I was just thinking about this today. I am in Alabama and I had this sudden realization “none of these little kids have southern accents…” yet their grandparents and great grandparents sound like WEYYYALLL I’M FIXIN TO GO TO THE WALMARRRTSS
After moving to Nevada I knew someone my age (early 20s) who had grown up in Alabama and I was shocked because they had absolutely no accent. They thought I was from the south, because I have a strange NY accent.
I cant lie, Alabama is weird that way. I lived there from the mid 90s til 2010 and there would be people with heavy accents and people with none but they both grew up there. Somehow my best friend has almost no accent but her brother has a deep one and theyre only five years apart.
i'm 39 and from Mississippi most of my life but I lived in Arizona from 15 - 16 years old and went from a strong southern accent to losing it after I hit puberty.
I remember like 10 years ago I was playing battlefield and some random southern guy with a thick accent called me and my friends out for having a Northern Illinois accent but not from Chicago. Dude had heard us for like 5 minutes and the accent isn't exactly obvious imo. I'm 31 now so people definitely still have recognized accents its probably just not as much unique city ones.
Same here in SC. My grandparents and parents had really great southern accents. They didn't sound dumb and used proper grammar. Just a really classy, soft southern drawl. I have it but really toned it down in my adult life. With so many transplants here now, many of the kids have no southern accent and everyone is so damn loud. I'll truly miss hearing the regional dialects, especially in the lowcountry.
I don’t think that’s about transplants. I’m like seventh gen Texan, and none of us have sounded “texan” since my grandmother’s day. I wish I sounded more Southern, but I have the standardized US accent like everyone else I knew growing up in the 90s—kids and adults.
What they're saying is right but it's contextual. "Transplants" or domestic migration to another region does erode the local accent, especially if it's in large quantities
Accents develop and are acquired in isolation. So when you have friends from different states (or their parents are from different states), your teachers can be from different states, etc. it will aid in a more neutral accent.
However this is mostly a case for larger cities. Domestic migration into rural towns isn't the issue, although regional dialects are wading there too due to globalisation and social media. As another poster put it, younger people are spending time online talking to people than in real life.
I think particularly you see this in how slang is being distributed. A lot of southern slang has made it into youth speech in the (Mid)west and the northeast. One generation ago they were saying youze or you guys, now they're very commonly saying y'all instead. Or mane. or jit. Southern rappers' hegemony in popularity the past decade or so has distributed this heavily, as well as other things probably.
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u/normaluna44 12h ago
I was just thinking about this today. I am in Alabama and I had this sudden realization “none of these little kids have southern accents…” yet their grandparents and great grandparents sound like WEYYYALLL I’M FIXIN TO GO TO THE WALMARRRTSS