surfing the "innernet"
I'm sure I'm not the only person to notice the "evolution" of the generic American accent recently. Although there are many many American accents, because of TV, movies, and radio, all of those individual accents are starting to sound similar. By far the biggest change I've noticed is that people are dropping "internal t's" so that words like "Internet", "Pentium", and "center" become "Innernet", "Pennium", and "cenner". It's becoming increasingly obvious in TV advertisements. I saw an ad for "Ren-A-Cenner" the other day, for instance.
Even before I noticed this lack of t's, I was hearing the different ways people pronounce the letter "o". "Not" and "pop" are becoming "naht" and "pahp". That may sound normal to west coast speakers, but up here in the frozen tundra of Massachusetts, I've always heard those words as "nawt" and "pawp" (close approximation). It's also closer to the British pronunciation.
Of course, we Massholes have our own quirky accent (that, might I add, Hollywood almost NEVER gets right). It's well known that we tend to leave out the r's, but it's not as serious as the clichéd Bostonian portrayal in movies, which tends to sound more like a New York accent than a Boston one. And there are also definite differences between the South-of-Boston accent and the North-of-Boston accent, not to mention the Berkshire accent. There are even subtle differences between Haverhill speakers, Lawrence folks, and Andover bourgeoisie. But I'm straying from the point...
The point is that I'll bet a lot of those regional accents will disappear as children are exposed to a deluge of west coast-based media and their particular manner of speech. I'm not saying I'm opposed to this inevitable consolidation of accents, but let's just hope future generations don't all sound like the "Dude, yer gettin a Dell" caricature of a teen...