The Matt Walsh Show - Why Are American Accents Disappearing？ The Reason Is WEIRDER Than I Thought

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00:00:45.400 you could delay two mortgage payments. Call American Finance today, 866-569-4711. That's

00:00:51.140 866-569-4711 or visit americanfinancing.net slash walsh. If you've spent a lot of time traveling

00:00:59.680 in America, you may have noticed that people are starting to sound the same regardless of

00:01:04.900 where you go. A bus driver in Charlotte has roughly the same accent as a guy at a Brooklyn

00:01:10.600 beer hall who in turn sounds the same as a salesman at a car dealership in Boston or a

00:01:15.620 cashier in Grand Rapids. Now, of course, anyone over 35 years old knows that it wasn't always

00:01:21.000 this way. Until recently, there was a huge difference in how people talked, and it was not

00:01:26.240 always regional in nature. Accents were also class distinguishers. People would adopt accents to

00:01:31.860 seem more sophisticated, including famous TV personalities. One of the most elite mid-century

00:01:37.160 accents was Locust Valley Lockjaw, named after an extremely wealthy wasp enclave in Long Island,

00:01:43.820 in New York, which sounded something like this. Listen. We counted it up the other day. We had

00:01:49.340 16 live-in help in this house. Not counting the chauffeurs.

00:01:56.260 Not counting the chauffeurs. Aside from all the help we had in the Tuxedo Park house and the

00:02:02.800 Southampton house as well. But those days are going forever. If you recognize that accent,

00:02:09.340 And it might be because so many mid-century public intellectuals used it, like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. debating in this clip.

00:02:17.480 Listen.

00:02:18.580 You must realize what some of the political issues are here.

00:02:22.380 And many people in the United States happen to believe that the United States policy is wrong in Vietnam.

00:02:29.180 And the Viet Cong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically.

00:02:34.440 This happens to be pretty much the opinion of Western Europe and any other parts of the world. 1.00

00:02:38.960 If it is a novelty in Chicago, that is too bad.

00:02:41.740 But I assume that the point of the American democracy is you can express any point of view you want. 0.98

00:02:47.260 Shut up a minute. 0.93

00:02:47.920 No, I won't. 0.97

00:02:48.640 Some people will call Nazi, and the answer is that they were well-treated by people who ostracized them,

00:02:54.200 and I'm for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. 0.91

00:02:59.700 As far as I'm concerned, the only pro-crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.

00:03:05.700 Failing that, I will only say that we can't have the right of the assembly. 0.55

00:03:10.460 Stop calling you a crypto Nazi.

00:03:11.520 Let's stop calling names. 1.00

00:03:13.040 Let's get you in your goddamn face. 1.00

00:03:14.340 Let's stay plastered. 1.00

00:03:15.980 Gentlemen, let's go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions of nationalism to somebody with infantry in the last war.

00:03:24.800 You were not in the infantry.

00:03:25.980 I would like to.

00:03:27.940 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.

00:03:39.960 From ABC News World Headquarters in New York, this is World News Tonight with David Muir.

00:03:47.840 Good evening. We begin tonight here with several breaking stories.

00:03:50.680 Tonight, the East Coast struggles to recover from Hurricane Sandy.

00:03:54.840 Before we go tonight, a word about me.

00:03:57.940 So what we see is that the way that Americans talk, for the most part, has been homogenized.

00:04:03.420 The monoculture is dead, as we've discussed at length, and yet we all speak the same way,

00:04:10.320 ironically enough, paradoxically enough. The most common explanation is that regional accents died

00:04:15.700 because of the proliferation of TV and the internet, and that's true, but it's only part

00:04:20.580 of the story. We'll show throughout this video that there are other more complicated reasons

00:04:25.600 as well. Of course, some people still have accents, and there are holdouts, like whether you call your

00:04:31.200 soft drink pop, soda, or Coke. It often depends on what part of the country you grew up in,

00:04:36.280 though that's starting to fade also. But people with strong accents today have accents that

00:04:41.580 would have been considered very weak accents just a few decades ago, and for the most part,

00:04:46.560 there is a pervasive increasing sameness in how we talk. Surprisingly enough, there's a large

00:04:52.820 volume of data on these shifts. Researchers who study linguistics at major universities have

00:04:58.440 devoted a substantial amount of time to the topic. And what's remarkable is that, as far as I can

00:05:03.680 tell, this is the only major area of social science research that isn't totally corrupted

00:05:09.300 by politics. Normally, when you ask college professors to explain the decline of any aspect

00:05:14.980 of American culture, they'll talk about white supremacy and police brutality, and they'll say,

00:05:20.480 you know, we had it coming. But when it comes to the disappearance of American dialects and

00:05:24.840 accents, for whatever reason, academics are generally honest about what's happening, which

00:05:29.840 is rare, and honest about the reason why it's happening. So with that in mind, we'll start

00:05:35.500 with an excerpt from a 2005 documentary called Do You Speak American, which is about a major

00:05:42.020 exception to this trend. This is a segment about something called the Northern Cities

00:05:47.320 vowel shift, which was first documented in the late 1960s. It's a rare case of the American

00:05:53.320 language becoming less concentrated and more regional from the last 50 years. And it happened

00:05:58.660 in cities in the Great Lakes region. All the experts, including researchers who had been

00:06:04.720 spending decades studying American accents, were shocked by what they were seeing. And to understand

00:06:09.920 their findings, first you might need a quick refresher on the vocabulary. So a long vowel is

00:06:16.040 a vowel that sounds exactly like the letter. So, for example, the A in cake is a long vowel because

00:06:21.440 it sounds exactly like the letter A. Another example of a long vowel would be the E in tree.

00:06:26.300 Sounds exactly like the letter E, so it's a long vowel. On the other hand, a short vowel is a vowel

00:06:30.600 that doesn't sound like the name of the letter. So, for example, the A in cat is a short vowel,

00:06:36.680 so is the I in pig. Now, the really big finding from researchers was that around 1969, for the

00:06:43.180 first time in a thousand years, people stopped pronouncing short vowels in the same way. As a

00:06:49.240 species, we've been pretty consistent on how we pronounce short vowels. Until one day, everything

00:06:54.000 changed. So this is from the documentary's interview with a linguist named William Labov.

00:06:59.720 Watch. What we'll be looking at is this mass of cities around the Great Lakes.

00:07:05.040 uh here we have syracuse rochester buffalo and cleveland detroit how many people is that

00:07:14.400 it's about 34 million people this area used to be the closest to network pronunciation it was what

00:07:21.760 the nbc standard was based on and today uh it is moving further and further away this is

00:07:28.240 spectacular. Bosses. Everybody writes down what? Bosses. Right. The guy. Yeah. The bosses with

00:07:35.940 the antennas. Now you begin to wonder what are these? The bosses with the antennas. I can remember

00:07:42.600 vaguely when we had the bosses with the antennas on the top. So buses has become bosses. Right.

00:07:48.540 Yeah. So black became block and buses became bosses. The vowel in the word cat raises and

00:07:57.260 becomes keyat. The vowel in the word cot then moves and starts sounding like the A in cat used

00:08:03.620 to sound and on and on and on. It's like a game of musical chairs. The short vowels are getting

00:08:07.260 shifted around. Once one vowel changes, then by necessity, the other vowels have to change as well

00:08:12.120 so that people can tell them apart from one another. This emerging accent became so ubiquitous

00:08:18.220 that SNL created a skit mocking it. Take a look. I'm Bob Swirsky and I want to thank everyone for

00:08:24.300 sending those cards to my brother, Bill, who recently had another heart attack.

00:08:28.580 We are coming to you live from Ditka's here on Thanksgiving Day, a day for giving thanks 1.00

00:08:34.240 for, or taking punishment from, a team that is known as Stabers. 0.98

00:08:40.520 Stabers.

00:08:43.480 This phenomenon was isolated to a very specific area of the country.

00:08:48.400 By 2005, this particular linguist had mapped out the geographic boundaries of the shift.

00:08:52.920 encompass cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Syracuse, and there was no clear

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00:11:13.060 One place to start, of course, is to look at what was happening in the 1960s. 0.51

00:11:16.680 Millions of black people were moving to northern cities, bringing their own dialect with them.

00:11:21.260 So there's a theory from one sociologist that white people, as a subconscious way to distinguish themselves from the new black arrivals in their cities, began slightly altering how they spoke.

00:11:31.060 As we discussed in our Real History documentary, white people were leaving urban areas in large numbers during this period as a way of avoiding rampant black crime violence.

00:11:39.600 or as michelle obama puts it to avoid black culture and the wonders of diversity so maybe 0.59

00:11:45.120 as white people were trying to distance themselves physically from black people their brains were 0.91

00:11:49.140 rewiring themselves to avoid speaking like black people as well that's the theory now admittedly

00:11:55.340 i'm no linguist uh i'm no expert in linguistics but it seems like a stretch you know kind of a

00:12:00.500 way to shoehorn racial politics into a topic where it doesn't belong another theory which makes a lot

00:12:05.620 more sense, is that the shift had been going on for quite some time, increasing from one generation

00:12:10.620 to the next, and was only noticed by researchers beginning in the 1960s, when American universities

00:12:15.800 were exploding and becoming far larger and much more numerous. On this theory, as I understand it,

00:12:21.200 thousands of people in the early 1800s traveled west from New England and settled along the Erie

00:12:26.040 Canal Corridor, which was an isolated area. Plenty of immigrants arrived to help build the Erie

00:12:31.600 Canal and over time separated from the rest of the country. They came up with a unique way of

00:12:37.220 pronouncing a single vowel and then every other vowel changed accordingly. Whatever the case,

00:12:41.880 the Northern City's vowel shift, the great linguistic quirk that perplexed researchers

00:12:46.120 for a very long time and a counterpoint to the great homogenization of American English

00:12:51.200 and which gave millions of Americans a unique way of speaking, is now coming to an end. This

00:12:56.980 is research from Indiana University, and to understand this quote, you need to understand

00:13:02.240 the word trap. In this context, trap refers to the short A vowel in words like cat, and realization

00:13:09.720 just means how a person actually says it. As we've already covered, people in northern cities had a

00:13:14.800 unique raised way of pronouncing this vowel. So with that in mind, here's the latest finding.

00:13:19.360 Quote, recent acoustic analyses examining English in the northern American Great Lakes region

00:13:25.420 show that the area's characteristic vowel chain shift, the northern city shift, NCS, is waning.

00:13:32.160 Attitudinal analyses suggest that the NCS has lost prestige in some NCS cities such that it is no

00:13:40.260 longer regarded as standard American English. Results show that trap realization is conditioned

00:13:45.660 by gender and birth years such that women led the change toward NCS realizations into the middle of

00:13:51.400 the 20th century and then away from them thereafter. These findings reflect the backdrop

00:13:55.680 of de-industrialization during this time of linguistic reorganization in Lansing and shows

00:14:01.020 that as the regional industry auto manufacturing loses prestige, so does the regional variant

00:14:07.200 raised trap. So this particular finding states that as the automobile manufacturing industry

00:14:14.220 declined in the Great Lakes, the unique accents started to disappear as well. People, particularly

00:14:18.020 women, who were very attuned to their perceived social status, didn't want to be associated with 0.91

00:14:23.720 a dying blue-collar industry anymore. It stopped being prestigious to talk like the auto workers. 1.00

00:14:30.920 Additionally, for workers, particularly young people who were trying to get an office job,

00:14:35.360 it didn't help to sound like a factory worker. There were all kinds of prejudice against hiring

00:14:39.860 somebody like that, as you might imagine. So young people on the job market began talking more like

00:14:44.600 people from other parts of the country, subconsciously or not. And when they had kids,

00:14:50.120 they taught them to speak in the new way, not the shifted way of speaking. Instead,

00:14:54.960 Midwesterners are now talking more like Canadians and Californians. It was class, not just TV and

00:15:01.740 YouTube, that killed an emergent regional accent. That's the point. Now, did you have any idea that

00:15:08.720 this was going on? Have you drawn a connection between the decline of the auto industry and the

00:15:13.180 way millions of Americans speak. It's extraordinary to think about for several reasons. How we speak

00:15:19.400 is a direct reflection of how we think. You know, it really matters. It's one of the first things

00:15:24.260 we notice about a person. In addition to their appearance, we pay very close attention to what

00:15:28.480 they say and how they say it. And while we tend to think that accents and dialects originate in

00:15:34.620 mostly random and unpredictable ways, that's simply not true. Government policy can have a

00:15:40.660 major impact. Economic events can have a major impact. And I've only talked about one case

00:15:46.840 study so far. There are many other examples of similar changes in language all over the United

00:15:51.160 States. It's not just happening in the so-called northern cities. So let's take a look at an

00:15:56.080 island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, about 20 miles off the mainland. This was

00:16:02.100 historically a very isolated area. The island didn't have electricity until 1938 or a ferry

00:16:07.600 service until 1957. And because of their isolation, the locals started speaking in a distinctive

00:16:13.440 manner. Their dialect is called Hoyteuter, which got its name because that's how these people

00:16:19.060 pronounce High Tide. So this High Tider dialect has roots in early modern English dialects that

00:16:25.360 were spoken in Britain in the late 1600s through the mid-18th century. It's not strictly confined

00:16:31.600 to North Carolina. It's been observed on Smith Island in Maryland, although as far as I can tell,

00:16:36.500 it hasn't traveled to any other state.

00:16:38.940 This is a recent BBC segment from the region

00:16:41.400 just to give you an idea of how these people talk.

00:16:44.920 Watch. 0.92

00:16:46.400 Boy, toilet on the side of the street.

00:16:47.840 Last night, the water fire, night moonshine.

00:16:49.860 No fish.

00:16:50.520 Waste both matter up the woods. 1.00

00:16:52.080 It's the only dialect in the United States 1.00

00:16:54.640 when you play it for people from outside

00:16:58.400 of the United States, England,

00:16:59.960 do not identify it as an American dialect.

00:17:02.360 The Ocracoke dialect and several of the island dialects of the Atlantic seaboard really began

00:17:13.680 in the late 17th century. There was a settlement on the island in the first decade of the 18th

00:17:20.940 century, so in about 17, 9 or 10. The people presumably came from the southwest of England

00:17:29.220 there to Virginia and settled on islands. And people from those islands traveled by boat to

00:17:37.300 these islands in North Carolina and settled them. Once they settled them, of course, they had no

00:17:43.680 way to access the mainland other than by boat, which is still the case. And so it was isolated,

00:17:53.420 Isolated for centuries. 0.97

00:17:57.880 There are certainly retentions of English.

00:18:01.600 You know, there are words that sort of we can find in the plays of Shakespeare, like a word like mommick. 0.81

00:18:08.160 Mommick.

00:18:08.600 Oh, that means when somebody gets you playing and they get hold of you and they're mad at you about something in the game and they, you know, try to shake you up a little bit.

00:18:21.000 They want to box with you. 1.00

00:18:23.080 Momics like to irritate somebody or tickle somebody, you know. 1.00

00:18:28.360 There are also things that they've simply created. 0.99

00:18:33.720 In the United States, we play a game hide-and-seek.

00:18:37.860 Well, on Ochre Coke, the term is called me honky,

00:18:41.100 because when they're hiding, what they do is they imitate the sound of a goose.

00:18:46.860 Me honky, me honky.

00:18:48.420 now in case you're curious the term dingbatter comes from the um sitcom all in the family the

00:19:12.380 people living in the outer banks of north carolina got television the 1970s and they

00:19:16.220 heard Archie Bunker call his wife a dingbatter because she didn't have any common sense and 1.00

00:19:20.700 seemed like an appropriate insult for all the outsiders who were coming into their communities 1.00

00:19:24.440 and getting their trucks stuck in the sand and so on. So the word dingbatter came to mean outsider.

00:19:30.780 And because of these outsiders, this distinct way of speaking is dying out. By some estimates,

00:19:35.540 only around 200 people speak this dialect anymore, and it's happening because of an 1.00

00:19:40.520 influx of dingbatters. Watch. There are only about 150 speakers of the Ocracoke Brogue now 1.00

00:19:47.300 and they all live on one end of this barrier island on the coast of North Carolina which is

00:19:55.260 basically an enlarged sandbar. Within the next 50 years the brogue will disappear.

00:20:10.520 The dialect on this island is sometimes referred to as Hoitoiders, which is their pronunciation

00:20:16.280 of high tide.

00:20:17.280 Hoitoid on the sign side is high tide on the sign side.

00:20:19.920 In the United States, the Ocracoke Brogue is probably the only dialect that is not identified

00:20:26.840 as being from America.

00:20:28.640 I do.

00:20:29.640 I have a lot of people that think I'm from Australia or Ireland, yeah. 0.86

00:20:33.480 Then you can say we've been Mamak.

00:20:35.560 You also find here lots of terms for outsiders. 1.00

00:20:38.560 Y'all are dingbatters.

00:20:42.560 My wife is from Maryland.

00:20:44.560 We've been married 43 years. 1.00

00:20:47.560 She's still a dingbatter. 0.99

00:20:51.560 That's not a bad thing, okay? 0.99

00:20:55.560 It was basically the dingbatters who changed the island 0.97

00:20:58.560 because so many people came in. 1.00

00:21:00.560 Even today, there are more off-islanders 0.99

00:21:04.560 who live here than onliners. 0.92

00:21:07.440 Now it's changing. Within time, we're all going to lose it, you know, because of so many people

00:21:13.640 coming in. It's a part of heritage that I'm proud of. This is one of the few areas of our culture

00:21:21.160 where everybody, even the media and academics, is willing to say that demographic change is the

00:21:27.000 culprit. They'll admit that these people are losing their dialect because the demographic

00:21:31.320 makeup of their community has changed. As the BBC reports, quote, with each generation, the

00:21:37.180 dialect is starting to disappear. The world is coming to the island through television and the 0.98

00:21:41.560 internet, as well as with the long line of tourists who show up every summer. There's also more people

00:21:46.880 from the mainland moving in. What's happening is that some of these small dialects that thrive on 0.94

00:21:51.180 isolation are dying because isolation is a thing of the past, said North Carolina State University

00:21:56.320 Professor Walt Wolfram. They still pick up terms of vocabulary, but when a kid from the island

00:22:02.000 retains a strong dialect, that was the norm, and now it's an exception. In the past, kids adopted

00:22:06.740 the dialect because that was the only version they heard. Now there are hundreds of dialects

00:22:10.660 and languages that most will encounter before they graduate high school. In fact, as of 2024,

00:22:15.100 on this island of 676 people, fewer than half actually speak with the full hoitoiter brogue.

00:22:21.320 Within one to two generations, it'll be gone, said Dr. Wolfram.

00:22:24.540 It's dying out, and we can't stop that.

00:22:27.800 Now, the reason mainstream media outlets are willing to say all this is that, in their view, accents and dialects are no big deal.

00:22:35.220 Just kind of a curiosity.

00:22:37.420 So they're comfortable saying that, yeah, accents and dialects will change when an isolated community is flooded with outsiders.

00:22:45.880 But it's not merely a sentimental issue.

00:22:48.080 And we're talking about the loss of a shared history, vocabulary, an oral tradition that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.

00:22:56.040 We're talking about a fundamental part of humanity, how we communicate. 0.71

00:23:01.240 And white people in particular are losing their unique methods of communication. 0.79

00:23:06.940 It's not just happening in the Great Lakes and remote islands off North Carolina. 0.53

00:23:11.760 It's happening everywhere, even large swaths of the American South.

00:23:16.300 Watch.

00:23:16.560 then there was a tsunami it's the southern accent heard around the world southern but i

00:23:23.580 no way i'm as southern as parker posey's character victoria on white lotus season three

00:23:29.400 please even sparking this viral moment like piper no and between white lotus star parker posey

00:23:37.640 and our own carolina guy craig tsunami

00:23:41.420 The moment setting social media on fire popper.

00:23:49.420 No.

00:23:50.420 Oh, God, that was kind of spot on.

00:23:53.420 But in real life, experts say that iconic Southern drawl marked by elongated vowels and a slower pace is actually disappearing.

00:24:01.420 Y'all, what happened to Southern accents?

00:24:04.420 Accents. Research shows a diminishing accent in regions across the south from Georgia, which saw the biggest shift between baby boomers and Gen X and cities like Raleigh and New Orleans. The reason increased migration to the south, which in the 2020s alone is already more than four times greater than the other three U.S. regions combined, causing younger generations to lose that distinctive southern twang. Looks like two pigs fighting on the blanket.

00:24:33.160 The southern accent doesn't sound like that today.

00:24:35.520 There are still people who speak with these very, very strong accents.

00:24:39.360 They'll tend to be much more isolated places or they'll be much older speakers.

00:24:43.320 But yeah, the younger generation, it's shifted.

00:24:45.840 This is a study published in the summer of 2023 out of Georgia Tech.

00:24:50.080 There's a decent amount of technical jargon here, but the takeaway is clear.

00:24:53.960 Quote, the late 20th century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel

00:24:58.080 systems like the northern city shift and the southern vowel shift or SVS.

00:25:03.160 Replaced by supra-local systems like the low-back merger shift, the SVS is most advanced among

00:25:10.240 Georgians. Born in the mid-20th century, in Generation X, retraction of front-lax vowels

00:25:17.020 begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels,

00:25:22.560 support finding that regional vowel systems decline precipitously following a Gen X cliff,

00:25:29.220 raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in the demographic transformations

00:25:33.380 of that time period. So in other words, the accent that the boomers had,

00:25:38.820 the Southern vowel shift, is dying out because Georgia has become much more urban and less

00:25:43.980 rural. There's a much larger black population and white people are coming into the state from

00:25:48.360 very far away. So previously, Southerners might pronounce ride as ra, as I guess rod,

00:25:54.180 or time is Tom. Basically, they would flatten words so they sounded like one big syllable.

00:26:01.500 And now that's changing. They're starting to sound exactly like everybody else.

00:26:06.420 This is from the website Big Think, summarizing the findings from the same researchers, quote,

00:26:12.080 linguists at University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Brigham Young University reported that

00:26:16.720 white Georgians seem to be losing their classic Southern accent, analyzing vocal recordings of

00:26:22.840 135 native Georgians born between 1887 and 2003, they found that a few of the distinct

00:26:29.380 vowel pronunciations that define the southern accent have been disappearing over the generations.

00:26:35.020 For example, words like prize and fit, once pronounced pros and fiat, are now more often

00:26:44.140 spoken as prize and fight, fit, I don't know. The shift was greatest between baby boomers and

00:26:50.780 Gen Xers and has continued with millennials and Gen Zers. NPR spoke to a linguistic professor

00:26:58.100 at the University of Georgia named Margaret Renwick about the reasons for the change.

00:27:03.700 And here's what they reported, quote, major driver of this phenomenon is demographic change in

00:27:08.980 Georgia and throughout the South. Before World War II, Georgia received very little migration

00:27:13.120 into the state. But beginning in the 1960s, Georgia saw increasing migration from other

00:27:18.060 areas of the U.S. And by the 1980s, it was one of the top destinations for interstate migration.

00:27:23.820 And the Atlanta metro is still one of the fastest growing in the U.S. So these population movements

00:27:28.080 mean that Georgia speakers growing up after the 1960s were in a very different linguistic

00:27:33.020 environment than speakers from earlier generations. Little kids don't learn language from social media.

00:27:38.280 Kids acquire language from their parents, from their caregivers. And so that is our earliest

00:27:43.280 linguistic input that helps us learn our native language. Then once kids get into school,

00:27:47.160 that enter adolescence, they emulate their peer group. And so we think that's where language

00:27:51.560 change from generation to generation really takes hold. In the Today Show report, you heard that

00:27:57.980 people are even losing their accents in New Orleans, which historically has been one of the

00:28:02.900 most distinctive accents in the entire country. Elsewhere in Louisiana, the distinctive Cajun

00:28:08.500 dialect is also dying out. One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming that just

00:28:13.040 because something has always been done a certain way, it's the only way to do it. Healthcare is

00:28:17.140 is a good example. Most people assume their options are whatever their employer offers or

00:28:22.000 whatever they can find on the open market. They don't realize there's another approach that's

00:28:25.800 been helping families for more than 30 years. It's called MediShare. MediShare is a healthcare

00:28:30.260 sharing program, and today more than a million Americans are using it. The reason it's growing

00:28:35.600 is pretty simple. People are tired of paying more every year for a system that somehow keeps

00:28:39.980 getting more expensive and more complicated at the same time. MediShare offers a different

00:28:44.340 approach. And for many families, that difference can mean saving thousands of dollars a year

00:28:48.640 on healthcare. If you've heard about MediShare, but never looked into it, now's a good time.

00:28:53.900 Learning more doesn't cost you anything. Go to MediShare.com slash Matt. That's

00:28:58.720 MediShare.com slash Matt. Or if it's easier, just grab your phone and text Matt to 70246.

00:29:05.720 You'll get the information sent right to you. Again, that's Matt to 70246. Matt to 70246.

00:29:13.520 The people who change communities rarely start by trying to change the world.

00:29:18.400 They start small.

00:29:19.320 Over time, their small actions turn into meaningful work, which then turns into impact.

00:29:23.620 The Grand Canyon University students are prepared for that journey through academically rigorous programs designed to help them grow professionally, personally, and spiritually.

00:29:32.060 While many universities are raising costs, GCU has kept tuition rates steady on its traditional campus for 17 years, honoring their commitment by making higher education more affordable and accessible.

00:29:41.780 but they're not stuck in the past. 75% of GCU's programs and facilities have been built in just

00:29:46.140 the last decade. Summer is when a lot of people start thinking about what's next. If you're

00:29:50.420 exploring your next step, Grand Canyon University offers hundreds of degree programs designed to

00:29:55.420 help you move forward with purpose. Whether learning on campus in Phoenix or online from

00:30:01.400 anywhere, students join a community committed to leadership, service, and purpose. More than

00:30:06.140 132,000 students have chosen GCU for one reason. They want an education connected to real

00:30:11.200 opportunities, real careers, and real purpose. Purpose isn't something you stumble into, it's

00:30:16.000 something you pursue. Grand Canyon University, help students do exactly that. Grand Canyon

00:30:20.560 University, private, Christian, affordable, non-profit. Learn more at gcu.edu. This is from

00:30:27.400 the Stuyvesant Spectator. It says, quote, most young people increasingly speak in amalgamation

00:30:33.040 of American dialects that lack regional nuances. In much of Louisiana, Cajun French was once spoken

00:30:39.280 in nearly every household, even when it was illegal to teach in schools. Today, Cajun is

00:30:43.500 faced with a slow, painful death as the majority of its native speakers reach the end of their 1.00

00:30:48.840 lives. This is a pattern that pretty much everyone is noticing in their own communities. It's not 0.99

00:30:55.080 limited to the Detroit or Atlanta or the Outer Banks or North Carolina or Louisiana areas. It's

00:31:03.040 the single most widespread, least talked about change in our culture, and it's tracking a much

00:31:08.140 broader transformation, which is that regional culture in general, is starting to disappear.

00:31:14.940 Just like our speech patterns are becoming homogenous, so is everything else. Local newspapers

00:31:20.920 have, of course, been closing, so we all get our news from the same place, no matter where we live.

00:31:28.040 Major cities like Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Youngstown no longer have a daily print

00:31:33.000 newspaper at all. Local radio stations are dying out, certainly. Just a couple of weeks ago in

00:31:39.140 Hermiston, Oregon, the radio station KOHU and its sister station KQFM went dark. They've been on

00:31:46.140 the air since 1956, broadcasting high school sporting events and local news to a mostly rural

00:31:52.780 area. Now they're gone. Then there's the remarkable collapse of KGO in San Francisco. They were a

00:31:59.440 well-known talk radio station in the Bay Area for more than 80 years. And then just a couple of

00:32:04.340 years ago, they fired their staff and made a pivot to full-time sports betting coverage instead.

00:32:10.800 In fact, in the middle of a broadcast, they abruptly signed off and immediately began airing

00:32:16.000 ads for their upcoming gambling shows, along with various songs centered around the theme of money,

00:32:21.640 including Pink Floyd's Money and Lady Gaga's Poker Face. And these songs and promos continued

00:32:27.560 to loop for three days straight until the new sports betting coverage began on that Monday.

00:32:34.720 Listeners and the broadcasters themselves had no idea what was going on.

00:32:39.360 This is pretty surreal audio, but it's all real. Listen.

00:32:44.340 It's also National Doodle Day, so you can combine those two into some garlic noodle love.

00:32:49.460 And that's great.

00:32:49.920 Well, we have, thank you, Kim. We have the day thing. How do you think it's working, Kim?

00:32:57.260 Do you like it?

00:32:57.820 Do you like doing the days every day?

00:32:59.200 I enjoy it.

00:32:59.580 The special days?

00:33:00.600 Yeah.

00:33:01.120 All right.

00:33:01.380 If you like it, would you like it?

00:33:02.200 Well, it makes me think about it later on, too, about what day it is.

00:33:05.340 I don't know why, but why not?

00:33:08.280 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:10.240 The Herschel Walker issue only gets more complicated.

00:33:13.320 It really has its own bizarre quality to it now.

00:33:18.000 He claims he didn't know this woman who says that she had an abortion.

00:33:24.260 She has the receipts.

00:33:25.160 We gave you all that story yesterday.

00:33:26.460 But he also has a child with her, okay?

00:33:31.980 So he clearly knows her.

00:33:34.020 It's kind of a wild situation.

00:33:38.160 Yes, go to that as things transpire here in the studios.

00:33:45.980 Yep.

00:33:46.760 This is KGO San Francisco, a cumulus media station.

00:33:51.420 Coming Monday.

00:33:52.500 It's the biggest gamble in Bay Area radio history.

00:34:22.500 Now, what happened here, according to the L.A.

00:34:42.120 Times, is that on the morning of October 5th, all of the station's employees, including

00:34:47.600 the hosts, were summoned to a meeting where they were told that, quote, KGO as we know it will cease

00:34:54.040 to exist. And they were informed that the station had lost more than $20 million since it was

00:34:58.820 acquired by Cumulus and that changes would be coming. But there was no indication of what

00:35:04.480 exactly those changes would be. Mark Thompson, who hosted a show on weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon,

00:35:10.760 was told to go on the air, deliver the station's ID at 10, 15 a.m. and leave the booth. He wanted

00:35:16.840 it tells listeners what was going on, but the station's executives refused. I said, don't you

00:35:20.880 think we owe the audience an explanation of what's happening? There are a lot of people who count on

00:35:25.080 the station. They said, nope, this is the way we want to do it. Well, the gambling promos and

00:35:30.860 songs about money continued until the new sports betting station debuted on Monday to replace the

00:35:36.920 old KGO. And the listeners, as you would expect, didn't take it well. This is from the LA Times,

00:35:42.640 Quote, listeners of San Francisco's KGO radio station woke up to a shock on Monday.

00:35:48.140 The iconic AM station's all-talk format was gone, supplanted by a sports gambling format and a branding change to The Spread, with the slogan, The Bay's Best Bet on Sports.

00:35:59.780 Listeners had nowhere to go to express their dismay in public except the station's Facebook page.

00:36:04.940 Corporate greed at its finest, wrote one listener.

00:36:07.640 There's no sense of community anymore.

00:36:10.020 The station's host, their voices suddenly cut off,

00:36:12.420 fielded questions and comments from their audience members

00:36:14.720 through private emails and tweets.

00:36:17.100 Just an avalanche of Facebook responses, says Mark Thompson,

00:36:20.200 who held forth on KGO weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon.

00:36:23.580 There's rage, incredulity, and this deep emotion

00:36:26.120 associated with being disconnected from what was clearly a relationship

00:36:29.220 that transcended information and news.

00:36:32.340 Call it community.

00:36:33.780 People felt this immense connection, Thompson told me.

00:36:37.140 You got me through COVID, is what I've heard from more than anything.

00:36:40.360 You were my daily connection. It's heartbreaking.

00:36:43.640 That'd be a mistake to view all these different aspects of regional culture,

00:36:47.880 our dialects, our newspapers, our radio stations, in isolation.

00:36:52.700 And it would be an even bigger mistake to dismiss any of these elements as too insignificant to care about.

00:36:58.760 As A.N. Whitehead wrote in Science in the Modern World,

00:37:01.900 quote, men require of their neighbors something sufficiently akin to be understood, something

00:37:07.360 sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.

00:37:13.740 He declared that a diversification among human communities is essential for the provision of

00:37:18.220 the incentive and material for the odyssey of the human spirit. Now, he's not saying that we

00:37:23.100 should embrace diversity for the sake of it or import cultures that have no compatibility with

00:37:27.820 our own. But he is making a strong case that regional cultures, ones that are different

00:37:33.640 enough to be interesting but still harmonious with the rest of the country, are actually

00:37:38.700 extremely valuable. In 1948, T.S. Eliot built on this idea when he wrote Notes Toward the

00:37:44.140 Definition of Culture. And he began by pointing out that the term culture is incredibly broad

00:37:48.380 and includes everything from the kind of cheese people eat to the sporting events they attend

00:37:52.400 to the holidays they celebrate. And all of it is significant. Eliot also observed that England

00:37:57.980 benefits tremendously from the regional cultures of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and that friction

00:38:03.360 among these cultures was important to maintain or else English culture itself would fall. Quote,

00:38:09.720 it is an essential part of my case that if the other cultures of the British Isles

00:38:13.280 were wholly superseded by English culture, English culture would disappear too.

00:38:17.940 Many people seem to take for granted that English culture is something self-sufficient and

00:38:22.120 and secure that it will persist whatever happens. While some refuse to admit that any foreign

00:38:28.260 influence can be bad, others assume complacently that English culture could flourish in complete

00:38:33.400 isolation from the continent. To many, it has never occurred to reflect that the disappearances

00:38:37.780 of the peripheral cultures of England, to say nothing of the more humble local peculiarities

00:38:42.340 within England itself, might be a calamity. We have not given enough attention to the ecology

00:38:47.800 of cultures. Now, this phrase, the ecology of cultures, is what comes to mind when you hear

00:38:53.280 about the very rapid decline of regional dialects and institutions in the United States.

00:38:58.880 As Eliot puts it, it is the instinct of every living thing to persist in its own being.

00:39:05.020 Any vigorous small people wants to preserve its individuality. And that individuality is

00:39:11.240 threatened at the moment in ways that very few people are talking about. Now, for his part,

00:39:17.580 Eliot hesitated to recommend any decisive way to fix this particular problem. Culture by its

00:39:22.780 nature isn't something you can dictate from the top down. But we can start by identifying what's

00:39:28.620 happening and what's causing it. Rapid demographic change doesn't simply lead to social unrest and

00:39:36.020 less cohesion and more violence, although very often those are the expected consequences,

00:39:41.240 and they do happen. Demographic change can also lead to consequences that no one really thinks

00:39:46.180 about. Side effects that slowly chip away at America's various regional cultures, bit by bit.

00:39:52.940 Until one day there's not much left. Now, sometimes this demographic change comes from 0.58

00:39:58.620 within the country. More often it comes from outside of our borders. And either way, by the

00:40:04.960 time you truly realize the extent of the change, by the time no one can speak Cajun or tell you

00:40:10.440 what a dingbatter is, then it's probably too late to do anything about it.

00:40:16.180 We have a terror warning in Northern Virginia.

00:40:24.040 Radicalism has designs openly on the West.

00:40:26.240 The FBI thwarted a terror plot on New Year's Eve.

00:40:29.020 Violence attack over the Halloween weekend in Michigan.

00:40:32.240 Protests on college campuses showing no signs of stopping.

00:40:46.180 Oh, I'll make some love, I'll make some love.

00:41:16.180 Screams

The Matt Walsh Show - July 06, 2026

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

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