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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • Europeans have been settling in North America for 500 years. The United States being a young country has nothing to do with the evolution of accents and dialects. When the US was formed the Spanish had been in the Americas for 200 years, the French and English not much less, in addition to enslaved Africans who brought their own native languages to the continent and then were forced to learn English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. That alone is more than enough time and groups of people for dialects and accents to develop.


  • When I was in law school I did a deep dive on the formation of Illinois and ended up going down a big rabbit hole of the dialects of Southern Illinois. The reason different parts of southern Illinois have accents that sound so different is because a lot of people settled there from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and even thought towns were closish to each other the accents were very different because of the group of southern settlers. Super interesting. Where I’m from in Southern Illinois people have a very unique and unmistakable accent.


  • I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.

    Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.

    Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.




  • Riyria@sopuli.xyztomemes@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    9 months ago

    The US military has more than enough people signing up willingly. The only way conscription would ever possibly get restarted is if the US was in a conflict where hundreds of thousands of soldiers were being lost. I honestly don’t even think it would be necessary then either, because the US is a giant war cult, so people would be lining up left and right to “serve their country.”




  • I don’t know about that. I think the more appropriate stance is that it’s almost impossible to have people appropriately prosecuted when they do violate the law. Federal courts are afraid to be the court that starts the chain reaction of more appropriately defining how violation of the law and prosecution should work.




  • Riyria@sopuli.xyztoshitposting@lemmy.mlWhoopsy-daisy
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    10 months ago

    The US has been the Land of the Free* since it was founded. It is going to take a lot of work to break that as a single country. I don’t know if it’s honestly viable anymore. Sometimes I feel like we should just scrap the whole thing and try again,l.

    *terms and conditions may apply based on race, gender, and wealth




  • I never thought I would unsarcastically say “Oh no! Mitt Romney is retiring!” But here I am, saying just that. Even though he is Mormon and has some shitty politics he is one of the few remaining Republicans left that understands the importance of Bipartisan legislation and voting to help the people instead of voting against everything to “own the libs.” It probably helps that he while he is a Republican, a lot of his policies while he was governor of Ma, and even now are more Center right, and almost Center left, making it seem like he is largely GOP because he’s LDS and would really fit better as an Independent.*