The Last Days of the Southern Drawl

"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."

"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."

Family memories show distinct southern accents surfacing in informal settings: a father's pronounced country drawl at Kentucky Fried Chicken and a mother's softer church-inflected greetings. A decision to suppress a southern accent followed an encounter with ridicule in New York. Cultural stereotypes associate southern accents with simplicity and redneck caricatures. Urbanization and generational change correlate with weakening regional speech. Recent linguistic studies find young people are increasingly losing southern accents, suggesting traditional rural dialects may largely disappear outside isolated communities by the end of the century.

Read at The Atlantic