Fiona Greaney ‘29
Opinions Editor
It might surprise you, but more often than not I sound a bit like a sixty five-year old Manhattanite. I hail from the Big Apple, which is known for its regional dialect. Members of my family can be picked out as New Yorkers by voice alone. But in New York, as well as in other places around the world, accents are dying. Or are they?
Today, about 8.4% of people are moving, according to 2021 US Census data. People no longer stay in the same place for long, meaning regional accents have less time to develop. Even for those who remain home, they are more connected to the rest of the world than any human has been before. Accents continue to shift, but faster than they used to, in various parts of the world.
Linguists at the University of Georgia found that white Georgians appear to be losing their southern accent. They attributed the shift to migration and a process called “leveling” in which variation between different ways of speaking gradually lessens. This pattern is not limited to the South. Linguist William Labov documented a convergence of vowel pronunciations across America, particularly with younger generations.
While we can mourn this particular southern drawl we are so familiar with, we cannot mourn the language itself. The studies show change, not death. Languages have always changed, and they will continue to do so.
History shows us that every authentic accent was once a hybrid. The Southern drawl itself is a blend of Scots-Irish, English, and West African phonology. Cockney, a now disappearing English dialect, was once a new dialect that was known as a deviation. What we call “authentic” might just be “old enough to feel familiar.”
While old accents are fading, new accents are taking their place. One example is Multicultural London English (MLE), which has replaced Cockney as the majority-spoken dialect in parts of London like Hackney where people come from vastly different backgrounds. Caribbean, West African, South Asian, and a white working class converged to create this new dialect. The dialect is not just a combination of linguistic traits from each of these groups. Original inflections and phonetic changes showed up in this area.
So there are new accents forming. Still, I wonder: what is the uproar about the loss of accents about? Do the prejudices attached to them ultimately do more harm than good?
A 2024 study found that dialect prejudice in AI models predicts people’s character, criminality, and employability. Since AI models are trained on human data, they reflect our own biases back to us. There are some accents that are taken more seriously, and the people who have them are treated better. I personally know people who have gone through accent reduction training to get rid of their accents for professional reasons. As one friend of mine put it,”the difference between sayin’ ‘talk’ and ‘tak’ could cost you a job.”
But the answer is not to flatten or “level” our voices into a single, palatable standard. The grief that many feel towards the loss of accents is more so a loss of identity, memory, and culture. When Curtis Sliwa came to Holy Cross, it reminded me of home. Not just because of the references to Arthur Avenue and South Bronx, but also because of his mannerisms and way of speaking. This recognition matters, and this is what we lose when we lose accents.
Like the languages they communicate, dialects are not set in stone. They are living systems that reflect who is talking to whom. The teen who switches between their parent’s Gujarati-inflected English at home and MLE at school is not losing an accent. They are adapting to different environments in the same way anyone else would do.
The grief we feel towards these accents is real and valid. But what is remarkable is that new ones will continue to emerge from their absence. Language doesn’t die when communities stop sounding the same. They die when communities stop talking to each other at all. So as long as we keep talking to each other, I think we’ll be all right.
Featured image courtesy of YES! Magazine
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