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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.
Recent studies suggest I’m part of a trend: Young people are losing their southern accents. 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.
Margaret Renwick, an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins, has co-authored studies on changing accents among white and Black people in Georgia. The University of Georgia has a huge collection of old recordings and interviews from all across the South beginning in the 1960s. “Nobody had ever really looked at them with modern methods, so we dove in,” she told me. The study focused on four different “drawling vowels” that are part of what linguists call the Southern Vowel Shift—which, she discovered, is on the decline.
“The Southern Vowel Shift began in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, and the first thing that happened was that bide became bahd—so i to ah—like time to tahme,” Renwick said. You have to listen closely to hear it, but the accent treats long vowels and short vowels differently. With a long vowel (beat or bait), “you add a little uh sound before the original vowel” (buheat). But with the short vowels (bit or bet), the uh goes after the original vowel. (Can you hear it, just a little biuht?) “That’s where the drawl perception comes from,” she said, “because they kind of stretch out.” The paper found that the Southern Vowel Shift is becoming less detectable, particularly in urban areas such as Atlanta. Renwick also found that the accent has faded at different rates among Black and white Georgians. For white speakers, she told me, the peak southern accent was among “Baby Boomers born right after World War II.” For Black speakers, the accent was strongest among Gen X, and began to disappear only among Millennials and Gen Z.
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She linked the decline to migration patterns and to the great suburbanization that’s happened around southern cities. After World War II, lots of white people moved from northeastern cities to the Sun Belt, and to the Atlanta suburbs especially. Starting in the 1970s, the same areas saw more Black transplants. Many of them were the children of people who had left the South in the early years of the Great Migration. Their parents and grandparents “took their accents with them” to places such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Rochester, New York, Renwick said, but their returning descendants “didn’t talk quite the same way” when they came back.
The influx continues. Today the South is the most populous region of the country, and from 2023 to 2024, it gained more residents than all other regions combined, according to the U.S. census. People are drawn to the South for many reasons: lower taxes and warmer weather, and the stereotype—true, in my experience—that southerners make pleasant neighbors. The South isn’t appealing only to families seeking cul-de-sac living, either. Lately, teenagers from the Northeast are opting to head to the South for college, where tuition is cheaper and sororities are the ultimate social club.
The internet is another cause of the dilution of the southern drawl among young people. “There’s huge changes in speech in elementary and middle school, when everything about your identity is based on who you’re hanging out with,” Susan Tamasi, a linguist at Emory University, told me. What happens when the people you hang out with include peers from across the country? Most kids won’t adopt accents that they hear on TV, but social media—especially gaming, where kids talk to one another while playing—is different, in that it involves children actively building relationships online.
Landon Bryant is the author of Bless Your Heart: A Field Guide to All Things Southern and runs the well-loved Instagram account @landontalks. He told me that his 12-year-old son adopts what he calls a “YouTube accent” when he’s speaking with his friends online that is “totally different than the way he talks” at the dinner table, where he matches his parents’ Mississippi drawl. “He’s not doing that on purpose. That’s just what naturally happens.”
Many southerners who lose their accents don’t lose them entirely, because they learn to code switch. They may use the accent to establish trust or preserve old bonds, and drop it to be taken seriously in professional settings. “I code switch between levels of southern even here in the South,” Bryant said. “You speak a little differently in Charleston than you do in Soso”—a town in Mississippi—“and you speak a little differently at the country club than I would if I was going to the gas station.”
But walking a “linguistic tightrope” can be hard on people, Jennifer Cramer, the director of the Appalachian Studies Program at the University of Kentucky, told me. “I’ll have a student from eastern Kentucky who tells me, when they got to Lexington, they got made fun of immediately for how they talked. So they started trying to fix it,” she said. “Then it comes to Thanksgiving break, and they go back home. Well, now they’re getting made fun of at home.” Family members will often say things like “you’ve gotten above your raising” or “you’re too good for us now.” This can create a real crisis of identity as people try to belong in two different “voice places.”
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Amy Clark, a professor at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and the host of the podcast The Talking Appalachian, tries to reassure her students that adding “Broadcast American English to the language so that they can shift when they need to” isn’t about losing the accent they have. “When I go home and I sit with my granny, I don’t want to sound like Dr. Amy Clark,” Clark told me. “I don’t want to sound like a podcaster. I don’t want to sound like a writer. I want to sound like the granddaughter she knows.” When she uses a different accent, it’s not about fitting in or being accepted; it’s about clarity. “If you’re not going to accept me because I sound Appalachian, then that’s on you, but it’s on me to be as clear as I can in the message that I’m sending.”
Even as many Americans have embraced diversity in unprecedented ways, prejudice against the southern accent is still largely permissible. “I think people still believe it’s okay to openly make fun of a region and a place, especially if it’s associated with more rural people, and not be called bigoted,” Clark said. “It’s not taboo yet.” She tries to counteract that by teaching students about the history and beauty of southern and rural dialects.
In college, Clark was given an assignment by her English professor to record her oldest living family member—her great-grandmother Ethel, who was born in 1908 in Dickenson County, Virginia. She was told to transcribe her language verbatim, and not to standardize the English:
We’d go birch sappin’. You’d find you a birch tree, and my brother Bill would take a ax, and he chopped that tree all around and he skinned the bark off of it. We’d all take spoons, and we’d go around and get us a big piece and scrape that birch sap out of that old bark. It tasted so good.
The process let her hear “the poetry for the first time in the way that she spoke.” From that point, she was infatuated with Appalachian and southern dialects. She now gives her students the same assignment.
Clark told me that we risk losing so much of the beauty of American English if we strip away our southern dialects. Consider Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son”:
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
If you “rewrite that poem in standard English” and try reading it aloud, she said, “you hear immediately what’s lost.”
“The entire character is gone. The way that he creates her voice is so distinctive and so rich. When you strip away the vernacular dialect, there’s really nothing of her left.” The same thing would happen to John Wesley and June Star in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or to Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
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Bryant is also a self-described southern-language preservationist. He’s treating the internet as his very own wraparound front porch. “One day I was talking at my wife and she was like, ‘What if you talk to the internet instead?’” (He described this as a “nice southern-lady way” to say shut up.) So he did. He posted a video in which he told a story about the time his high school got destroyed by a tornado and students spent the remaining nine weeks of the year taking classes at the local Walmart. “We had show choir in Layaway.” He’d never thought of his accent or dialect as particularly notable, but then the comments started rolling in. “So I was like, well, let’s discuss ‘fixin’ to’” and “might could.”
Like many people my age, I checked my southern accent at the door of my northeastern adult life. It comes out on rare occasions—when I revisit my Southern Baptist church in Tennessee, when I speak with the receptionist at my childhood doctor’s office, when I want a southerner to trust me, or when I’ve simply had a bit too much to drink. Clark told me that she, at one point, did the same. “I did go through a phase where I wanted to be completely separated from it,” she said. “But then I came back.” And she did so for good reason. “I love my region; I love my family. There’s pride in that. I carry my history in my mouth. My words and my grammar patterns are full of centuries of history. My ancestors are with me every time I speak.”
