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From: HenHanna <HenHanna@devnull.tb>
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: Classic Georgia accent fading fast
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2024 15:31:26 -0700
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On 1/1/2024 9:26 PM, Tilde wrote:
> 
> https://news.uga.edu/classic-georgia-accent-fading-fast/
> 
> A collaborative study between the University of
> Georgia and Georgia Tech has found the classic
> Southern accent is undergoing rapid change in
> Georgia. The instigator? Generation X.
> 
> “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 Margaret Renwick,
> associate professor in UGA’s Franklin College
> of Arts and Sciences department of linguistics
> and lead on the study. “Today’s college students
> don’t sound like their parents, who didn’t sound
> like their own parents.”
> 
> The researchers observed the most notable change
> between the baby boomer generation (born 1943 to
> 1964) and Generation X (born 1965 to 1982), when
> the accent fell off a cliff.
> 
> “We had been listening to hundreds of hours of
> speech recorded in Georgia and we noticed that
> older speakers often had a thick Southern drawl,
> while current college students didn’t,” Renwick
> said. “We started asking, which generation of
> Georgians sounds the most Southern of all? We
> surmised that it was baby boomers, born around
> the mid-20th century. We were surprised to see
> how rapidly the Southern accent drops away
> starting with Gen X.”
> ...
> 
> “The demographics of the South have changed a
> lot with people moving into the area, especially
> post World War II,” said co-author Jon Forrest,
> UGA assistant professor in the department of
> linguistics. Forrest noted that what the
> researchers see in Georgia is part of a shift
> noted by others across the entire South, and
> furthermore, other areas of the U.S. now have
> similar vowel patterns.
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-variation-and-change/article/boomer-peak-or-gen-x-cliff-from-svs-to-lbms-in-georgia-english/6AEA44E9263DFAE376F3BB20E087E5F9
> Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS
> in Georgia English
> 
> Abstract
> The late twentieth century in the United States
> marks the decline of regional vowel systems
> like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern
> Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems
> like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such
> change in acoustic data from seven generations
> of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern
> state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels
> affected by both the SVS and LBMS (DRESS, TRAP),
> plus PRICE and FACE, known respectively to
> monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and
> LBMS-implicated LOT/THOUGHT. The SVS is most
> advanced among Georgians born in the
> mid-twentieth century, particularly in
> FACE-centralization. In Generation X, retraction
> of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the
> LBMS. These results, which hold across genders
> and education levels, support findings that
> regional vowel systems declined precipitously
> following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions
> about how such language changes are rooted in
> demographic transformations of that time period.


i'll look for Youtube clips on this.