Here is a video clip from American Tongues, a documentary that my linguistics professor thought was important enough to spend class time on. I loved this film because there's not much editorializing by the narrator. The subjects say their piece, share their attitude, then the film moves on. So the medium is the message. Also, this is a subject particularly well-suited for video. You couldn't do the same thing with a book. Maybe a radio piece, but it would be missing something.
This is just a bit of it, but as the film goes on, people reveal more and more of their attitudes about others' accents - regionally speaking. This, together with research about the way people differentiate themselves linguistically...perhaps not consciously, but nonetheless actively, is food for reflection.
I wonder what this documentary would look like re-made in 2011 instead of 1988. The old-timers are dead now - I suspect we'd be missing a lot of old-timey richness because today's old-timers are thirty years farther from a pre-radio or pre-TV era. I think about Pop-pop and his sturdy Oklahoma drawl. My mom, the accent chameleon. My midwestern stepdad, who got made fun of for talkin' funny when he moved to The Deep South as a six-year-old (or thereabouts). And, of course, my husband, whose accent is so Southern that it seemed exotic when we first met. He truly is a rare bird, but in a houseful of Forest Park natives, I can't tell him apart from the rest if there's a closed door between us.
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