Are regional accents dyin'? Not on Tik-Tawk

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It all started March 31, when the Boston Globe uploaded a video featuring reporter Emily Sweeney describing a robbery.

"There was a crazy home invasion in Beverly over the weekend," the video began. Sweeney, 50, pronounced "Beverly" the way some people might pronounce "bevel lee." When she said "intruder," it could have rhymed with "Bermuda."

"A caretaker was assaulted and tied up," she continued, nary an "R" sound to be heard.

The video unexpectedly racked up more than 1.2 million views.

There was something about Sweeney's blond, cropped hair and Adidas tracksuit. And there was really something about that Boston accent.

"Introodah" read one comment with more than 24,000 likes.

Another just read, "cehtaykkuh," a phonetic approximation of the way she said "caretaker." More than 7,500 likes.

And another simply read, "More of this reporter, please." Six thousand likes.

A star was born.

Since the video went viral, strangers have been stopping Sweeney on the street, asking her to say "caretaker."

"I'm like, 'caretaker.' Like, it sounds totally normal to me in my head," she told The Washington Post. "And people are like, 'Oh yeah, that's great!'"

"I guess I can blame the lack of R's," Sweeney said, pronouncing R's the way some people might pronounce "Oz."

Social media has increasingly become a place where creators with regional American accents have found fans and followers. For Sweeney, her accent led to a huge leap forward in her career. She's been interviewed by the New York Times, Tamron Hall and Today.com.

Her title at the Boston Globe changed from print reporter to video journalist. It was a dream come true.

"I just never even imagined that there would be opportunities for me in broadcast news, on TV," she said, remembering her days as a journalism student when "non-regional accents" were de rigueur. "But I think times are changing, things are evolving."

The idea that social media could help preserve regional accents runs counter to popular concerns about "tik-talk," the halting, vaguely Valley Girl-esque way some creators speak when recording voice-overs. (Here's my impression of it.) Think pieces popped up asking if social media is permanently changing the way we speak.

But amid this anxiety, social media personalities have gained attention for their distinctively non-nonregional accents.

There's Rita Gigante, the psychic daughter of former head of the Genovese crime syndicate Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who shares family recipes in a thick New York accent.

There's Joedy Tran, the "Sacramento foodie" who shares recipes and stories from her Vietnamese American family in an accent tinged with African American Vernacular English (AAVE). She ends many of her videos by playfully calling her viewers "heffas."

And there's RaeShanda Lias-Lockhart, 45, a fashion designer and content creator with more than 2.5 million TikTok followers who was born in Chicago, raised in Mississippi and has lived in Louisville for the past 12 years.

Her content is mostly about fashion and her fabulous lifestyle. But her comments regularly feature praise or criticism of her accent, which can give words such as "ground" two syllables and "bathroom" three.

Lias-Lockhart mostly sees her accent as an asset, lending authenticity and relatability to her content. "My accent draws you in and makes you feel like a friend, which is what I want," she said.

But there are haters. "They don't automatically assume that you're intelligent, which is horrible, right?" Lias-Lockhart said.

"So my AAVE on top of having a Southern accent [is what] people often laugh about," she said. "I never take it to heart because they're not being mean, and I am a Southern belle, I really am."

Some online creators have had a harder time. When Iva Marie Gutowski, 41, first started uploading TikTok videos about her childhood in Appalachia, she was inundated with cruelty over her accent. "Every day, when I would read the comments I would just cry," she remembers. "And my husband would be like, ‘Why do you do it?'"

For her, creating content under the name "Iva of Appalachia" was a personal mission to document what she learned from her great-grandparents, who adopted and raised her. "I didn't have children, and I don't want all of the knowledge that I learned from my Mamaw and Papaw to not be passed down to anyone," she said. "And the internet is forever."

In recent years, Appalachian culture has exploded on TikTok, with people sharing folklore, superstition, slang and music. A clip of a woman singing at a funeral uploaded by Ginger Cline has more than 7 million views, and has been reposted and repurposed as a meme many times over.

With renewed interest in Appalachian culture, Gutowski has found more people excited to hear her stories, home remedies and songs she remembers from her childhood. Her family's accent was part of those memories.

"Mamaw's accent was just really strong," Gutowski said. "She didn't say ‘umbrella,' she said 'umber-elle.' Instead of ‘siren,' it was ‘si-rene.'"

Today, Gutowski is encouraged to see more young people online who are proud of their Appalachian accents.

"People are now trying, across cultures, across accents, to reclaim [their accent] and quit code-switching as much," she said. "Your intellect is not based on how you speak."

Jennifer S. Cramer, a professor of linguistics and director of the Appalachian Studies Program at the University of Kentucky, also noticed this shift among some of her Southern and Appalachian students.

"You have kind of a renaissance of pride in the region," Cramer said. "Social media especially has given this love of home a platform."

And some linguists think concerns about social media killing regional accents are overblown. "There was once an argument that TV was going to make us all sound the same," Cramer said. "In fact, linguistic research since the invention of the TV has shown that even with these larger connections, we're not actually becoming more similar."

"Sometimes people will say, ‘Oh, now that we have the internet, regional dialects are shifting," said Robin Dodsworth, a professor of English at North Carolina State University. "No, no, no. That's not what happened."

Dodsworth has been studying the evolution of the local accent in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 2008. Based on her research, migration can have an impact on how accents change, but our speech patterns are based on who we talk to, not what media we consume.

"You're not having conversations with those people that you hear" on social media, Dodsworth said. "And really, the linguistic choices that we make depend a lot more on the people who are right around us."

Social media has also become a crucial resource for actors learning new accents. Traditionally, accent coaches have relied on academic field recordings of regional accents. "For my work, I also need recordings where people aren't conscious of being captured," dialect coach Eliza Simpson said.

"Social media is the flavor, the color, the smells - it is everything that makes an accent vibrant and alive," said Simpson, who has worked with Broadway actors in "Cabaret" and voice actors in the Avatar video game series. "So that's where I tend to pull my primary sources."

Simpson also noted an uptick in demand for regional accents in shows such as "Mare of Easttown," "Ozark" and "The Pitt." She thinks casual exposure to actual speakers from these regions on social media has increased demand for better accent work from actors.

"It's actually sharpened audiences' ears and made them want higher degrees [of] authenticity, which is always a good thing," she said.

Shane O'Neill connects the dots between entertainment news, internet fads, celebrity gossip and pop culture ephemera to sketch a portrait of how we live today.