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Is Siri Killing Your Regional Accent?
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Regional accents are changing. Globalization is part of the shift, but so, perhaps, is voice recognition software like Siri.
It turns out that people talk differently to their phones than they do to their friends. An article in The Guardian says that some people in India and Australia report that their phones only understand them if they "fake an American accent."
In the U.S., writer Julia Reed complains that, "A smart person could make a lot of money by inventing a Siri for southerners."
And of course, colloquial speech is hard for the software to understand. So what do we do? When we speak to foreigners and phones, we simplify our speech and smoothen out our regional accents. We create an international common denominator for what we say and how we say it.
A trend to watch.
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Wolves, Coyotes and Human Language
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So it turns out that the howls of wolves have something to teach us about human language.
First, wolves seem to have "dialects." The dialects correspond to species. They also affect how wolves from different "tribes" interact and how they mate. Wolves are drawn to wolves with similar howl types.
In fact, an article in The Christian Science Monitor discusses research that shows how endangered red wolves were drawn to the similar howls of coyotes so much that the wolves interbred with the coyotes--undermining conservation efforts to keep the species alive.
Amazing.
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