Angie Holland is proud of her thick drawl but says it’s jarring to hear her voice blare over the intercom at the store where she works in Albany, Ga. “I’m like, OK, I sound like a country hick,” the 57-year-old said, laughing. “I’m real Southern.”
Her son, John Heldenberg, 32, sounds very different. His speech carries much fainter hints of his own southwest Georgia upbringing. “Everybody thinks I’m from the Midwest,” he said.
The mother-son divergence tracks with a buzzy new research finding: The classic Georgia accent is slipping away, y’all. Is it just a matter of time before it’s gone with the wind?
“Fading fast,” said Margaret Renwick, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia. “We don’t think everybody’s going to start talking the same, but change is going to keep happening.”
She led a recent study that for the first time documented a pronounced waning of the Peach State drawl, beginning with white Georgians born in the mid-1960s. (A similar study of the accents of Black Georgians is in the works.)
The steady post-World War II influx of new arrivals, especially to metro Atlanta, transformed the linguistic scene in Georgia, Renwick said.
An analysis of 135 voice samples recorded in recent decades from people born in the state between 1887 and 2003 found that the accent stayed robust among baby boomers. Then it fell off a cliff with Generation X, defined in the study as those born between 1965 and 1982.
“I feel like people love to hate on Boomers, but here in our study the real change is from Boomer to Gen X,” said Georgia Tech linguist Lelia Glass, a research team member. She noted other studies have cataloged a similar weakening of regional accents in places like Chicago.
Georgia Boomers, now mostly in their 60s and 70s, are liable to say dray-uss for dress and prahz for prize, the researchers said. Younger Georgians often sound like their peers around the U.S.
The study, published in the journal Language Variation and Change, has sparked indignant pushback on social media, with many Georgians insisting the drawl is alive and well. “We are all still as country as cornbread,” one woman huffed.
But others say the findings ring true, even if it stings to acknowledge the dimming of a mainstay of Southern culture, albeit one that is a source of endless mockery.
“Maybe it’s silly, but I felt my heart dip a little bit,” said 21-year-old George Moore, who grew up in rural Georgia. A UGA senior and the student government president, he has a fairly strong accent, unlike his roommates who hail from the sprawl of Atlanta.
Moore said during out-of-state trips, people sometimes ask him to repeat things just to hear him talk more. He doesn’t mind. The sense he gets is: “Wow, he sounds very authentic.”
For politicians, the accent has proved to be an asset, or at least not a liability. Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter took his to the White House. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a twice-elected Boomer, has a textbook drawl.
To her dismay, teacher Michelle Jarrett never really developed a Southern accent as a lifelong metro Atlantan, in contrast to her twangy older relatives. “I do regret it because my whole family was raised in Georgia, and they were much more Southern in their speech and in their ways,” said Jarrett, 53.
Fellow Gen Xer Lisa DeVeaux, on the other hand, had more accent than she wanted. So she set out to fix it while fixing to leave a job in HR to pursue modeling and acting. In 2020 she turned to Jon Berton, who runs a business called Advanced Accent Training.
“I did not want my accent to limit me,” explained DeVeaux, who lived in Georgia as a girl and calls Charleston, S.C., home. And now? “I do not think I’ve gotten rid of my Southern accent, but I do think he has helped me to improve my communication.”
Berton, a speech pathologist, said he often works with clients on their grammar and overall expression, in addition to their accent. It’s never too late for a vocal makeover, he said, recalling a man in his 70s who reined in his Southern dialect.
Patti Johnson, a 66-year-old retired teacher in North Georgia, isn’t looking to tame her lush accent, acquired during a childhood near Atlanta. But it does give her headaches.
“I have a hard time spelling, because I try to spell words the way I say them,” she said. She is tired of being misunderstood—by devices. She once tossed her phone in frustration due to a failure to communicate with Siri, she said. And don’t get her started on Alexa. “That girl does not understand. We do not speak the same language,” she said.
Her son Josh Johnson, 42, finds it hilarious how she says certain words. “Poem has three or four syllables, and has a ‘y’ in there,” he said from Nashville, where he cares for his two sons.
As for his accent, Johnson doesn’t have much of one, despite growing up in what was then a rural Georgia area north of Atlanta. But he said he can switch on a Southern accent in certain settings.
Heldenberg, who works at an Albany brewery and is studying computer programming, thinks the times he spent with Illinois relatives might have helped smooth his accent. Like Johnson, he has the ability to speak Southern when he needs to blend in. “I can pull it off pretty well,” he said.
His maternal grandmother’s accent, though, is as rich and natural as homemade pecan pie. Ann Holland, 81, said she sounds more Southern than her daughter Angie.
Ann Holland lives near Albany—she pronounces it Awl-binny—which she points out is the hometown of drawling boomer and celebrity chef Paula Deen. Holland said she had never given the Georgia accent any thought and won’t lose sleep over its uncertain future. But don’t mess with it, hear?
“A lot of the Northern people, they make fun of our accent,” she said, “but I ain’t so crazy about theirs sometimes, to be honest with you.”
Write to Scott Calvert at scott.calvert@wsj.com
The quirkier side of life
The A-Hed, named for a headline shaped like a capital A, has run on the front page of The Wall Street Journal since 1941.
