> Yeah, regional American accents are dying, unfortunately.
I don't have the exact source but I believe research has shown the opposite. When cable television started becoming more common about 20 years ago, there was a belief that a common "source accent" would flatten out regional differences in accents. Apparently, it has made accents more distinct as people, consciously or not, were using those accents as a "tribal marker" to differentiate themselves from the rest of the country.
On a broader note, I remember reading an OpEd in the late 90's that predicted that because people were going to be getting all of their information from a common source (aka the Internet) that it would eliminate debates between regions of the US. The idea was that with shared common information, we would all have shared beliefs. Obviously, this completely missed the ball with regards to personalized streams of information (e.g. Netflix, Pandora etc).
I don't have the exact source but I believe research has shown the opposite. When cable television started becoming more common about 20 years ago, there was a belief that a common "source accent" would flatten out regional differences in accents. Apparently, it has made accents more distinct as people, consciously or not, were using those accents as a "tribal marker" to differentiate themselves from the rest of the country.
On a broader note, I remember reading an OpEd in the late 90's that predicted that because people were going to be getting all of their information from a common source (aka the Internet) that it would eliminate debates between regions of the US. The idea was that with shared common information, we would all have shared beliefs. Obviously, this completely missed the ball with regards to personalized streams of information (e.g. Netflix, Pandora etc).