. There is a country song with the line, “I learned to talk like the man on the six o'clock news.” That explains where all of our regional accents are going. I think we are poorer for it. But I am an old man, so what I think no longer counts.