Southern twang going extinct?

Study Finds -  The U.S. South has long been synonymous with a certain drawl and way of speaking, but fascinating new findings reveal that the classic Southern accent is undergoing “rapid changes” in the state of Georgia. Local researchers from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech say the Georgia accent is fading fast, and Generation X appears to be the driving generational force behind the linguistic shift. “We found that, here in Georgia, White English speakers’ accents have been shifting away from the traditional Southern pronunciation for the last few generations,” says Margaret Renwick, an associate professor in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Department of Linguistics and lead of the study. “Today’s college students don’t sound like their parents, who didn’t sound like their own parents.”