The Sudden Collapse of Local Radio

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Call American Finance today eight six Five, six, nine, forty seven, eleven, that's eight, six, six, five, six, nine, forty seven, eleven Visit Americanincing dot net slash Walsh. If you've spent a lot of time traveling in America, you may have noticed that people are starting to sound the same regardless of where you go A bus driver in Charlotte has roughly the same accent as a guy at a Brooklyn beer hall who in turn sounds the same as a salesman at a car dealership in Boston or a cashier in Grand Rapids Of course, anyone over thirty five years old knows that it wasn't always this way Until recently, there was a huge difference in how people talked. and it was not always regional in nature. accents were also class distinguishers People would adopt accents to seem more sophisticated, including famous TV personalities. One of the most elite mid century accents was a Locust Valley lockjaw named after an extremely wealthy wasp enclave Long Island, New York, which Sounded something like this, listen We counted it up the other day. we had Sixteen live in help in this house Noting the chauffeurs and nothing. accounting chauffeurs, yeah Aside from all the help we had in Tuuckxedo Park House and the Southampton House as well But those days are gone forever If you recognize that accident, it might be because so many mid century public intellectuals used it like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. debating in this clip, listen. You must realize what some of the political issues are here and many you people in the United States happen to believe that the United States policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Vietcong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of Western Europe and many other parts of the world. If it is a novelty in Chicago, that is too bad. But I assume that for the point of the American democracy and you can point of view you ut up aute No,t. Some people were not a Nazis. And the answer is that they they were well treated by people who ostracized them. and I'm for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don't onation. P crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that. I only say all n it have. Now listen, you right calling me a crypto Nazi. Let's stoping you in a goddamn face. That will stay plastered. Gentlemen, let's go. M Brcken go back to his pornography and stop making any illusions of Nazi. to infantry in the last war. You were not anantry as a matter ofight not 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 ABCU's World Hequarters in New York This is World News Tonight. With David Muk. Good evening. We begin tonight here with several breaking stories that Tonight, the East Coast struggles to recover from hurricane Sandy. Before we go tonight, a word about me So what we see is that the way that Americans talk, for the most part, has been homogenized The monoculture is dead, as we've discussed At length And yet we all speak the same way ronically enough, paradoxically The most common explanation is that regional accents died because of the proliferation of TV and the internet. and that's true But it's only part of the story. we'll show throughout this video that there are O more complicated reasons as well. Of course, some people still have accents and there are holdouts like whether you call your soft drink pop, soda or Coke depends on what part of the country you grew up in So that's starting to fade also But people with strong accents today have accents that would have been considered very weak accents just a few decades ago, and for the most part There is a pervasive increasing sameness in how we talk Surprising enough, there's a large volume of data on these shifts. Researchers who study linguistics at major universities have devoted sububstantial amount of time to the topic. and what's remarkable is that As far as I can tell, this is the only major area of social science research that isn't totally corrupted by politics. Normally when you ask college professors to explain the decline of An aspect of American culture, they'll talk about white supremacy and police brutality and They'll say know, we had it coming. But when it comes to the disappearance of American dialects and accents, for whatever reason, academics are generally honest What's happening, which is rare. And honest about the reason why it's happening So with that in mind, we'll start with an excerpt from a two thousand five documentary called Do you Speak American which is about a major exception to this trend. This is a segment about something called the Northern Cityities Val shhift, which was first documented in the late nineteen sixties. It's a rare case. of the American language becoming less concentrated and more regional from the last fifty years And it happened in cities in the Great Lakes region All the experts including researchers who had spending decades studying American accents were shocked by what they were seeing And understand their findings, first you might neede a quick refresher on the vocabulary So a long vowel is a vowel That sounds exactly like the letter. So for example, the A in K is a long vowel because it sounds exactly like the letter A Another example of a long vowel would be the E and sounds exactly like the letter. E, so it's a long vow On other hand, a short vowel is a vowel that doesn't sound like the name of the letter. So for example, the A in cat a short val. So is the eye and pig Now the really big finding from researchers was that around nineteen sixty nine, for the first time in a thousand years People stop pronouncing short vowels in the same way As a species, we've been pretty consistent on how we pronounce short vowels Until one day everything changed This is from the documentaries interview with a linguist anded William Lebovve Watch What we'll be looking at is this mass of cities around the Great Lakes U Here we have Syraccuse, Rochester, Buffalo and Cleveland Detroit How many people is that? It's about thirty four million people. This area used to be the closest to network pronunciation. It was what the NBC standard was based on. And today, it is moving further and further away. This is spectacular. Bosses? Everybody writes down what? Bosses. Right. The guy. Yeah. The bosses with the antennas. Now you begin to wonder what are these the bosses? What the antennas how kind. I can remember vaguely when we had the bosses with the antennas on the topap. So bosses has become bosses. Right. ye So black became black and buses became bosses. The vowel in the word cat raises and becomes kiat The vowel in the word cot then moves and starts sounding like the A and cat used to sound on and on and on It's like a game of musical chairs. the short valves are getting shifted around Once one vowel changes, then by necessity the other vowels have to change as well so that people can tell apart from one another This emerging accent became so ubiquitous that SNL created a skit mocking it. Take a look wor and I want to thank everyone for sending those cards to my brother, Bill, who recently had another heart attack We are coming to you live from Dickas here on Thanksgiving Day, a day for giving thanks for or taking punishment from a team that is known as stop bears. Stop bears This phenomenon was isolated to a very specific area of the country By two thousand five, this particular linguist had mapped out the geographic boundaries of the shift. It encompassed cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland. Buffalo in Syracuse And there was no clear explanation for why this was happening A lot of people think getting healthier means making some huge changes, a brand new diet and intense workout plan or even a complete overhaul of their routine. Truth is, most long term progress comes from small habits you can actually stick with That's why I've been interested in dose for cholesterol. 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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 As we discussed in our realal History documentary, white people were leaving urban areas in large numbers Period is a way of avoiding rampant black crime violence Or as Michelle Obama puts it to avoid black culture and the wonders of diversity So maybe as white people were trying to distance themselves physically from black people, their brains were rewiring themselves to avoid speaking Black people as well. That's theory. Now admittedly, I'm no linguist I'm no expert in linguistics, but it seems like a stretch, you know, kind of a way to shoehorn racial politics into a topic where it doesn't belong Another theory which makes a lot more sense is that the shift had been going on for quite some time, increasing from one generation to the next It was only noticed by researchers beginning in the nineteen sixties when American universities were exploding and becoming far larger and much more numerous On this theory, as I understand it, thousands of people in the early eighteen hundreds traveled west from New England and settled along the Erie Canal Corridor, which was an isolated area. Plenty of immigrants arrive to help build the Erie Canal and over time separated from the rest of the country, they came up with a unique way of pronouncing a single vowel and then every other vowel changed accordingly Whatever the case. The northern city is Valchift, the great linguistic quirk that perplexed researchers for a very long time and a counterpoint to the great homogenization of American English and which gave millions of Americans a unique way of speaking is now coming to an end This is research from Indiana University and to understand this quote You need to understand the word trap. In this context, trap refers to The short A vowel in words like cat And realization just means how a person actually says it As we've already covered, people in Northern cities had a unique raised way of pronouncing this vowel. So with that in mind Here's latest finding quote Recent acoustic analyses examining English in the Northern American Great Lakes region show that the area's characteristic valve chain shift, the Northern city shift, NCS is waning attitudinal analyses. suggests that the NCS has lost prestige in some NCS cities such that it is no longer regarded as standard American English Results show that trap Realization is conditioned by gender and birth year such that women led the change toward NCS realizations. into the middle of the twentieth century and then away from them thereafter. These findings reflect the backdrop of de industrialization during this time of linguistic reorganization in Lansing and shows that as the regional industry auto manufacturing loses prestige so does the regional variant raised traps This particular finding states that As the automobile manufacturing industry declined in the Great Lakes, the unique accents started to disappear as well. People, particularly women were very attuned to their perceived social status didn't want to be associated with a dying blue collar industry anymore and stop being prestigious to like the autoorkers Additionally, for workers, particularly young people who are trying to get an office job It didn't help to sound like a factory at work there were all kinds of prejudice against hiring somebody like that, as you might imagine. So Young people on the job market began talking more like people from other parts of the country subconsciously or not And when they had kids, they taught them to speak in the new way, not the shifted way of speaking Instead Midwesterners are now talking more like Canadians and Californians It was class, not just TV and YouTube killed an emergent regional accent. That's the point Now did you have any idea that this was going on? Have you drawn a connection between the decline of the auto industry and the way millions of Americans speak? Extraordinary to think about for several reasons How we speak is a direct reflection of how we think. You know it really matters. It's one of the first things we notice about a person. in addition to their appearance, we pay very close attention to what they say and how they say it And while we tend to think that accents and dialects originate in mostly random and unpredictable ways That's simply not true. Government policy can have a major impact Economic events can have a major impact And I've only talked about one case study so far. There are many other examples of similar changes in language all over the United States It's not just happening in the so called Northern cities So let's take a look at an island in the outer banks of North Carolina. about twenty miles off the off the mainland This was historically a very isolated area The island didn't have electricity until nineteen thirty eight or a ferry service until nineteen fifty seven. And because of their isolation, the locals started speaking in a distinctive manner Their dialect is called Hi Titer, which got its name because that's how these people pronounce high tide So this high tider dialect has roots in early modern English dialects that were spoken in Britain in the late sixteen hundreds through the mid eighteenth century It's not strictly confined to North Carolina, it's been oerved on Smith Island in Maryland although As far as I can tell, it hasn't traveled to any other state This is a recent BBC segment from the region Just to give you an idea of how these people talk, watch Sooy to it on a saturk. lastast night the waterfire night moonhine. No feet. Joy spoke matter up woods. It's the only dialect in the United States. When you play it for people from outside of the United States, England do not identify it as an American dialect. The Okrakok dialect and several of the island dialects of the Atlantic seeaboard really began in the late seventeenth century. There was a settlement on the island in the first decade of the eighteenth century, so in about seventeen nine or ten, the people presumably came from the southwest of England there to Virginia and settled on islands and people from those islands traveled by boat to these islands in North Carolina and settled them. Once they settled them, of course they had no way to access the mainland other than by boat which is still the case. And so it was isolated, isolated for centuries. There are certainly retentions of English, you know, there There are words that sort of we can find in the placeays of Shakespeare like a word like Momic 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 try to shake up a little bit. They want a box with you Mommy's like to irritate somebody or tickle somebody, you know There are also things that they simply created in the United States, we play a game hide and seek. Well, on Ochre Coke, the term is called me honky because when they're hiding, what they do is they imitate the sound of a goose. Me honky, me honky riding and fing and running through the bushes and hide somewhere else Fowering me hwking, me hwking, they know you wherever you got where they you that name No I don't know. It's really just another thing sort of like h h sleep say twoube t. Now in case you're curious, the term ding batter comes from the Sitcom all in the family. The people living in the outer banks of North Carolina got television in the nineteen seventies and they heard Archie Bunker call his wife a ding batter because she didn't have any common sense and seemed like an appropriate insult for all the outsiders who were coming into their communities and getting their trucks stuck in the sand and so on. So the word ding batter came to mean outsider. And because of these outsiders, this distinct way of speaking is dying out By some estimates, only around two hundred people speak this dialect anymore. and It's happening because of an influx of ding batters. Watch There are only about one hundred and fifty speakers of the Ochre Kke Broue now And they all live on one end of this barrier island on the coast of North Carolina, which is basically an enlarge sand bar Within the next fifty years, the broad will disappear. Whaite to us house we left night water farnite Msine no fish The dialect on this island is sometimes referred to as poi Titers, which is their pronunciation of high tide. Poi Tid on the s side, H tide on the sand side. In the United States, the Okra Coke Brog is probably the only dialect that is not identified as being from America. I have a lot of people that't think I'm from Australia O Ireland, yeah. Then you could say we'd be mama You also find here lots of terms for outsiders. Y'all are dang batters. J My wife is from Maryland. We've been married forty three years. She's still a dang batteratter That's not a bad thing, okay It was basically the ding batters who changed the dialect because so many people came in. E today, there are more off islanders who live here than onliners. Now it's changing. butin time, we're all gonna to lose it, you know? because of so many people came in. It's a part of a heritage that I'm proud of This is one of the few areas of our culture where everybody, even the media and academics is willing to say that demographic change is the culprit. They'll admit that These people are losing their dialect because the demographic makeup of their community has changed As the BBC reports quote, With each generation, the dialect is starting to disappear. The world is coming to the island through television and the internet. as well as with the long line of tourists who show up every summer. There's also more people from the mainland moving in. What's happening is that some of these small dialects that thrive on isolation are dying because isolation is a thing of the past, said North Carolina state University professor Walt Wolfrin They still pick up terms of vocabulary, but when a kid from the island retains a strong dialect, That was the norm and now it's an exception. In the past, kids adopted the dialect because that was the only version they heard. Now there are hundreds of dialects and languages that Most will encounter before they graduate high school In fact as of twenty twenty four, on this island of six hundred and seventy six people fewewer than half actually speak with the full Hoy Titter brogue Within one to two generations, it'll be gone, said Dr. Wolfram It's dying out and we can't stop that. Now the reason mainstream media outlets are willing to say all this is that in their view, accents and dialects are No big deal. ust kind of a curiosity So they're comfortable saying that yeah, accents and dialects will change when an isolated community is flooded with outsiders But it's not merely a sentimental issue. And we're talking about the loss of a shared history, vocabulary, in oral tradition. doesnn't exist anywhere else in the world We're talking about a fundamental part of humanity, how we communicate. And white people in particular are losing their unique methods of communication. It's not just happening in the Great Lakes and remote islands off North Carolina It's happening everywhere. even large swaths of the American South Then there was a tsunami. It's the southern accent heard aroundound the world. I'm southern, but I ain no way I'm as southern as Parker Posey's character, Victoria on White Lus season three. Even sparking this viral moment. like Piper No. And between white Lotus star Parker Posey and our own Carolina guy, Craig. Tsunami. Buddhism. The moment Piper No! Setting social media on fire. Piper No Oh God, that was kind of spot on. But in real life, experts say that iconic southern drawl marked by elongated vowels at a slower pace, is actually disappearing. Yall What southern accents? Research shows a diminishing accent in regions across the south from Georgia which saw the biggest shift between baby boomers in GX and cities like Raleigh and New Orleans. The reason Increased migration to the south, which in the twenty twenties alone is already more than four times greater than the other three US regions combined, causing younger generations to lose that distinctive southern twang. Looks like two pigs like it. The southern accent doesn't sound like that today. There are still people who speak with these very, very strong accents They'll tend to be much more isolated places or they'll be much older speakers. But yeah, the younger generation it's shifted. This is a study published in the summer of twenty twenty three out of Georgia tech.. decent amount of technical jargon here, but the takeaway is clear, quote The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern City Shift and the Southern Vowel shhift or SVS, replaced by supra local systems like the low back merger shift, the SVS is most advanced amongor Georgians Born in the mid twenteth century in generenation X, where retraction of front lax vows begins toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support finding that regional vowel systems decline precipitously following a GX cliff raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period So other words, the accent that the boomers had the southern valve shift s dying out because Georgia has become much more urban and less rural. There' much larger black population and white people are coming into the state from very far away. So previously southerners pronounce a ride as rout as Iike guesss Rod time is Tom Basically, they would flatten words so they sounded like one big syllable. And now that's changing. They're starting to sound exactly like exactly like everybody else This is from the website Big Think, summarizing the findings from the same researchers, quote Linguists at University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Brigham Young University reported that white Georgians seem to be losing their classic southern accent Analyzing vocal recordings of one hundred and thirty five native Georgians born between eighteen eighty seven and two thousand three They found that a few of the distinct vowel pronunciations that define the Southern accent have been disappearing over the generations For example, words like prize and once pronounced praz and fiat. are now more open, more often spoken as pzies and The shift was greatest between baby boomers and gen Xors and has continued with millennials and Gen Zeers. Now NPR spoke to a l linguistic professor at the University of Georgia. named Margareick Renwick about the reasons for the change. And here's what they reported, quote, major driver of this phenomenon demographic change in Georgia and throughout the South. Before World War II, Georgia received very little migration to the state Be beginning the nineteen sixties Georgia Saul. inccreasing migration from other areas of the US. And by the nineteen eighties top destinations for interstate migration. and the Atlanta Metro is still one of the fastest growing in the US. So these population movements mean that Georgia speakers Growing up after the nineteen sixties, we werere in a very different linguistic environment than speakers from earlier generations. Little kids don't learn language from social media kids acquire language from their parents, from their caregivers And so that is our earliest linguistic input that helps us learn our native language. Then once kids get into school and enter adolescence they emulate their peer groups. And so we think that's where language change from generation to generation really takes hold. In the today' S showow report, you heard that people are even losing their accents in New Orleans which historically has been one of the most distinctive accents in the entire country Elsewhere in Louisiana, the distinctive Cajun dialect is also dying out One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming that just because something has always been done a certain way, it's the only way to do it. Healthcare is a good example. Most people assume their options are whatever their employer offers or whatever they can find on the open market. They don't realize there's another approach that's been helping families for more than thirty years. It's called Medicare. Medicare is a health care sharing program, and today more than a million Americans are using it The reason it's growing is pretty simple. People are tired of paying more every year for a system that somehow keeps getting more expensive and more complicated at the same time. Medicare offers a different approach. And for many families, that difference can mean saving thousands of dollars a year on health care. if you've heard about Medicare but never looked into it, now's a good time. Learning more. Um doesn't cost you anything. Go to medisare d. com slash Matt. that's Medisare d. com slash Matt. orr if it's easier, just grab your phone and texts Matt. to seven zero, two, four six You get the information sent right to you again, that's Matt to seven zero two four six, Mat to seven zero two four six People who change communities rarely start By trying to change the world, they start small. over time, their small actions turn into meaningful work then turns into impact. The Grand Canyon University students are prepared for that journey through academically rigorous programs. desesigned to help them grow professionally, personally and spiritually While many universities are raising costs, GCU has kept tuition rates steady on a traditional campus for seventeen years honoring their commitment by making higher education more affordable and accessible they're not stuck in the past. seenty five percent of GCU's programs and facilities have been built in just the last decade summer That's when a lot of people start thinking about what's next. If you're exploring your next step, Grand Canyon University offers hundreds of degree programs designed to help you move forward purpose Whether learning on campus in Phoenix or any online from anywhere, students join a community committed to leadership, service and purpose More than one hundred and thirty two thousand students have chosen GCU for one reason. They want an education connected to real opportunities, real careers, and real purpose Purpose isn't something you stumble into. It's something you pursue. Grnd Cany University. help students do exactly that Grand Canyon University, Private Christian, affordable Nonprofit, learn more at gcu. edu This is from the Styisen spectator It says, quote, Most young people increasingly speak in amalgamation of American dialects that lack regional nuances. In much of Louisiana, Cajun French was once spoken in nearly every household, even when it was illegal to teach in schools. Today, Cajun is faced with a slow, painful death As the majority of its native speakers reach the end of their lives There's a pattern that pretty much everyone is noticing in their own communities. It's not limited to the Detroit or Atlanta or the Outer Banks or North Carolina or Louisiana areas is all. it's the single most widespread least talked about change in our culture. and it's tracking a much broader transformation which is that regional culture in general is starting to disappear J like our speech patterns are becoming homogeneous So is everything else Local newspapers have closing and so we all get our news news from the same place, no matter where we live. major cities like Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Youngstown No longer have a daily print newspaper at all. Local radio stations are Dying out certainly. just a couple of weeks ago in Hermeston, Oregon, the radio station KOHU and its sister station KQFM went dark. They'd been on the air since nineteen fifty six Broadcasting high school sporting events and local news to a mostly rural area Now they're gone Then there's the remarkable collapse of KGO in San Francisco. They were a well known talk radio station Bay arerea for more than eighty years and then couple of years ago They fired their staff and made a pivot to full time sports betting coverage instead In fact, in the middle of a broadcast, they abruptly signed off and immediately began airing ads for their upcoming gambling shows, along with various songs centered around the theme of money, including Pink Floyd's Money and Lady Gaga's poker face And these songs and promos continuue to loop for three days straight until the new sports betting coverage began on that Monday listeners and the broadcasters themselves had no idea what was going on This is pretty surreal audio, but it's all real It's also National Noodle Day. So you can combine those two into some garlic noodle love. And that's. Well we have thank you, Kim. we have We have met The day thing. How do you think it's working, Kim? Do you like it? You like doing the days every day? I enjoy S special days as well. All right. If you like it, we it makes me it like think about it later on too about what day it is. I don't know why. but why not No. The Herschel Walker issue only gets more complicated. It really has its own bizarre quality to it now. He claims he didn't know this woman Oh says that she had an abortion, she has the receipts. We gave you all that story yesterday. Uh He also has a child with her. okay? So he clearly knows her kind of a a wild situation U Yes, go to that as things here in the studios. This is KGO San Francisco, a cumulus media station Monday is the biggest gamble in Bay Area radio history G money in run Ging money and run some real n too her for a little show I I can take home. I can take home She me eighteen, eighteen with an attitude nineteen G of start real. Now what happened here, according to the L.A Times is that on the morning of october fifth All of the station's employees, including the hosts were summoned to a meeting where they were told that, quote, KGO, as we know it will cease to exist And they were informed that the station had lost more than twenty million dollars since it was acquired by Cumulus and that changes would be coming, but There was no indication of what exactly those changes would be Thompson, who hosted a show on weekdays from ten AM to noon. was told to go in the air, deliver the station's ID at ten fifteen AM. and leave the booth He want to tells listeners what was going on to the station's executives refused, quote I said, Don't you think we owe the audience an explanation of what's happening There are a lot of people who count on the station They said, Nope, this is the way we want to do it Well the gambling promos and songs about money continued until the new sports betting station debuted on Monday to replace the old KGO And the listeners as you expect, didn't take it well. This is from the L.A Times quote Listeners of San Francisco's KGO radio station woke up to a shock on Monday. The iconic AM station's All talk format was gone, supplanted by a sports gambling format branding change to the spread with the slogan Bay's best bet on sports. Listeners had nowhere to go to express their dismay public accept the station's Facebook page. Corporate greed 's finest, wrote one listener There's no sense of community anymore. The station' host, their voices suddenly cut off questQestions and comments from their audience members private emails and tweets Theres an avalanche of Facebook responses says Mark Thompson. who held forth on KGO weekdays from ten AM to noon. There's rage, incredulity. And this deep emotion associated with being disconnected from what was clearly a relationship that transcended information and news community People felt this immense connection, Thompson told me You got me through COVID is what I've heard from more than anything. You were my daily connection. B That'd be a mistake to view all these different aspects of regional culture O dialects, our newspapers, our radio stations in isolation. And it would be an even bigger mistake to dismiss any of these elements as too insignificant to care about As AN Whitehead wrote in science in the modern world, quote, men require of their neighbors Something sufficiently akin to be understood something sufficiently different to provoke attention And and something great enough to command admiration He declared that a diversification among human communities is essential for the provision of the incentive and material for the odyssey of the human spirit Now he's not saying that we should embrace diversity for the sake of it or import cultures that have compatibility with our own But he is making a strong case that regional cultures, ones that are Different enough to be interesting, but still harmonious with the rest of the country are actually extremely valuable In nineteen forty eight, TS. Elliot built on this idea when he wrote nototes toward the definition of culture They began by pointing out that the term culture is incredibly broad and includes everything from the kind of cheese people eat to the sporting events they attend, to the holidays they celebrate. And all of it is significant. Elliot also observed that England benefits tremendously from the regional cultures of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and that Friction among these cultures important to maintain or else English culture itself would fall. It is an essential part of my case that if the other cultures of the British Isles were wholly superseded by English culture. English culture would disappear too Many people seem to take for granted that English culture is something self sufficient and secure that it will persist whatever happens While some refuse to admit that any foreign influence can be bad, others assume Clacently, that English culture could flourish in complete isolation from the continent many it has never occurred to reflect the disappearances of the peripheral cultures of England to say nothing of The more humble local peculiarities within England itself might be a calamity We have not given enough attention to the ecology of cultures Now this phrase, the ecology of cultures is what comes to mind when you hear about the very rapid decline of regional dialects and institutions in the United States. As Elliot puts it It is the instinct of every living thing to persist in its own being. any vigorous small people wants to preserve its individuality And that individuality is threatened att the moment. in ways that very few people are talking about Now for his part, Elliot hesitated to recommend any decisive way to fix this particular problem Culture by its nature isn't something you can dictate from the top down But we can start by identifying what's happening And what's causing it rapid demographic change doesn't simply lead to social unrest less cohesion and more violence, although very often those are the expected consequences And they do happen. Demographic change can also lead to consequences that no one really thinks about side effects that slowly chip away America's various regional cultures bit by bit Until one day there's not much left Now, sometimes this demographic change comes from within the country More often it comes from outside of our borders. And either way, by the time you truly realize the extent of the change, By the time no one can speak Cajun or T tell you what a ding batter is then it's probably too late to do anything about it terror warning in Norn Virginia. Radical Islam has designs openly on the West. The FBI' ordered a terror plot on New Year's Eve violent attack over the Halloween weekend in Michigan. Protests on college campuses showing no signs of stopping Oh?