“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.
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.