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 discovered that the main dividing factor is coastal accent and inland accent, finding that the two groups generally pronounce vowels differently.
Variations inland tend to form sounds with a tighter mouth, exemplified by words like “goose” or “boot”, while those along the coast pronounce the vowel with the tongue further back in the mouth like “gewse” or “bewt”.
Coastal accents still include many pronunciations influenced by the British and Irish accents of early American settlers, while those inland have moved away and become more their own dialects, deeper, richer, and longer.
The inland accent is most closely associated with the classic Southern drawl.
Texas natives Woody Harrelson (left) and Matthew McConaughey (right) speak with an inland southern accent, which uses longer vowels. They both grew up more than a thousand miles from where that accent took root on the Atlantic coast when settlers came from England, Ireland and Scotland.
Walton Goggins, originally from Birmingham, Alabama, speaks with a coastal Southern accent, characterized by speech that comes from the front of the mouth.
Technically, the South stretches from Maryland to Texas, an expanse that includes diverse geographies, cultures, and ways of speaking.
In this sense, “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: the inland accent and the coastal accent.
Classic Southern drawls can be considered inland accents, she said. Living in the South.
Linguistic quirks such as “mergers” and “fronting” are essential elements of interior 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 being closer to the teeth.
These traits exist alongside long vowels and little quirks like stretching one-syllable words until they’re practically two syllables.
There are two main types of Southern accent, according to linguist Margaret EL Renwick, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia.
Renwick noted that the classic Inland Southern accent is most often heard in northern Alabama, eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, far northern Georgia, l Western North Carolina and western South Carolina, with Appalachia home to some of the most recognizable versions of the accent. inland accent.
On the coastal side, Renwick pointed out the way people talk in Tidewater Virginia or the Lowcountry. Here, accents take on a different flavor, dropping “r”s to turn words like “car” into “cah.”
In some places like the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland and Virginia, the Pamlico Sound region of North Carolina, and Tangier Island off the coast of Virginia, locals have surprises in store by replacing “ay” with “oy.” in words like “price”.
People in these places may sound much more like Irish or English than South Americans, emphasizing the European origins of American English.
Louisiana native Reese Witherspoon speaks with a relatively light Southern accent. Louisiana contains a mixture of influences, but its inland accent uses tighter mouth sounds than the coastal accents of the South.
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 share some commonalities.
Louisiana presents a whole different palette of accents.
Cajun country carries French heritage through its drawling accents, but in New Orleans, many locals speak as if they’re from New York – likely a product of German, Irish and Italian settlers who arrived before the 1900s, which results in a mixture similar to this. this gave the classic New York accent.
However, throughout the American South, Scottish, Irish, and English influences can still be found.
As early Americans attempted to replicate aristocratic accents from overseas, a few minor changes in pronunciation led to an entirely new way of speaking – but without the “Southern lilt” of many aristocratic accents of the era would have resembled the English spoken by upper-class Londoners.
Over time, Southern ways of speaking transformed into something distinct from their origins, and different regions developed their own forms.
This type of evolution is inevitable, according to Renwick.
“A language shift is going to happen, nothing can stop it,” she said.. “It’s natural and it changes from generation to generation.”
This is true in modern times, but it is also true historically, as we trace the origins of South American accents back to the native language across the Atlantic Ocean.
Renwick highlighted several of the salient features of South American accents.
A few distinctive markers, some of which last longer than others, make it possible to discern a Southern accent.
Taylor Swift, originally from Pennsylvania, adopted elements of southern accents for her early music. She sang with a predominantly interior accent, characterized by long lilting vowels.
“One of the oldest sounds we know is the ‘i’ sound, like ‘ride,’ ‘why,’ ‘white,’ and ‘fire,'” Renwick said.
In many Southern accents, these words are pronounced more like “rahd”, “whah”, “waht”, and “fahr”, although there are minor variations depending on the region.
This phonetic phenomenon dates back to the Civil War era, according to historians.
Renwick noted that the way Southerners say “rise” is a quintessential aspect of Southern dialect, a mark of its distinctiveness.
“This change in the ‘i’ is classic, an original characteristic of the South and recognizable through regional accents,” she said.
A second notable pronunciation is the similarity between “pen” and “pin” among some Southern speakers.
This convergence of vowels is an example of fusion in linguistics, as mentioned above.
Something similar happens with the words “mill” and “meal” in some parts of the South, where the two sound about the same, both pronounced “meal.”
Renwick also considers fronting a third Southern linguistic phenomenon.
In this case, the tongue is placed more forward during vowels, as demonstrated by the pronunciation of words like “boot” and “goose” – a feature known as the “u” in front.
Although fronting distinguishes Southern speech from its counterparts in, say, Wisconsin, it can also differ regionally.
The more people move around, the less distinct the differences between people’s accents in the South become, Renwick noted.
These changes continue to occur today, with Renwick’s team last year finding that Southern accents were in decline.
According to their research, fewer white Americans in Georgia speak with the same accents used by their parents and grandparents.
But rather than “losing” these accents, Renwick and other linguists note that they are likely giving way to something new, and historians of the future will continue to trace the roots of these changes.