- When you think of a southern accent, does it sound like this?

- Great balls of fire.

Don't bother me anymore.

Don't call me sugar.

- Or this?

- My momma always said, life was like a box of chocolates.

- Or maybe like this.

- I'm just like you.

For the most part, my life is totally normal.

- While all these movies are set in Georgia, you may notice that all those Georgia accents don't sound the same, and you wouldn't be the only one.

When linguists in Georgia published a study showing that young Georgians have different accents than their parents, headlines sprung up all over declaring that the drawls and y'alls of the southern American dialect are on their way out.

But is it really possible for an accent to vanish and what's causing young Southerners to change the way they speak?

I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Other Words."

(odd music) - [Narrator] Other words.

- So is the drawl going away or is it here to stay?

Linguists at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech worked together to find out.

Instead of movie clips, they analyzed recordings of seven generations of speakers born in Georgia to see how their language patterns changed.

The linguists only looked at white speakers because race can also impact our accents.

More on that in our episode about African-American English.

And the researchers wanted to isolate changes over time.

They specifically looked at vowels.

Why?

Well, we make consonant sounds by closing at a particular point in the vocal tract, like the lips to make the B sound.

Bah, bah, or the space just behind the teeth to make a T. Tah, tah.

Vowels, on the other hand, are produced with open shapes.

Ah ooh.

The placements of these sounds are a lot less exact, which makes them easier to change.

The sounds you might think of as a southern drawl are a collection of changes to where and how southerners produce vowel sounds inside of their mouths.

The A sound in face that I make toward the front of my mouth drops down and moves farther back to sound, more like face in Georgia.

Southern American English also plays with how many vowel sounds are produced in a word.

Some words that have a single vowel sound in my dialect kit, trap, or dress stretch out in southern English to sound like two vowels kee-it tray-ep, drey-is.

Meanwhile, the ai diphthong in time compresses into a single vowel sound, tahm.

Together, all these long syrupy sounds are known as The Southern Vowel Shift.

So when the Georgia linguists listen for the southern vowel shift across different generations of speakers, they notice that it's still, well, shifting.

Where older Georgians say prahce, younger people are making the sound more of a diphthong, price.

And baby boomer's dra-ee-is that moves through three separate vowel sounds is simplified in Gen Z speakers to sound like two, dre-as.

So why is this generational shift happening?

You might guess it has something to do with technology, television, texting, and TikTok, but in fact, it has more to do with the people who are around you IRL.

Researchers actually noticed the biggest change in southern vowels happened among Gen Xers.

As they were growing up, migration patterns in the US were changing.

For the first part of the 20th century, southerners, especially Black southerners, had been moving north for industrial jobs.

But around the 1970s, that trend started to reverse.

Young northerners started moving to southern cities, drawn in by a more affordable cost of living.

And it's a migration trend that's only accelerated for Millennials and Gen Z.

Some of the fastest growing cities in the country right now, places like Atlanta, Georgia, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas are the same cities where the southern vowel shift is getting harder and harder to find.

So as people move around the country, they bring their own regional accents.

People with the southern vowel shift from Atlanta meet the people with the northern cities vowel shift from Chicago, or the low back merger shift from California.

Vowels like to move around a lot, and their speech patterns start to mix together.

This is a phenomenon called dialect leveling, where two or more dialects meet and the variations and features between the two decrease over time.

Speakers over the course of several generations, will standardize their speech to a single dialect that lands somewhere in the middle.

By the time we hit school age, our speech patterns are influenced more by our peers than by parents or popular media.

As younger Georgians gained more friends and classmates from other regions, they started to lose some of their parents' uniquely southern vowel sounds.

Southern speakers may have also made conscious efforts to change their speech to avoid negative stereotypes that people with southern accents are bigoted or uneducated.

But mostly this process happens slowly and unintentionally as we mirror the people around us.

Leveling starts in urban hubs and then moves outwards through local migration between rural areas and cities.

Migration isn't the only way dialect leveling happens though.

As people move through different social and economic circles, and as we're all exposed to the speech patterns of people from around the world in our social feeds, we have even more peers to level with.

Each generation of Georgians continues this dialect leveling process so that even though the changes in speech patterns from parent to child might not be huge, if we compare speakers from the greatest generation to Gen Z, you can hear why it sounds like the southern vowel shift is going away.

But dialect leveling isn't just happening in the south.

It's happening all across the western world.

Younger speakers in Detroit are losing the A raising, as in I brought back a bayg of bagels commonly used around the Great Lakes region.

And someone just getting their driver's license in Boston now might be more likely to park their car, then pahk the cah.

Even in the UK, researchers have noticed that northerners are starting to sound more like speakers from Southern England and all the hyper-local London accents are starting to level out too.

Take the Cockney accent from East London.

Like Southern American English, one of its primary features is a shift in vowel placement, retracting their vowel sounds towards the back of the mouth.

As in price and choice, younger east enders are also moving their vowels towards the front of their mouths, in the direction of the posh receive pronunciation, price and choice.

Dialect leveling doesn't mean that language is losing all its fun unique regionalisms.

Sometimes we're sharing them.

The Southern y'all is so useful as a gender neutral way to address a group of people that it's caught on across the country and now all y'all get to use it.

While certain features of the southern accent are becoming less pronounced, new regional features are taking their place.

Georgians are picking up the low back vowel merger from the west coast.

South Floridians are incorporating language patterns from Spanish speakers in Miami.

All these cross-cultural influences are shaping a new southern sound.

Everybody, no matter where they're from, has an accent.

So it's not that we're losing Southern American English so much as we're evolving it.

And language evolution is a great thing because it's proof that the speech community that uses it is vibrant and thriving.

The way that vowel sounds are shifting around the Southern American dialect is just evidence of the ways that people and culture are shifting around the country and around the world.

So today's young southerners might not sound like Georgians from the 1800s or even their Gen X parents, but Southern American English lives on