The rapid disappearance of the classic Southern drawl in Georgia has many factors. Researchers from local universities point to population changes in the state following WWII, as well as generations starting with baby boomers gradually moving away from typical Southern pronunciation.
From Study Finds:
“We found that, here in Georgia, White English speakers’ accents have been shifting away from the traditional Southern pronunciation for the last few generations,” says Margaret Renwick, an associate professor in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Department of Linguistics and lead of the study. “Today’s college students don’t sound like their parents, who didn’t sound like their own parents.”
Study authors observed the most notable changes among the baby boomer generation (born 1943-1964) and Generation X (born 1965-1982), with the accent falling off a cliff, so to speak, among the latter.
“We had been listening to hundreds of hours of speech recorded in Georgia and we noticed that older speakers often had a thick Southern drawl, while current college students didn’t,” Prof. Renwick adds in a university release. “We started asking, which generation of Georgians sounds the most Southern of all? We surmised that it was baby boomers, born around the mid-20th century. We were surprised to see how rapidly the Southern accent drops away starting with Gen X.”
The research team believes their work is the first to identify this accent shift in the state of Georgia.
“The demographics of the South have changed a lot with people moving into the area, especially post World War II,” explains study co-author Jon Forrest, UGA assistant professor in the department of linguistics.
Importantly, Prof. Forrest went on to note that what the researchers discovered in Georgia is not an isolated trend but part of a larger shift seen by others across the entire U.S. South. Moreover, other areas of the United States now share similar vowel patterns.
“We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics,” Forrest continues.
It's genuinely unfortunate to witness such an iconic American accent fading into obscurity at such a rapid pace.
Certainly, accents all over the world have evolved over the years, but these changes usually occur more gradually.
Therefore, it's intriguing to understand why the accents in Georgia are disappearing in this manner.
