Hey y’all! The decline of the Southern drawl

I have a very good reason why I work in newspapers. Actually, there are two reasons, when dipping my toe in the world of mass communication, I chose to be a disciple of the written word. I don’t have a face good enough to be on television and I don’t have a voice good enough for radio.

When I open my mouth, there is no hiding the fact that I am from the American Southeast. I have been blessed with, some might say cursed, with a very distinct southern drawl. Pepper the accent with regional idioms and phrases like “fixin’ to,” “pitchin’ a fit,” or the ever popular “y’all” and wherever I might find myself, my dialogue is singular.

Even here in the deep south, I often find myself sounding more southern than my friends and peers. While studying at Milledgeville’s Georgia College, my accent got a lot of attention. At the time, the public liberal arts college drew most of its student body from the Atlanta area, where the accent had long faded from the residents of one of the country’s most diverse cities.

I made a lot of friends with my linguistic quirks, and they never seemed to mind that I had to keep correcting the way they said Vidalia.

Looking back, my drawl has been more of a help than a hindrance, even if in a negative connotation. I don’t mind if somebody thinks I’m less intelligent because my words either cut off too soon or drag out beyond what is considered proper pronunciation.

It’s almost like a real-life version of “My Fair Lady,” the Loewe and Lerner musical based on the Georgie Bernard Shaw play “Pygmalion.” Just because I talk funny doesn’t mean I’m not cultured.

However, y’all, I have some terrible news. The way I and many more of my fellow Georgians talk may very well disappear, or at least the way we enunciate and drag out our words.

A recently released study by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia has determined that the southern drawl is rapidly disappearing. The schools’ findings reveal that Generation X, the good folks born between 1965 and 1980, shed the accent of their parents. There are many reasons for the shift, one of the biggest being the change of local demographics. Our world, as vast and mysterious as it can seem sometimes, is getting smaller every year. People move around like never before and do business all over the globe.

I don’t mind being part of a dying thing. I’ll keep using my accent to my advantage, as an ice breaker to meet new people. I’ll use the way I talk to spread some of that southern hospitality that we desperately need to see more of.

And I hope y’all do the same.

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