Preserving accents

Should we do a better job at preserving accents?

With each increasing year, it seems the general accent for Americans is turning into that West Coast neutral accent. Perhaps elsewhere around the world you've noticed accents have changed.

There's videos detailing a Texas town's accent level, and over the years it can be documented as faded away.

Oh, and:

youtu.be/lTyZAul60ok?t=14m54s

LISTEN TO THAT! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I'D GET LAID IF I HAVE THAT FUCKING ACCENT

Why did we decide that, that wasn't with preserving?

What the FUCK!!!!!!!!

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=Es0YGdROxVE
youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
vocaroo.com/i/s0kvEHhUKu7F
vocaroo.com/i/s0kuZeNkJgyT
sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Survey-of-English-dialects/021M-C0908X0017XX-0600V1#_
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I always thought it a shame that Yanks entirely lost the educated class that spoke like this.

youtube.com/watch?v=Es0YGdROxVE

The way they speak now is disgraceful.

It's the strangest thing. We're all about being vain and shit, you think we would want to preserve that if nothing else for bragging rights in being able to talk like that at all.

That accent should be taught in schools

I think that it was standardly taught in private schools in the 1940s or 50s. In this clip both Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley have a trans-Atlantic accent.

youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8

Holy shit, the level of stupidity demonstrated by your post is staggering.
>
There's videos detailing a Texas town's accent level, and over the years it can be documented as faded away.

Everyone has an accent. You're hearing an accent change--not "fade away." Accents are had by all persons using any language, always.

You mean it's slowly turning into a Midwest accent everywhere

The best way to preserve regional accents is to
1) prevent immigration from 3rd world shitters
2) prevent INTERNAL IMMIGRATION too (ie, stop californians from moving to virginia, etc)

That's what's causing our accents to disappear. There's so much internal migration within the united states that everyone has become rootless cosmopolitans moving from place to place and the regional linguistics/culture/etc get completely destroyed.

Look at modern virginia. You can be born and raised in VA with your ancestors living there for hundreds of years, and yet there will be people who think you must be from Alabama or something. Why? Because you actually have your accent. Meanwhile, everyone else is a federal employee carpetbagger who is not native to the area and moved from Cali/NY/etc, or a foreign pajeet or chink or whatever. THAT is what's destroying regional accents.


From wiki:
>Buckley spoke English with an idiosyncratic accent: something between an old-fashioned, upper class Mid-Atlantic accent, and British Received Pronunciation, with a Southern drawl.[137]

In other words, Buckley didn't speak like any other American whatsoever. Using him as your baseline for what Americans used to or ought to sound like is ridiculous. He sounds like someone trying to put on a fake posh britbong accent. No Americans sound like him and never did.

Don't be pedantic. What he's referring to is how regional accents have been disappearing and being replaced by "generalized" standard american accent.

test

sounds like a posh cunt trying to sound british honestly

Except it's not true. The point isn't semantic. Regional accents, in the USA, are increasing rather than decreasing.

>If you're one of the many that assume all this media exposure must be homogenizing the American accent, you're not alone. It sounds like a logical hypothesis: The accents heard in the media are far-reaching and pervasive, so local accents must be on the decline as the population is exposed to all this "standardized" speech. But experts say it's a common misconception that has no basis in fact.

>it seems the general accent for Americans is turning into that West Coast neutral accent
Maybe on TV but not in real life.

Are you saying that Vidal was imitating Buckley in this clip, then? . Buckley had a few small idiosyncrasies in his speech, but he was well within a tradition.

"Now popularly identified as a Mid-Atlantic accent, this conscious American pronunciation was advocated most strongly from the 1920s to the mid-1940s, but, by 1950, its influence had largely ended.[14] Upper-class Americans known for having learned to speak with a consistent Mid-Atlantic accent include William F. Buckley, Jr.,[15] Gore Vidal, H. P. Lovecraft,[16] Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, George Plimpton,[17][18] Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who began affecting it while at Miss Porter's School and maintained it lifelong),[19] Louis Auchincloss,[20] Norman Mailer,[21] Diana Vreeland,[22] Joseph Alsop,[23][24][25] Robert Silvers,[26] Julia Child,[27] and Cornelius Vanderbilt IV,[28] all of whom were raised, partly or primarily, in the Northeastern United States (and some additionally educated in London). The monologuist Ruth Draper's recorded "The Italian Lesson" gives an example of this East Coast American upper-class diction of the 1940s."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

Can confirm this is hapening where I live. Everybody tries to speak the standard version of the language or they try to speak vulgarly and all the regional dialects are slowly dying.

Mexico is the worst nation in Europe.

No, you can't confirm it. That's called an "anecdote" and is not evidence.

Enoch Powell was one of the smartest politicians ever. The dude spoke 19 languages and translated Greek and Latin at A* grade.

He was a fucking genius, was also Anti EU too.

The common Bong accent is fake, Shakespeare spoke more like a Burger than a Bong.

Accents are a product of local dialects, you must preserve local dialects first.

He doesn't have the trans-atlantic accent, but even if he did, that's an artificial accent that is literally just trying to be a halfway point between general american and britbong accent. Nobody in America ever actually talked like that except some radio hosts in the 30s and 40s.

Sucks I live in the midwest. We necer really had an accent. All thars kina happening north of me is the vowel shift, but again, I speak with a standard US accent, or neutral

It'd be better if I'd spoken out loud in the last week

vocaroo.com/i/s0kvEHhUKu7F

vocaroo.com/i/s0kuZeNkJgyT

I think he means William F. Buckley. I chose a clip of him interviewing Powell because I like the way both men speak.

kek good luck enticing youth with good enough jobs to keep then in their hometown for life. Do you plan to offer these great local jobs everywhere in the US?

You sound like a retard

When I first moved to Virginia one would occasionally hear that real, original Virginia accent which is the absolute ultimate in gentility. One can just imagine RE Lee speaking. I haven’t heard it here in years, though.

There's certain US accents I really like and there's others I find annoying, but I have no idea which ones match which regions. I know the deep south and New York, but that's about it.

Well I am rural and suburban :^)

This is actually a documented phenomenon across the linguistic spectrum. The dying off of dialects, accents and localized speaking habits and the replacing of them with the "lingua franka". It's happening in China, India, US, pretty much every corner of the globe is undergoing this change.

The Southern US accent is one of the comfiest in the world

It’s also very Anglo which I doubt is a coincidence

Buckley sounded like Buckley. No one else has or will.

I bet yo know what I am talking about. The “Virginia” accent is NOT a Sothern accent. The “Southern” is ScotsIrish. Appalachian.

Your perception of “lack of an accent” is literally an accent dumbass

>The “Virginia” accent is NOT a Sothern accent
It used to be before basically the population of Virginia got replaced through internal/external migration.

It's not a coincidence, in fact it was a catalyst for the revolution

The Scots Irish, Appalachian, or “Southern” accent is the accent of the red neck or hillbilly and is associated with illiteracy in the minds of many but it really is necessary to be familiar with it to really enjoy the works of Faulkner or “To Kill a Mockingbird” and such which sort of puts the lie to the “rural retard” myth.

GA is well on its way there too.

Apparently Americans today sound similar to what Brits sounded like hundreds of years ago. It stuck because America is much more sparse so it didn’t change as much. I believe in this as the way Americans say their ‘R’s is more similar to rural communities here than the cities.

>preserve accents
For what purpose

No, there is a distinctly different Virginia accent, which, like I say is synonymous with gentility. Let me see if I can find a recording of an example because it IS different. Not the “MidAtlantic affectation of the elite but a very smooth, relaxed “oozing class”. Maybe think of Doc Holiday, “I’m your Huckleberry.” Yeah. That is it. I used to hunt with a guy that spoke with that accent. Smooth, oozing class.

>The common Bong accent is fake
Which accent is that exactly, I speak the Queens English with a mixture of welsh, Yorkshire and south western accent. I could collect 10 people from my area and most wouldn't have the same accent. Their is no set accent for a region since I find that class can affect the accent much more than region.

When I say southern accent I mean the guy in a white suit owning a plantation. That is an extremely charming accent to our ears. I’m not talking about Cletus.

>West Coast neutral accent
It's not from the west coast, it's from the midwest.
It's just that the west coast was settled by midwesterners so recently that they couldn't develop their own accent.

Yeah. Wiki calls it the “Tidewater” accent which is where I live but you rarely here it anymore. But in my mind I can hear the old gentleman on the porch, mint julep in hand welcoming me to “Tahdwatah.”

Only kinda true.
Older rural English accents were closer to a West Country accent. They lost their rhoticity and the US accents didn't, but that doesn't make US accents similar to historical English accents.

Californians nearly had one with the whole valley girl and surfer dude thing but, relentless mockery put a stop to that.

Relentless mockery put a stop to a lot of accents really.

Also, no one speaks with trans atlantic accents mainly because it was never a naturally born accent but, rather something actors did on purpose to sound more high society. I think a lot of it might have been started by those actors being taught by British dialogue coachs.

Some still sound irish, none of them british tough.

>Hol up!
*Smacks lips
>Yoo saying muthafugger bix blood here
*Shoots cop
>aint a kang and sheeeeeit and not mericen.


>sheeeeeeeeit

There is a group of people who live across the York River from us here in Tidewater (Tahdwatah) who according to legend are descended from prisoners dropped of on the way to Jamestown who speak what I have been told is pretty much the exact “Cocney” dialect of the 1600s London street urchin. I swear you cannot understand them.

I know what you're talking about. It's still a subset of southern accent, spoken mostly by the "aristocrats" of the old south. Either way, all types of southern accent are slowly being erased due to carpetbaggers flooding in and taking over

I’ve been complimented frequently on my speaking voice. It’s hushed, breathy, and clipped. I don’t sound British but you can’t tell which part of the country I’m from. I sound sort of like L from Death Note. There’s nothing wrong with an educated American accent, but I do admit there are some annoying ones.

Half my family are agricultural and they say ‘tractor’ like ‘tracturrrr’. You can’t deny that the ‘r’ sound for Americans comes from Brits. I’m sure that’s where they got it from. What’s more interesting is how it stuck there and not so much here. Again, I think it’s because the sheer size of the US - accents only change when there’s a lot of interaction.

Accents change and language changes with it, you can't control it.

From what I understand, most/all used to have rhotic accents back in the 1600/1700s. After our independence, most britbongs started losing rhoticity in their accents, while most americans kept it. Exceptions on both sides (boston, areas in northern england) but that's the general idea.

It's more complex than the US accents retaining features and the UK ones losing them.

Non-rhotic accents were actually common in the US in the 18th century but they slowly changed to become more rhotic.
Meanwhile in the UK non-rhotic accents crept in from the southeast in the 17th century, but didn't take over completely until relatively recently.
Consider the following: sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Survey-of-English-dialects/021M-C0908X0017XX-0600V1#_
That's a rhotic Buckinghamshire accent from 1957. Right in the home counties (pretty much where I live, although the accent has almost disappeared now).