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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • Europeans have been settling in North America for 500 years. The United States being a young country has nothing to do with the evolution of accents and dialects. When the US was formed the Spanish had been in the Americas for 200 years, the French and English not much less, in addition to enslaved Africans who brought their own native languages to the continent and then were forced to learn English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. That alone is more than enough time and groups of people for dialects and accents to develop.


  • When I was in law school I did a deep dive on the formation of Illinois and ended up going down a big rabbit hole of the dialects of Southern Illinois. The reason different parts of southern Illinois have accents that sound so different is because a lot of people settled there from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and even thought towns were closish to each other the accents were very different because of the group of southern settlers. Super interesting. Where I’m from in Southern Illinois people have a very unique and unmistakable accent.


  • I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.

    Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.

    Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.



  • He has been an excellent governor. All the conservatives in So. IL disagree, but when you ask them why, the literal only reason is “he raised the gas prices!!” They ignore the fact that Illinois has had a balanced budget for the last four years, that we are slowly climbing our way out of debt, that marijuana is legalized, cash bail has been ended, Southern Illinois has received a fuck load of infrastructure money, etc. They also ignore the fact that Southern Illinois is the prime reason WHY Illinois is so broke. Southern Illinois is where the majority of the people on snap, tanf, Medicaid, and other social programs are. They all conveniently ignore that though.