By Bo Emerson, Cox News Service
Greensboro News & Record
ATLANTA -- Could America's mouth be heading south?
Depends on who's talking.
About 40 percent of the nation's population will be living in 16 Southern states by 2030, many of them Northern transplants, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts.
Those in-migrants are unlikely to eradicate Southern speech, according to Dennis Preston, professor of linguistics at Michigan State University.
It's more likely that arrivals will end up speaking Southern, he said, especially after a few generations. "If anything, those newcomers would strengthen Southern norms rather than weaken them," said Preston.
This raises the tantalizing possibility that the drawl will finally get some love.
The Southern accent has long been stigmatized as a badge of backwardness. But what happens if a plurality of Americans are saying y'all?
The negative attitude toward the sound of the South won't disappear anytime soon, said Bill Kretzschmar, University of Georgia linguistics professor.
"People from New York still think those old stereotypes about the South are true: that Southerners are slow," Kretzschmar said. And this conviction isn't likely to change, at least not fast enough to keep up with other changes.
Harry Watson, director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill, knows about the anti-y'all prejudice from personal experience.
"When I was a freshman, people assumed any white person with a Southern accent was a bigot," said Watson, who attended Brown University in Providence, R.I. Response to his elocution was just as bad during his graduate school years at Northwestern University, outside Chicago.
But twang is on the rise, Watson believes. "The Southern accent is moving up in the world. It is no longer as much of a disgrace as it used to be."
Sheer numbers can help. The Southern population will grow from 100,236,820 in 2000 to 143,269,337 in 2030, according to U.S. Census projections.
Well-known voices also play a part. Three of the last five presidents spoke with a Southern accent, and despite myths to the contrary, the broadcast world echoes with the sound of corn bread and black-eyed peas.
Take Fred Graham, Court TV anchor and Nashville native, who went north in the 1960s to write for The New York Times and joined CBS news in 1972.
He's been out of the South for 30 years, but his diphthongs are just as unglided now as they were then. (A diphthong, or complex vowel sound, is "unglided," or simplified to a single sound, in some Southern regions, where, for example, "time" becomes more like "tahm.")
"I happened to sit with (Texarkana native) Bob Schieffer on the shuttle from New York to Washington last week, and we sounded like two country boys having a conversation," Graham said.
Schieffer, the CBS anchor who replaced Texas native Dan Rather on the national podium, never tried to Midwesternize his voice. Neither did Graham, and he still says "joo-roars" for "jurors."
The Southern accent, even when it's judged favorably, is rarely judged to be "correct."
In 1996 Preston quizzed 85 respondents from Michigan about qualities they associated with Southern speech. They described the sound of the South as "friendly," "casual" and "down-to-earth."
Michiganders, it will come as no surprise, did not describe the drawl as "educated." Because no matter how many Yalies with Fulbright scholarships -- like Graham -- serve as contrary examples, the Southern accent is a long way from being associated with brains.
Southern humorists Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy reinforce this image of the Southerner as a good guy to hold down his end of the bass boat, but not necessarily somebody you'd want holding the nuclear football.
(Note how often President Bush is tweaked for his pronunciation of the word "nuclear.")
Though the rural, uneducated Southerner is fast being replaced by MBAs from Cobb County, old associations persist, linguists say.
When people think Southern accent, "people think hillbillies, 'Dukes of Hazzard,' Jeff Foxworthy," said Lee Pederson, linguist and English professor at Emory University.
For some reason, he added, they don't think William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
UGA's Kretzschmar judges the creeping influence of the Southern accent from personal experience. A Wisconsin native, he's lived in Athens for 20 years, and his pronunciation is virtually unchanged, but his 14-year-old son's speech is clearly Southern in certain respects, for example in his undifferentiated pronunciation of the two words "pin" and "pen."
That "monophthong" is why many Southerners might ask you for an "ink pen," he said. Without the "ink" they might well be asking you for a straight pin.
The Southern accent may well prevail, but Kretzschmar said it is not likely to become the country's dominant form of speech.
Unless something dramatic happens.
In Germany the Prussians were considered the ruling class, he said, and the East German accent was associated with education and style. Then came communism. Today, said Kretzschmar, the East German accent is associated with poverty and backwardness.
In the United States the same thing might happen if, say, New York disappeared under rising ocean levels and the South became a center of commerce.
That's not likely, Kretzschmar said.
But, as Deputy Dawg's cartoon friend Muskie Muskrat might add, "It's possi-bull, it's possi-bull."
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