Are the various dialects of the English speaking world as distinct as ever or is there any evidence they are converging over time given the pervasive nature of modern mass communication and media?
Are United Kingdom, US, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian etc. accents and distinct vocabularies slowly merging or not?
I don’t have a cite, I’m afraid, but I am pretty sure that the experts say they are still diverging, and fairly rapidly too. What you hear from mass media just does not have the same effect as what you hear from, and say to, the people who live around you. Language learning comes from interactive use of language, not from passive absorption.
Yep, just the other day I went to the loo.
They speak English in the loo?
My understanding is that vocabulary is becoming more universal but in general pronunciation quirks and unusual constructions remain put.
I can’t cite any studies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are converging. Regional accents within the US still exist but are rapidly fading into a generic American accent. Canadian English never seems to have been all that different from American English, but seems to have become more similar still, even in the course of my lifetime. Regional accents in the UK are still strong, but I’m told that even there they are not as strong as they used to be. Cockney accents are apparently almost extinct. (Not sure what British people are shifting to as hardcore regional accents die - a form of BBC English?)
Whether accents are converging or not, one thing I have found to be true in my travels - and this is probably thanks to mass media - is that standard American accents are pretty universally understood. For example: I spent six months in Scotland once, and though I have a pretty good ear I had a terrible time understanding some of my Scottish coworkers. Glaswegians could be nearly incomprehensible. Yet I don’t recall any of them ever expressing the slightest difficulty understanding my American accent. So while mass media didn’t have them speaking any differently, it did prime them to understand me - and, presumably, their BBC-English speaking countrymen.
One issue that trips people up is that accents change. Features that you grew up associating with a particular accent fall by the wayside and new features show up but since they’re not what you’re looking for, you ignore them.
I dunno about american accents. I was watching a british panel show on youtube and they started talking about Brokeback Mountain and one of the players mentioned he had to subtitle the film to understand what they were saying. I don’t remember that movie as having a particularly thick accent.
I read somewhere that by far the biggest influence on how we speak is our direct interaction with people, day to day. Mass media spreads some vocabulary, and there are sometimes fads like younger people imitating hip hop argot and the like, but basically it doesnt have that much effect on how people speak. What has happened in the last century or so is that the average person’s circle of acquaintances now comes from a larger area, but we’re still only talking maybe a 50- or 100-mile radius rather than say 10 miles in days of yore.
Too late to edit, but I should have acknowledged that njtt had already said part of that.
I’ve seen British TV programs which were produced in Britain for a British audience, subtitle British people speaking (most usually Northern Irelanders, and Glaswegians). So it’s not just you :). I myself wished to hell that “The Wire” had had subtitles, though generally I don’t have a huge problem with accents.
I do notice that old TV programs of all nationalities have noticeably different accents from what I hear today. Even something as recent as, say “Get Smart” sounds … sixties.
Also, people are proud of their regionalisms, and resist assimilation. Start talking about “diapers” and “sidewalks” over here and we probably won’t say anything if you’re obviously American. But if you’re Australian, you’re likely to get slapped upside the head with a wet fish PDQ 
You should hear the fuss about Halloween every year…
I think it would be more accurate to say that regional British accents have coalesced into a smaller number of accents covering larger areas, rather than the old Henry Higgins thing of being able to tell which village someone comes from (although there are still instances of that). Of course, it’s more of a continuum; I don’t think Cockney is extinct, for example - that full-on East London accent is one end of the continuum of “Estuary English” accents.
They are also often less strong than they once were; my great-grandmother had such a strong Lancashire accent that my mother couldn’t understand her at all, and had to get the younger generation to translate.
There’s nothing anywhere near as strong as that left in the area. It worked fine when no-one from there ever went further than the annual mass trip to the seaside, but the next generation travelled much more, so such a strong accent would be a major hindrance. To keep an accent that’s practically a local language (and some of the old accents really were), you need to have a decent proportion of people stay in the area their whole lives, and that just really doesn’t happen in many places any more.
I have noticed significant changes in my life. I don’t think it is just Canadian, but the word “problem” has just about disappeared, replaced by “issue”. It kind of drives me nuts. And many others. I doubt these are general though, so yes I expect dialect differences to widen.
I hereby certify that back in 1987 (ok, that’s longer than some of our posters have been alive), I was able to understand a bobby thanks to having watched My Fair Lady, Original Language with Subtitles, less than 48h prior. Despite having read many novels set in London, I don’t think I would have realized that “pohk loin” was likely to be “Park Lane” if that specific vowel shift hadn’t been described in MFL. Just four years before, my host family in Ireland was a cockney husband and Finnish wife and he and I were never able to talk without an interpreter.
It helped with my Jamaican landlady 10 years later, too. That movie should be compulsory watching in advanced ESL classes.
ETA: one of my current customers just came back from some training given by an American. We poke fun at not having “problems” any more, they’re “issues” or “challenges”. That’s not a dialect thing so much as a “gloss over shit, maybe that way it’ll stop smelling” thing, though.