Whether you call it a drawl or a twang, odds are “y’all” are familiar with the distinctive accent possessed by the fine folks living in the Southern United States, but new research suggests that you might want to enjoy it now while you can, because it could soon become extinct.
According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), Robin Dodsworth, an associate professor in sociolinguistics at North Carolina State University, and her colleagues have observed the slow disappearance of the southern drawl in Raleigh, North Carolina in recent years. In fact, they say that the drawl has been quietly fading away for the past five decades.
In 2008, Dodsworth and a team of sociolinguists, researchers who specialize in analyzing the impact of social influences on speech habits, began conducting and recording a series of hour-long interviews with people who had grown up in the Raleigh area, the NSF explained in a statement Monday.
Each recording was then analyzed using acoustic analysis software to measure just how “Southern” each speaker was when it came to the pronunciation of their vowels. They also tracked the prevalence of certain linguistic features (i.e. pronouncing the word “kid” as “kee-yid”) among people Raleigh natives born in different decades.
Raleigh’s growth as a tech center to blame
Dodsworth’s team discovered that the vowels of those individuals born between 1920 and 1950 tended to be stable, but sometime around the middle of the 20th century, the characteristic traits of the Southern drawl slowly began a steady decline, with Dodsworth (an Ohio native) pointing out that after 1950, “folks in the present start to sound like me.”
So what was the cause of this phenomenon? The NSF said that it was the region’s emergence as a technology hub during the 1960s, which came following the construction of Research Triangle Park, a high-tech R&D center built between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. The new industry “heralded a decline in the region’s traditional Southern dialect,” the agency noted.
“It’s no secret to anyone in this area that RTP was constructed in 1959,” Dodsworth added, “and then IBM came in the early ’60s. If you’re born in 1950, you’re in junior high right about the time when those white-collar workers are coming down from Northern places to work.” The arrival of those people and families ignited a “dialect contact situation” in the area, she explained.
During the 1960s and 1970s, children growing up and attending school in Raleigh spoke with less of the Southern accent of their parents, largely because they spent so much more time talking with people from the North. Since peers play a large role in sociolinguistics, Dodsworth said, the increasing social diversity of the city correlated to the decline of traditional accents.
“It’s not as though, all of a sudden, everyone said, ‘Let’s lose this Southern dialect,’” she added, adding that rural areas which saw the least amount of migration from the northern states are still more Southern-sounding than urban areas. “Linguistic changes often jump from city to city at first and leave the rural spaces in between untouched for some time. Part of that is that rural areas have a less concentrated population, so it’s harder for change to spread.”
(Image credit: Thinkstock)
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