OPINION | This article contains the author's opinion.
The iconic American southern drawl is fading away, according to linguists who participated in a collaborative research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The accent has sharply declined with Generation X, which includes people born between 1965 and 1982.
In comparison, the accent was far more prevalent with the baby boomer generation, which covers people born between 1943 and 1964. (Trending: Woman Raised in USSR Says Biden’s DOJ Acts Like KGB)
“We found that, here in Georgia, White English speakers’ accents have been shifting away from the traditional Southern pronunciation for the last few generations,” Dr. Margaret Renwick, an associate professor of linguistics at UGA, said.
“Today’s college students don’t sound like their parents, who didn’t sound like their own parents,” she continued.
Brigham Young University professor Joseph A. Stanley recorded the differences in vowel pronunciation between the generations.
“The team found that older Georgians pronounced the word “prize” as prahz and “face” as fuh-eece, but the youngest speakers use prah-eez and fayce,” the report found.
Renwick said, “The Southern pronunciation of words like ‘face’ emerged in the early 20th century. These are distinctive features of the traditional Southern drawl.”
Dr. Lelia Glass, a professor in the School of Modern Languages at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said, “[This] gives us a quantitative metric of accent.”
Dr. Jon Forrest, professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia who co-authored the study, said, “We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics,” he said.
“In our study, we focused on four vowels: they are exemplified by words like BIDE, BAIT, BET, BAT. We found that all of them are ‘more Southern’ in older speakers, and less so in younger speakers: the Southern drawl versions are BAAHD, BUH-EYT, BE-YUT, BA-YUT.” (Trending: Trump Makes The Biggest Promise Of His Political Career)
“In particular, we found evidence of the strongest Southern accents among Baby Boomers, born in the mid-20th century, followed by a rapid shift away from Southern speech beginning with Gen X, who were born in the late 60s and 1970s…” Renwick’s email explained.
“Although very young children acquire their native language from their parents and caregivers, school-aged children may rapidly shift their pronunciations to be more similar to that of their peer group. We think this is when inter-generational language change occurs,” it added later.
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