Science Shows the Southern Accent Is Fixin’ to Disappear
The classic Southern accent in Georgia is on the decline, according to a two-university study.
The shift toward a mainstream American accent has become more pronounced with Generation X.
Each generation moves regional accents more toward the middle, the study claims.
That famed Southern drawl isn’t so, well, drawl-ey any longer.
The regional accent, predominantly used by white English speakers in Georgia, peaked with Baby Boomers and took a nose-dive with Generation X. Sho’ nuff, it is continuing to shift toward a much more mainstream American cadence.
This conclusion was drawn in a joint study between the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech, published in the journal Language Variation and Change.
“The demographics of the South have changed a lot with people moving into the area, especially post World War II,” co-author Jon Forrest, Georgia assistant linguistics professor, said in a news release. “We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston, and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics.”
The researchers say that in Georgia, white English speakers’ accents have been moving away from traditional Southern pronunciations for generations. “Today’s college students don’t sound like their parents,” Margaret Renwick, Georgia associate linguistics professor and study lead, said in a news release, “who didn’t sound like their own parents.”
In the study, the writers claim that we’ve seen such speech characteristics as the Southern Vowel Shift and the Northern Cities Shift replaced by more mainstream Low-Back-Merger Shift. It all points to the idea that “regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X ‘cliff.’”
The anecdotal evidence from college students taking over Georgia campuses was put to the analytical test, with researchers recording white individuals native to Georgia and ranging widely in age. The research team focused on vowels, the key characteristic in defining accents.
The words “prize” and “face” were the tell-tale markers. Older Georgians said “prize” has prahz and “face” as fuh-eece, but the youngest speakers took a less Southern approach with prah-eez and fayce.
“Changes to the diphthong in ‘prize’ are the oldest characteristic pronunciation in Southern speech, that can be traced back well over 100 years,” Renwich said. “The Southern pronunciation of words like ‘face’ emerged in the early 20th century. These are distinctive features of the traditional Southern drawl.”
The researchers believe that this study highlighting the change in the Southern drawl is the first step to mapping generational and societal linguistic shifts. They hope to work on a cross-generational accent study among the Black population in the state next, and further understand how linguistic evolution highlights societal trends.
For now, though, the researchers at two Georgia institutions reckon things are shifting in the Southern drawl, y’all.
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