Cool Articles and Regional Accents

While we all know that different regions have different accents, it's sometimes hard to pay attention to the specifics of each region and what distinguishes them. Until everyone in the class actually starting comparing how they said words like "hot" and "father", I never really saw some of the intricacies of each region's accent. Another thing that was interesting is the varience in the accents of each region. One region may be identified with a specific accent, but there may be many sub-accents that differ from the main accent. Also, some people in the designated region simply do not speak the accent in the "proper" form even if they have lived there for ever. So I guess there are limits to assigning regional accents. They serve more as guidelines and not necessarly the norm in each region of the US.
In today's technological age, I think it is easier for regional accents to mesh together and be less distinct. This maybe a result of uniform media as seen in tv shows, movies and news. These avenues of language may have a much greater impact on us than we realize. Listening to such uniform language on TV may make American accents much more similar than they used to be.
We learned a lot about regional accents in the articles we read for last week. I found many of the articles to be very interesting. We read the article about Mountain Speech in class and I found it to be really funny. I found myself trying to replicate the accent after reading nearly every sentence, but realized I couldn't do it. It was also very interesting to see how this accent was specific to a very small area and how it has survived through the years. My favorite article by far was the Trini Talk poem. It conveyed a lot of culture a cool poem as well as an interesting accent which I also tried to replicate(unsuccessfully though, haha).
Overall, I found the study of accents to be very interesting, especially their evolution over time. I look forward to learning about many more cool accents through the IPA and Praat. Can't wait to begin Praat in class tomorrow!