I think that is the true point of the rant — those individual accents, based on regional accents, are being lost to a high-pitched, slightly nasal whine across the board.
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There was a time when someone with a practiced ear could locate a person’s place of birth, give or take a county width, by their accent. A case in point, in 1972 I took a new job and moved to a town approximately fifty miles by the road, not as the crow flies, from where I was born and raised. As I went from customer to customer it was quite common for someone to listen to the first words I spoke and say something like,”You’re from further up state, aren’t you?” Now my nephew age 22 who was born right here and lived in South Carolina all his life although my brother moved him to Fort Mill, just across from Charlotte, NC as a small boy, sounds nothing like his father. He could be from anywhere, he has no distinctive accent at all that I can hear.
Soon we will all sound the same, listen to the same sorry excuse for music and be as boring as Al Gore. I dream of spending a day hearing the speech of those who were old when I was a small boy, they used words like “nary”.
For the most part in Oklahoma you can still spot the small town people.
But the end of more regional accents is just something that seems inevitable when everything is becoming more and more national. The closest thing to a regional show I can think of is Friday Night Lights but it get almost no viewership. Its subject matter hits home for people in the South, but it has to be a totally foreign concept to people not from small towns where Football is life.
I know exactly what you mean...I grew up in southern Delaware, very unique accent, a soft Virginia infused with harder tones from Baltimore and Philadelphia to the north. First day on a new job in Houston,TX...guy running a roofing crew said the word “water” but pronounced it “wooter”...this is a red flag for someone from the Delmarva Peninsula...yup he was from 60 miles south of where I grew up and we dated some of the same girls at the beach..small world,but the accent made it smaller..you can hear the same accent from Robert Mitchum, he was just a farm boy from Felton,Delaware.