Classic Georgia Accent Dwindling With Gen X, Study Shows

GEORGIA — The Southern dialect in Georgia is shifting, and a joint study says Generation X is the reason.

The study completed in partnership by the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology said southerners have been transitioning away from accents used by prior generations, according to a news release.

UGA and Georgia Tech claim to be the first team to identify the change in Georgia's accent.

“We found that, here in Georgia, white English speakers’ accents have been shifting away from the traditional Southern pronunciation for the last few generations. Today’s college students don’t sound like their parents, who didn’t sound like their own parents," said Margaret Renwick, associate professor in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of linguistics and lead on the study.

Researchers believe the classic Georgia accent took the most significant leap between baby boomers, born in 1943-64, and Generation X, born 1965-1982, the release said.

The study was done using recordings of white Georgia natives, born from the late 19th century to the early 2000s, the release said. Its focal point was the way the recorded speakers pronounced vowels.

“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 in the release. “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 word "prize" was pronounced as "prahz" by older Georgia residents while they pronounced "face" as "fuh-eece." Contrastingly, young speakers pronounced the words "prah-eez" and "fayce," the release said.

“Using transcribed audio, we can use a computer to estimate where you put your tongue in your mouth when you pronounce each vowel, which gives us a quantitative metric of accent,” Lelia Glass, assistant professor in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech, said in the release.

Jon Forrest, UGA assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics, said in the release that the the southern demographics have changed, especially since post Word War II, due to a large number of people relocating into the area.

Forrest said the Georgia shift is part of a bigger transition across the southern region.

“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 in the release.

Researchers are planning a cross-generational study that will focus on accents within the Black population, the release said.