It's because there are less Southron's than in the boomer days?
Southern accent is DISAPPEARING because Generation Xers talk so differently than their Baby Boomer parents, scientists say
The famous 'southern drawl' is set to become extinct because Generation X'ers from the deep south speak so differently to their Baby Boomer parents, a study suggests.
Scientists from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech, shows that Xers displayed a 'notable change' in how they speak compared to their Boomer elders.
The researchers studied hours of spoken word from people of different generations and saw that the accent became lighter as speakers got younger.
They say the explosion in pop culture TV including MTV may have been behind the rapid change in regional accents, but did not offer firm conclusions on why the change has taken place.
Showing-off accents is a popular subject for TikTokers to cover - including southern social media influencers.
Generation X is typically seen as being anyone born between 1965 and 1982, while boomers are seen as born between 1943 and 1964. Oscar-winner Julia Roberts is perhaps the most famous Georgia-born Gen Xer.
'We found that, here in Georgia, white English speakers' accents have been shifting away from the traditional Southern pronunciation for the last few generations,' said University of Georgia Associate Professor of linguistics Margaret Renwick.
'Today's college students don't sound like their parents, who didn't sound like their own parents,' added Renwick, who led the study.
The study used recordings of white people native to Georgia and born between the late 19th up until the early 2000s, which is seen as the beginning of Generation Z.
Jon Forrest, a fellow academic who co-authored the paper, said that the shift isn't limited to Georgia but is largely responsible to a change in demographics across the southern United States after World War II.
'We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics,' Forrest said.
Post-WWII, millions of people moved to Georgia and its largest city of Atlanta, which is now seen as a southern hub for several high profile industries.
The study added that, because of this migration, children may have heard more accents than their parents did at school and therefor modulated their own speech to match peers.
'Although very young children acquire their native language from their parents and caregivers, school-aged children may rapidly shift their pronunciations to be more similar to that of their peer group. We think this is when inter-generational language change occurs,' it claims.
Words seen as symbolic of the traditional southern accent or words like 'prize' and 'face,' which older Georgians pronounce 'prahz' and 'fuh-eece' where as zoomers pronounce them 'prah-eez' and 'fayce,' the study claims.
'Changes to the diphthong in 'prize' are the oldest characteristic pronunciation in Southern speech, that can be traced back well over 100 years,' Renwick said.
'The Southern pronunciation of words like 'face' emerged in the early 20th century. These are distinctive features of the traditional Southern drawl.'
Renwick said they focused on words that sounded similar to one another, like 'bide,' 'bait,' 'bet' and 'bat' and discovered that all four words were pronounced 'more southern' by older speakers.
'In particular, we found evidence of the strongest Southern accents among Baby Boomers, born in the mid-20th century, followed by a rapid shift away from Southern speech beginning with Gen X, who were born in the late 60s and 1970s,' she concluded.
The researchers are planning to continue their research by studying speech alterations in Georgia's black population.
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