Gen Zers in Georgia are losing their classic southern drawl, reflecting a trend of regional accent shifts across the country

• Young white Georgians are losing the accent associated with their grandparents, a new study found.
• These Gen Zers are adopting speech patterns more closely associated with "California English." 
• Researchers think migration patterns are to blame for the loss of the older accent.

Georgia's stereotypical White southern accent that most Americans have come to associate with the region is vanishing, with younger generations now leading the shift.

A new study published in Language Variation and Change from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech analyzed hundreds of hours of speech recordings across generations. Researchers found for the first time that the accent model— known as the southern vowel shift — noticeable in the Baby Boomer era significantly dropped off among Gen X speakers.

Following this steep decline began the adoption of the "lower-back merger shift," or LBMS, which Margaret Renwick, an associate professor at UGA and lead researcher on the study, described as "California English" or "Canadian English."

How migration influences accents

"What it means is that the vowels, in words like 'kit,' and 'dress,' and 'trap,' all get pronounced with the tongue a little bit farther back in your mouth," Renwick told Insider. "So in all three of those vowels, your tongue is a little bit farther back in your mouth. And that changes the shape of the shape of the exit path for air as it's coming out of your lungs."

This meant that while older Georgians pronounced "prize" as "prahz," younger ones said "prah-eez," researchers wrote. And when older generations said "face" as "fuh-eece," young speakers used "fayce."

The study notes that the LBMS pattern has also become "more established in other regions" of the US.

Renwick told Insider that migration patterns and economic shifts that orient people to different places play a huge role in how accents evolve. One example she brought up was the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, which is experiencing its own loss of the southern vowel shift. Scholars believe that the arrival of IBM and other tech-sector companies to Raleigh in the 1960s is to blame, as people moved in for work and brought their dialects and accents with them.

The study notes that the classic White southern accent developed at the end of the nineteenth century when the end of plantation-based agriculture resulted in migration in, out, and around the South. One of the oldest indicators of the accent shift is how the word "prize" was pronounced by speakers.

Following that time, migration in Georgia came to a relative standstill until the 1960s, when the Atlanta metro area became one of the fastest-growing regions in the country.

Gen X Georgians experienced a 'different bath' of accents

"The timing of that change means that baby boomers were in a different bath of accents than Gen Xers, who grew up in the 1970s with different people around them," Renwick told Insider. "And there are probably some shifting ideas that people have about what it means to be southern and what it means to sound southern."

Renwick told Insider the research team is looking to replicate the study to follow the accent shifts of Black speakers in the region who do not use the SVS model of speech. She noted that getting speech data on the older generations of Black Georgians has been more difficult because fewer recordings exist.

Renwick said her team predicts there will also be a noted shift among Black speakers as well, but it will occur during later generations.

As for what's next for later generations, Renwick said it really can't be predicted. Perhaps Gen Alpha Georgians will adopt vocal fry — the low, creaky vocal style associated with Kim Kardashian — in their speech or introduce new slang words, she said.

"As linguists, we love diversity. And we think that understanding the full range of what humans do in language is extremely powerful," Renwick said. "It helps us understand how language makes us humans and what it means to be a person. At the same time, language is constantly changing. And so change is the only thing we can rely on."