Picture this, a small town where everyone sounds the same. They have the same accent, the same phrases, the same style of vocabulary. That's hard to imagine, right? However, one might question why such a situation does not occur if the townspeople are all living together in a condensed area. To some degree the people may talk the same but there will always be subcultural differences, and the reason is individuality.
The article addresses such a question on a much larger scale, the whole country. People often wonder if, because of the television and social networking boom, dialects will be lost and a uniform style of speech will be formed for all Americans. However, the author of the article argues that such an occurrence will never happen because people are constantly adapting their speech "to stay one step ahead of the game". What the author means is that, even though language is spread from all over the country due to television and other mediums, we still maintain our own unique styles of speaking to form our identity and associate ourselves with the groups we are a part of.
All of what the author had to say strongly ties in to the video series "Do You Speak American?". In the videos, they venture all over the country and sample different dialects. Not one is the same as the last. They are all fit to the individual. Such dialogues have many determining factors such as race, age, location, and social class. In essence, what you say projects who you are, or want to be.
The theories of the article remain true for me. I speak in a fashion that is fairly common to a middle class, white guy from the Chicagoland area. I have many phrases and words unique to my friends and school. I talk the way I do because of who I am, and TV won't change that.
Here is a website that has a very interesting way at broadly summarizing American speech by region.
http://www.evolpub.com/Americandialects/AmDialMap.html
It's interesting to think about the fact that each sub-culture has different dialects. I always hear other people who are not fimilar to the area of Chicago talking about the fact that the people of Chicago have an accent/dialect (a different way of speaking standard English). It's hard for me to tell the differences between a Chicago accent and standard English. However this many be because I am used to the area; when i travel to other areas of the United States I can easily tell the different between standard English and a dialect. I think dialects should be accepted in society though, there will always be a standard English and nothing will change that. Dialects symbolize the sub-culture of Americans, since our country was based on uniting all different types of people it seems wrong to judge a persons dialect. It's normal for people to have dialects I think. I completely agree that dialects aren't going away. You're blog was very intersting. Good job!
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