accents
.... Often times one will hear many different types of accents within one city. Migration vastly contributes to this because when people migrate into a city from another country they bring with them their own form of dialect that is likely to spread to people that the immigrants are closely tied to. This spread will continue to grow larger as more and more people are sharing their own unique form of dialect. Perhaps a person from upstate New York moved to somewhere in the south, this person would spread his or her accent on to other people they become acquainted with in the south and before we know it we have southerners saying “Can I get a HEE-am sandwich”. Drastic changes in dialect develop over a very long period of time; the change takes so long because the people that are changing the accents we have now are mostly children. In the 20th century more children began to watch more television. Television is a major factor in how children speak today. Children are watching more cartoons and other television shows where characters are made to talk in a strange or different way. Children pick up these ways of speaking in incorporate them into their own daily speech, therefore contributing in a huge way to the changing of accents. This is a very slow process as Cooke states but it does take place, because usually by the time a person reaches a certain age in their teens the accent that the person has will stay with them for the remainder of that person’s life, proving that children have to be the biggest factor in changing accents. Although accents of many people change depending on where they are from and where they live, this change does not hold true for lower-class African Americans. Cooke explains, from his own research, that African American people feel themselves to be one big group or organization across the United States, therefore they do not think they should change the way they speak because of where they live or who they are acquainted with. Cooke says that because of this language difference blacks and whites will continue to grow further apart in the way that they speak. Cooke also emphasizes that accents play an important role in obtaining a better or higher paying job. People that are higher up in the job including CEO’s and managers must be able to speak with intelligence. Not very often do we see a person promoted to CEO that pronounces the word fantastic as “FEE-an-TEE-astic”. Cooke says that some companies take the extra step in helping their employees get promotions by sending them to speech therapy. Although therapy will not change a person’s accent entirely, therapy will help that person in speaking more clearly with an accent that is readily heard and more understandable. Children often choose some sounds over other sounds, meaning some children leave out specific sounds in a word whether it was an E sound or an O sound. Cooke performed and experiment in Los Angeles with school children to hear what sounds they leave out the most. He found that many children say “sale” as “sell”. He also found that many children are not sticking to accents that they learned when they were growing up. Although Cooke does not have an answer to why this happens, one can clearly see why. Children in schools today are from many different parts of the Country because so many parents are in the military and end up moving to another state before their children even get out of elementary school. This explains why children do not keep the accents from where they are growing up. Children are making new friends in school that come from complete opposite coasts of the United States; a child nowadays may share a class with students from New York,...