intertext

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72518&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=are-local-accents-doomed

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72518

Annie Joy Williams, "The Last Days of the Southern Drawl", The Atlantic 1/4/2026:

By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.

On Sundays after church, my family would pile into our crank-window GMC truck and head to Kentucky Fried Chicken. “Can I get me some of them tater wedges?” my father would say into the speaker, while my sisters and I giggled in the back seat. My dad has always had a southern accent: His words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound if it could speak, thick and slow. But his “KFC voice,” as my sisters and I call it, is country. It’s watered-down on work calls and during debates with his West Coast relatives. But it comes out around fellow cattle farmers and old friends from Kentucky, where he grew up.

My mother’s accent isn’t quite as strong. She’s a therapist, and she can hide it when she speaks with her patients and calls in prescriptions. But you can always hear it in her church-pew greetings, and when she says goodnight: “See you in the a.m., Lawd willin’.”

I was always clear on one fact: I wasn’t going to have a southern accent when I grew up. I was raised in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, near Nashville, where the accents grow stronger with each mile you travel from the city. I watched people snicker at the redneck characters on television who always seemed to play the town idiot. I knew what the accent was supposed to convey: sweet but simpleminded. When I was 15 and my family went to New York for the first time, the bellhop at our hotel laughed when my mom and I spoke; he said he’d never met cowgirls before. That was when I decided: No one was going to know I was from the South from my voice alone.

The article sketches a conversation with Margaret Renwick, links to two of her studies ("Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English" and "Demographic Change, Migration, and the African American Vowel System in Georgia"), and lays out some of the reasons for homogenization of local varieties, including migration and ethnocentric prejudice.

And then there's a series of (positively-evaluated) discussions about code-switching, offering hope that the future of American speech may be less homogeneous than the title suggests.

The whole article is well worth reading.

It doesn't discuss the process by which new varieties emerge and spread, but that would be a distraction from its nostalgic tone. Still, it's worth noting that a similar set of issues form the background of George Bernard Shaw's 1916 play Pygmalion, and in fact have been around, in one form or another, since the origins of spoken language. It's true that the internet and social media are a new source of change, just as in the past there were effects of agriculture, writing, empires, universal education, and broadcasting. But it's been hundreds of years since (for example) the Romance dialect continuum coalesced into a few national languages, with the associated gradual loss of tens of thousands of local varieties.

And there's plenty of evidence that American regional varieties are diverging rather than converging — see Bill Labov's 2012 book Dialect Diversity in America, whose blurb says

The sociolinguist William Labov has worked for decades on change in progress in American dialects and on African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In Dialect Diversity in America, Labov examines the diversity among American dialects and presents the counterintuitive finding that geographically localized dialects of North American English are increasingly diverging from one another over time.

Contrary to the general expectation that mass culture would diminish regional differences, the dialects of Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Birmingham, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and New York are now more different from each other than they were a hundred years ago. Equally significant is Labov's finding that AAVE does not map with the geography and timing of changes in other dialects. The home dialect of most African American speakers has developed a grammar that is more and more different from that of the white mainstream dialects in the major cities studied and yet highly homogeneous throughout the United States.

Labov describes the political forces that drive these ongoing changes, as well as the political consequences in public debate. The author also considers the recent geographical reversal of political parties in the Blue States and the Red States and the parallels between dialect differences and the results of recent presidential elections. Finally, in attempting to account for the history and geography of linguistic change among whites, Labov highlights fascinating correlations between patterns of linguistic divergence and the politics of race and slavery, going back to the antebellum United States. Complemented by an online collection of audio files that illustrate key dialectical nuances, Dialect Diversity in America offers an unparalleled sociolinguistic study from a preeminent scholar in the field.

Increasing divergence doesn't imply stasis — on the contrary, obviously. But still…

Update — Williams' description of her father's speech ("His words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound if it could speak, thick and slow") is evocative, but may not be empirically accurate. See "Regional speech rates", 10/13/2007.

And for a striking example of inter-ethnic phonetic prejudice, see Michael Lewis (who's from New Orleans) ridiculing the pronunciation of a lawyer from southern Indiana, discussed in "Lazy mouths vs. lazy minds", 11/26/2003.

Update #2 — For those who aren't familiar with the way people from rural Tennessee speak, here's a clip of Trae Crowder:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72518&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=are-local-accents-doomed

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72518