You might think that TV and movies and the general mobility of the population would mean accents are getting more and more similar across the country. This turns out not to be the case. Kids don’t learn their accents from TV; they learn them from the people around them. And different regions are in some ways becoming more different from each other.

Thanks to detailed research done by many linguists (such as in the Atlas of North American English by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg), we have a good picture of what’s been going on in American English. Some parts of the U.S. are going through gradual but identifiable shifts of vowel sounds right now. For instance, in much of the country, the “oo” sound — as in “loop” — is moving forward in the mouth, towards “ew.”

The cities near the Great Lakes are well progressed in what linguists call the Northern Cities Shift — “on” is sounding more like “an” used to and “Ann” is sounding more like “Ian.” Meanwhile, “bet” is moving towards “but,” and “ow” as in “out” is also moving farther backward in the mouth — which is the opposite of what’s happening farther south, where “out” is moving towards “at.”