Why Are American Accents Disappearing? The Reason Is WEIRDER Than I Thought

**Matt Walsh** (0:00)
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If you've spent a lot of time traveling in America, you may have noticed that people are starting to sound the same regardless of where you go. A bus driver in Charlotte has roughly the same accent as a guy at a Brooklyn beer hall, who in turn sounds the same as a salesman at a car dealership in Boston, or a cashier in Grand Rapids. Of course, anyone over 35 years old knows that it wasn't always this way. Until recently, there was a huge difference in how people talked. And it was not always regional in nature. Accents were also class distinguisher. People would adopt accents to seem more sophisticated, including famous TV personalities. One of the most elite mid-century accents was Locust Valley Lockjaw, named after an extremely wealthy Wasp enclave in Long Island, New York, which sounded something like this. Listen.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:47)
We counted it up the other day, we had 16 live-in help in this house.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:54)
Not counting the chauffeurs and others.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:56)
Not counting the chauffeurs, yeah. Aside from all the help we had in the Tuxedo Park House and the South Hampton House as well.
But those days are gone forever.

**Matt Walsh** (2:08)
If you recognize that accent, it might be because so many mid-century public intellectuals used it, like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. debating in this clip. Listen.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:18)
You must realize what some of the political issues are here. Many people in the United States happen to believe that the United States' policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Viet Cong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of Western Europe and the other parts of the world. If it is a novelty in Chicago, that is too bad. But I assume that the point of the American democracy is you can express any point of view you want. Shut up a minute. No, I won't. Some people were pro-Nazi, and the answer is that they were well treated by people who ostracize them, and I'm for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don't care. As far as I'm concerned, the only pro-Crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I would only say that we can't have... Now listen, you...
Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi. Let's stop calling names. Let's stop you in your goddamn face. You'll stay plastered. Gentlemen, let's go. Let me author Myron Brackenry go back to his pornography and stop making any illusions of natural... I beg you to......infantry in the last war. You were not in the infantry, as a matter of fact.
I would like to...

**Matt Walsh** (3:29)
By and large, these accents have been totally replaced on TV by a certain kind of fake newscaster voice that no one would use, of course, in real life.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:40)
From ABC News, World Headquarters in New York, this is World News Tonight with David Muir. Good evening. We begin tonight here with several breaking stories.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:50)
Tonight, the East Coast struggles to recover from Hurricane Sandy.

**SPEAKER_7** (3:55)
Before we go tonight, a word about me.

**Matt Walsh** (3:58)
So what we see is that the way that Americans talk, for the most part, has been homogenized. The monoculture is dead, as we've discussed, at length, and yet, we all speak the same way, ironically enough, paradoxically enough. The most common explanation is that regional accents died because of the proliferation of TV and the Internet, and that's true, but it's only part of the story. Now, we'll show throughout this video that there are other more complicated reasons as well.
Of course, some people still have accents and there are holdouts, like whether you call your soft drink pop soda or Coke often depends on what part of the country you grew up in. Though that's starting to fade also. But people with strong accents today have accents that would have been considered very weak accents just a few decades ago. And for the most part, there is a pervasive increasing sameness in how we talk. Surprisingly enough, there's a large volume of data on these shifts. Researchers who study linguistics at major universities have devoted a substantial amount of time to the topic. And what's remarkable is that, as far as I can tell, this is the only major area of social science research that isn't totally corrupted by politics. Normally, when you ask college professors to explain the decline of any aspect of American culture, they'll talk about white supremacy and police brutality. And they'll say, we had it coming. But when it comes to the disappearance of American dialects and accents, for whatever reason, academics are generally honest about what's happening, which is rare, and honest about the reason why it's happening.