Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Interesting article; thanks for sharing. My experience in the South largely parallels Rick Aschmann's research, as far as pronunciation goes. I wonder how much longer the people of the "lowland South", as he calls it, will sustain much of their Southern pronunciations. I lived in the South for around six of my formative years, so I developed an ear for the language (and a bit of a twang, as my schoolmates in the next place I moved told me). I returned to the South, to North Carolina this time, some twelve years later, and I noticed that the real Southern drawl that people often think of increased in direct correlation with my distance west from a city. So beginning in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill-Cary (where there are many, many Northerners transplanted) there would be only occasional or slight accents, mostly noted by the use of "y'all". Farther west on I-40 and the pronunciation becomes distinctly more "Southern" until one starts to approach Greensboro-High Point-Winston-Salem, where the Southern accent is still more distinct than it was in the Triangle area, but a bit more weakened than the surrounding rural areas. Continuing west, the accent thickens again until one gets to Appalachia and you get the nearly-incomprehensible-to-an-outsider Southern dialect among the mountain folk in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee (with a tiny island of almost no Southern accents in Asheville, N.C.).

Anyway, that long explanation out of the way, how long does anyone think it will be before the Southern dialect disappears from the "lowland South" areas in all but the most rural areas? I see this not just due to the Northerners moving down, but because many Southerners-born-and-bred make an effort to not speak with a Southern accent because they believe that non-Southerners immediately perceive some ignorance in that person, whether justified or not (such Southern people I've met have told me this, so I'm not simply stereotyping Southern accents). Any thoughts, anyone?