The South American accent is one of the most recognizable in the world, but the iconic sound varies depending on where a person lives below the Mason-Dixon line.
Linguists have found that the main dividing line is coastal accent and inland accent, noting that the two groups of vowels tend to be pronounced differently.
Inland variations tend to form sounds with a tighter mouth, exemplified in words such as ‘goose’ or ‘boot’, while those along the coast pronounce the vowel sound with the tongue further back in the mouth as ‘gewse’ or ‘ bewt’.
Coastal accents still include many pronunciations influenced by the British and Irish accents of early American settlers, while inland accents have drifted further away and become more like their own dialects, deeper, richer and drawn out.
The inland accent is more closely associated with the classic Southern accent.
Texas residents Woody Harrelson (left) and Matthew McConaughey (right) speak with the Southern Southern accent, which uses longer vowels. They both grew up over a thousand miles from where this accent first took root on the Atlantic coast as settlers arrived from England, Ireland and Scotland.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Walton Goggins speaks with a more southern coastal accent, characterized by speech coming from the front of the mouth
Technically, the South spans Maryland to Texas, an area that encompasses diverse geography, cultures, and ways of speaking.
In that sense, the “Southern accent” cannot be defined as just one thing.
Professor Margaret EL Renwick, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia, said that, simply put, there are two main flavors of Southern accents: inland and coastal.
Classic Southern accents can be considered backwoods accents, she said Southern life.
Linguistic peculiarities such as ‘mergers’ and ‘fronting’ are essential parts of the domestic accent.
Mergers describe when two different words start to sound the same due to changes in pronunciation, and fronting describes when a word is pronounced more with the front of the mouth – the tongue is closer to the teeth.
These features coexist with long vowels and little quirks, such as stretching one-syllable words until they are practically two syllables.
According to linguist Margaret EL Renwick, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia, there are two main types of Southern accent.
Renwick noted that the classic inland Southern accent is most commonly heard in northern Alabama, eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, far northern Georgia, western North Carolina, and western South Carolina, with Appalachia being home to some of the most recognizable versions of the accent. domestic accent.
On the coastal side, Renwick pointed out how people talk in Tidewater Virginia or the Lowcountry. Here accents take on a different flavor, dropping ‘r’s so that words like ‘car’ become ‘cah’.
In some places, such as the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland and Virginia, the Pamlico Sound area in North Carolina, and Tangier Island off the coast of Virginia, locals provide surprises, such as swapping ‘ay’ for ‘oy’ in words like ‘price’.
The locals in these places may sound much more Irish or English than South American, pointing to the European origins of American English.
Born in Louisiana, Reese Witherspoon speaks with a relatively light Southern accent. Louisiana contains a mix of influences, but her inland accent uses tighter mouth sounds than coastal Southern accents.
This map shows the approximate range of Southern accents in the United States, stretching from Maryland in the east to Texas in the west. Although there are differences between them, these accents all have some similarities.
Louisiana presents a completely different sample of accents.
The Cajun country carries French heritage, but in New Orleans many locals speak as if they were from New York – likely a product of German, Irish and Italian settlers who arrived before the 1900s, resulting in a similar mix to that one. that produced the classic New York accent.
However, Scottish, Irish and English influences can still be found throughout the American South.
When early Americans tried to reflect aristocratic accents from across the ocean, some minor changes in pronunciation led to an entirely new way of speaking – but without the “Southern accent” many aristocratic accents of the time would have sounded just like English spoken by the Americans. Upper class Londoners.
Over time, Southern colloquialisms have morphed into something distinct from their origins, and different regions have developed their own forms.
This kind of evolution, according to Renwick, is inevitable.
“There is going to be a language change, there is no stopping it,” she said. “It’s natural and it changes from generation to generation.”
This is true in modern times, but also historically, as we trace the origins of South American accents back to native languages from across the Atlantic.
Renwick pointed out some notable features of South American accents.
A few distinctive markings, some of which last longer than others, help distinguish a Southern accent.
Taylor Swift, originally from Pennsylvania, adopted elements of American southern accents for her early music. She sang largely with a domestic accent, typified by elongated lilting vowels
“One of the oldest sounds we know is the ‘i’ sound, such as ‘drive,’ ‘why,’ ‘white’ and ‘fire,'” Renwick said.
In many Southern accents, these words are pronounced more like ‘rahd’, ‘whah’, ‘whaht’ and ‘fahr’, although there are slight variations depending on the region.
According to historians, this phonetic phenomenon dates back to the Civil War era.
Renwick noted that the way Southerners say “ride” is an essential aspect of the Southern dialect, a mark of its distinctive character.
“That change in the ‘i’ is classic, an original Southern feature and recognizable across regional accents,” she said.”
A second notable statement is the similarity between ‘pen’ and ‘pin’ among certain Southern speakers.
This convergence of vowels is an example of a merger in linguistics, as mentioned above.
Something similar happens with the words “mill” and “flour” in certain parts of the South, where they both sound roughly the same, both pronounced “meal.”
Renwick also points to fronting as a third linguistic phenomenon from the South.
In this case, the tongue is placed further forward during vowels, as evidenced by the pronunciation of words such as ‘boot’ and ‘goose’ – a feature known as ‘u’ fronting.
While fronting distinguishes Southern speech from its counterparts in Wisconsin, for example, it can also vary by region.
The more people move around, the less apparent the differences between the accents of people in the South become, Renwick noted.
These changes continue to occur in modern times, as Renwick’s team discovered last year that Southern accents are on the decline.
According to their research, fewer white Americans in Georgia speak with the same accent as their parents and grandparents.
But rather than these accents being “lost,” Renwick and other linguists note that they are likely giving way to something new, and future historians will continue to trace the roots of these changes.