Southern accents have nuances to them.
Here, a linguist explains how they came to be and what the key differences are.
Beth Gwinn/Getty Images
There isn’t one thing that makes aSouthern accent.
Credit:Beth Gwinn/Getty Images
The regions' iconic sounds go back hundreds of years.
Language change is going to happen, theres no stopping it, she says.
Its natural, and it changes from generation to generation.
Language communicates more than just words.
Younger kids and teenagers will form ways of talking that are unique to their groups.
A lot of how we talk is social.
The result of the mingling of language has produced one of the country’s most recognizable accents.
But there are two significant buckets of accents: inland and coastal.
Just because someone doesnt have a traditional Southern accent doesnt mean theyre going to sound like someone from Ohio.
They just might choose different aspects of their pronunciation to transmit their Southernness, she says.
