Today Show Interview
I was contacted by the NBC Today Show for a segment on Southern accents, and we jumped through lots of logistics to set up an interview. We spent over an hour shooting the interview and some "walk and talk" shots. Of course, these things always turn into something you might not expect from the what went into it.
Are Southern Accents Fading Away?
Parker Posey's accent on White Lotus was the prompt for this Today Show piece. She'd been on the show a few days before, and had some very quotable moments with the accent, so they, of course, wanted to make the most of it and turn it into another segment!
Most of the questions were looking for some sound bites that quickly explain the situation, but the reality is much too complex for an eight-second quip...
Are Southern accents going away? No. But the nature of ALL accents is that they change.
Southern Accents Change Over Time
A huge percentage of white Southern speakers used to speak with a non-rhotic, R-dropping accent that are on Accent Help as the American Southern: Soft-R materials. This accent has often been called Deep South or Plantation Southern. It was largely spoken in the flat lands of the Southeastern United States.
This accent has changed over time - just as all accents do. The only way that it's "dying out" is that speakers of this accent are, indeed, getting quite old these days.
Over the years, almost all of the dialect recording samples I've included in those materials are from people well into retirement age. I believe the youngest person I interviewed was about 65, while most were more into their 80's.
The Hard-R Southern accent that we hear today used to be largely in the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ozarks, more focused in much of Kentucky and Tennessee and areas near their borders.
African-American accents in the US typically still retain some of that non-rhotic, dropped R quality, even in Northern cities because of migration towards the North, especially in the early 1900s. Much of the time, black speakers in the north have more in common with other black speakers from 1000 miles away than they do with white speakers 1 mile away because of America's history of segregation and racism - that continues today.
There are, of course, other "Southern accents" that don't fit easily into these categories: Cajun accents, the accents of New Orleans, and Texas accents have some of those elements, but have some significant differences as well.
Texas accents were significantly influenced by Kentucky and Tennessee settlers early in it's history, so it has a great deal in common with the Hard-R Southern. Cajun and New Orleans have a massive French influence, along with French-speaking Acadians from Eastern Canada, as well as blacks and Native American populations that have long lived in the region. NOLA is truly a melting pot, and the accent(s) reflect that.
The Complexities of Changing Accents
What actually made it into this Today Show interview was more about grabbing attention for a few minutes rather than exploring the reality of changing Southern accents.
That hour-long interview turned into about 10 seconds in the feature, probably because I wasn't providing quick sound bites... I'm not good at giving a brief answer to a complex question, I'm afraid. I'm not much of a fan of black and white answers because most of the time there's a lot more grey to almost any topic.
In my video at the top of this post, you can hear more about the longer version of the story, which you might only want to listen to if you're up for a deeper dive instead of a Tik Tok snippet that tries to keep you scrolling.
Best if we not talk about politics, either, as all I think I have are long answers. Other than: It's broken.