NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {‘E} very part of the United States has its own accent,” writes Edward McClelland in his short and highly entertaining and informative (I dare not say “interesting”) 2016 book How to Speak Midwestern. But for how long might that be the case?

Some in the Midwest wouldn’t accept that statement in the first place. “An important element of Midwestern identity is believing you don’t have an accent,” McClelland writes. Guilty as charged. As an Ohio native, I have long believed that the primary distinguishing aspect of the way I talk is its lack of distinction. For many of my fellow Midwesterners (and yes, Ohio is Midwestern), this simply isn’t true. They may think they have assimilated to the bland, neutral dialect popularized for broadcasters by Ohio philologist John S. Kenyon. But, as McClellan explains, the Midwest has not only its own accent, but three distinct ones: “Inland North” (Buffalo to Milwaukee, the “lower Great Lakes”), “Midland” (western Pennsylvania to Iowa), and “North Central” (the Midwest’s far northern reaches — i.e., “Doncha know” country). Midwesterners in good standing can typically lump themselves into one of these categories.

I wish I could. But the best evidence I have suggests otherwise. I make a little game of trying to ask everyone I meet for the first time where they think I’m from. Initial answers have placed me anywhere from California to Colorado to Illinois to Indiana. Seldom does anyone successfully guess my actual native land. If that’s not rigorous enough for you: How about the dialect quiz the New York Times launched a decade ago? Based on over 350,000 survey responses concerning pronunciation and word use collected in 2013 from questions derived from the Harvard Dialect Survey, the quiz generates a heat map showing “the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did.” The redder the map is, the closer a region is to your dialect; the bluer it is, the less you have in common. Every time I take it, all the quiz does is rule out the areas of strongest regional accent — most of the South, much of the Northeast — and place me . . . just about anywhere else. The map is a sea of red for me. My strongest urban analogue is Lincoln, Neb. I have never been to Lincoln. Or anywhere else in Nebraska.

There’s a strong case, then, that I am part of post-accent America: those unfortunate tongues whose utterances fail to mark us as definitely from somewhere. Recent news suggests that more of us might be on the way. University of Georgia linguistics professor Margaret Renwick recently led a study analyzing the voices of over 100 native Georgians, some born as early as the 1880s and others as late as 2003. The study focused on key vowels found in the words “bide,” “bait,” “bet,” and “bat.” The result, Renwick told NPR:

We found that all of them are more Southern in older speakers and less so in younger speakers. So the Southern drawl versions of these are (imitating Southern accent) bide, bait, bet, bat. Speakers in Gen Z, who are current college students, instead use what we call a pan-regional accent that has been documented elsewhere in the U.S.

Renwick assures us that she doesn’t think the Southern accent is “doomed;” it’s simply “changing.” Attributes such as word choice will still separate it from other dialects. Bless her heart. In reality, this is a catastrophe.

Renwick’s explanation for the Southern accent’s mutation helps explain why. She notes that post-war Georgia, anchored by Atlanta, has become much more attractive to in-migration than ever before. With more residents from other states comes a greater cultural mixing, which of course can be salutary, as can the attendant prosperity. But both can come at the cost of a diminution of the folkways that set a given area apart, chief among them its distinct manner of speaking.

To which one might say: So what? Who cares if places start sounding and talking more like each other, or even the same? Maybe it’s for the best if idioms of such subtle nuance as “bless your heart,” or of such borderline incomprehensibility as “Jeet?” fade away into some common American mélange. Maybe we can resolve some of English’s defects. Unlike most other languages, it lacks a unique second-person plural. Maybe we can finally settle on one. Current options: “Y’all,” “youse,” and (my vote) “you guys.” There would undoubtedly be some advantages.

But we might as well rebuild the Tower of Babel while we’re at it. Regional accents and dialects are some of the strongest aspects of the federalist culture that exists alongside, and in part because of, America’s federalist politics. Ours is — and ought to be — a vast and variegated country, not some homogenous blob. Its residents are part of the nation, obviously, but are also proud of their particularities. Our diffuse system of government suits that well. The increasing movement of power and wealth, not just to Washington, but also to certain regional hubs (Atlanta being an excellent example) — and away from areas of differentiation — has weakened this motley character. As have the internet and other forms of media that have connected us across the nation more than we ever have been, even as direct relationships with our own neighbors diminish. The smothering of dialect differences is bound up in some of the more injurious trends in our national life.

It also portends an even worse one: the degradation of America’s resplendent cultural variation. The Left would call that part of the American character “diversity.” A better word, the one Russell Kirk favored, is “variety.” Kirk argued that conservatives “feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.” The cultural uniformity that now poses a threat in some respects resembles such systems.

This principle can, of course, go too far. Slavery, for example, was indeed the South’s peculiar institution, but peculiar in its barbarity. Harry Jaffa wrote in National Review that he could “think of no good objection to either Nazism or Communism, that would not apply to the chattel slavery that once existed in this country.” There is, furthermore, much good that comes from cultural intermingling. The culture and dialects now at risk emerged from the very same process; new ones can emerge, in combination with or at least owing something to the old, that continue to set the same areas apart but in new ways. Change is inevitable; “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” as Edmund Burke wrote.

An America where everyone sounds the same, full of people — like me — whose very words don’t give them away regionally, is a less exceptional America. The way we talk, one of the most basic human functions, is an essential part of our individual identity, and the shared identities of those around us. Aside from sports fandoms, cuisine, and — ahem — cryptids and esoterica, it’s hard to think of something more powerfully associated with place in the U.S. “Accents are an important element of regional identity,” McClelland writes. For that to go might herald an end to something all Americans share: our differences.

So what can we do? Here, the concerned conservative finds himself in a familiar place: raging against trends that seem inevitable. The best recourse is to hold dearly to one’s upbringing, especially if living in or nearby one’s place of birth. But also, if one has settled elsewhere, be firmly rooted there. Respect its folkways, its mannerisms, and, of course, its dialect. Bring your own cultural priors to it, but humbly. Don’t be a cultural imperialist or centralizer, insisting that everyone speak and act as you do. Accept, embrace, and come to love the varieties of American experience. And stay strong, y’all — er, you guys.