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The accents going extinct in the US

Sean Lundergan, a linguist, argues that migration marked the beginning of the end of the southern accent
Promotional photo of John Schneider, Catherine Bach, and Tom Wopat from The Dukes of Hazzard.
John Schneider, Catherine Bach and Tom Wopat starred in The Dukes of Hazzard, in which the characters spoke with a southern drawl
ALAMY

At the beginning of 1979 millions of Americans began following the adventures of two young men with quite ­convincing southern drawls as they outran and outwitted, in weekly ­TV ­episodes, a villainous county commissioner named Boss Hogg.

Occasionally it was noted that the two actors were from New York and Wisconsin but they said “he done” instead of “he has” and you could be double dang sure that when they wished to do something, they would declare they were “fixin’ to” do it.

It now appears that The Dukes of Hazzard was not just a hymn to moonshine and good ol’ boys but marked, more or less, a high point in southern speech, in which “prize” is pronounced with an “ah” in the middle and the word dress has two syllables, as “drayuss”.

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The year also marked the beginning of the end of the southern accent, ­according to a paper by the linguist ­Sean Lundergan, which argued that this corresponded with a migration to southern states from all over the US.

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A large industrial complex called the Research Triangle Park had opened in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1959, steadily drawing tens of thousands of workers from the rest of the country. Similar ­migrations to Georgia and other southern states gathered pace in the decades that followed. White southerners born a generation later, in 1979 and thereafter, do not usually talk with a southern ­accent, Lundergan wrote.

Lelia Glass, a linguist at Georgia Institute of Technology, said: “For black speakers it’s a bit later.” But an equally large migration of African-Americans to the south, a reverse of the Great ­Migration that had brought many families out of the Jim Crow south to the ­industrial cities of the north, appears to have wrought a similar effect.

Glass began teaching at Georgia Tech in 2018 and recording the accents of her students. She grew up during the Clinton presidency, when America was led by a man from Arkansas whose light southern accent helped lend him a “folksy appeal”, she said.

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But she heard little of it among her students. “We found this big difference [with] baby boomers born through the 1960s. They were the last people to have the really strong southern accent … Gen X, from the late 1960s and 1970s, they sound way less southern.”

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It was hard to pinpoint the cause. The explanation she and her colleagues presented is that “when lots of people with different accents started to interact with each other, you see this phenomenon called dialect levelling”.

Accents that have been stigmatised tend to diminish, she said. “There have been lots of studies showing that some people think of people with southern accents being uneducated.”

In her book Talk Southern To Me, ­Julia Fowler said she had been harassed about her accent, not to mention her tendency to say: “Sugarbritches, ­unlatch that doomafloochie [thingamajig] and raise the window down”.

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