Larry Bernstein had just suggested that the sheer variety of what people watch now makes it hard to see how broadcast could be flattening regional speech. Fridland separates the two mechanisms: one-way communication does not move accents, interaction does, which is why she thinks social media may be a different case. She credits suburbanization, not television, with the changes people think they are hearing.
think there were a few more than three shows, but yes.
Today, we have enormous variation of what's on television, what people can see. And so, it's hard to believe that social media, which is so varied, would be somehow forced to cause this change.
Television does not change accents. No research has ever shown that television has a profound influence on the way we sound. Does television have an influence perhaps on the words that we use? Does it reflect some tendencies that are already in place? Yes, but does it forge accents? No, it's very limited to have accent change in order to pick up novel innovations and do what your peers do. You have to have interaction. One-way communication does not seem to do it. Social media does that. It's much more interactive than television. So, you could argue that maybe social media is having a little more influence in that way. But television and the homogenizing effect of television is relatively overstated. But what we did have is suburbanization at the time you were born was greatly increased, and a lot of it was driven by white flight. This seems to be one of the important triggers for the northern city shift in Chicago and elsewhere. Two things happened with suburbanization. First of all, you tended to be more around similar people to you, which reinforced certain tendencies you would have, and therefore it would heighten anything that was already in progress in that group to diverge from things that were happening in the urban centers that you removed from. It also sort of dovetailed with this change in industrial practices, particularly in the Rust Belt, because around that same time, we're seeing a demise of the Rust Belt. Industries, they move to the Sun Belt as well as the South. This relocation of industry was massively taking numbers of people to urban areas of the South that had previously been fairly isolated from Northern influence. Case in point is Raleigh, North Carolina. You can barely hear a Southern accent in most people from Raleigh, and it's directly attributed to this massive swamping of Northern immigration.
So much for the founder effect.
But that doesn't mean that Southerners in Raleigh don't still see themselves as Southern. As I said, that founders' effects are not about the language forms themselves. They're about the identity of that area. And so, what tends to happen is these movers might swamp linguistically and enact change linguistically, but the cultural belief of that area often stays the same. We can't ignore the fact that race relations, the sort of Gen Z African-American influence that we do seem to get from social media, that's where social media has opened up a corridor for young white people from the burbs to actually witness African-American language and culture in a very positive way. They're adopting a lot of African-American speech styles and words into their own speech, which would not have happened in the middle of the 20th century, both because of hostilities and access.
This goes to LeBov. He analyzed African-American accents on the East Coast, in the Midwest, and in the West. And what he found was that there was little variation in African-American accents across the United States. And as I remember, it's because the African Americans who were in all three places came from similar places in the South. As a result, these are related people and they came from this. Same stock, they came from the same accent. And therefore, when you look at the variation, there hasn't been enough time for them to have adopted these new accents for their vowels. And they've stayed with their existing Mississippi or Alabama African-American accents. What do you make of LeBov's African-American observations?