This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: With the midterms fast approaching, communicating just the right message has been top of mind on all sides of the political aisle. Whether that message drives home a lack of affordability as gas, food and home prices surge or stokes fears about the rise of communism in the American heartland, Democrats and Republicans are spending a lot of time thinking about what to say.
But as a linguist who studies the impact of accents on the way people are perceived, I believe how politicians and voters say what they say might be just as important as the words they use in understanding the social consequences and linguistic changes resulting from the political divides that are growing between us. If there is one regional American accent that has long endured on the lips of its speakers—as well as in the minds of listeners beyond the region—it's the Southern accent. From North Carolina through Texas and pretty much all states in between, the so-called Southern drawl has long been emblematic of a distinct culture found in the South.
Yet, in the urban South, recent linguistic research finds that the drawl's most salient features are starting to fade on the lips of young speakers. Fewer "pins" are merged with "pens," and pronunciations such as "far" for "fire" or "say-ud" for "said" are becoming rarer. While linguists have been busy trying to understand this trend, political scientists have been measuring how different accents perform on the campaign trail.
Southern-accented candidates are generally heard as more conservative than those without a Southern accent, particularly to Democratic listeners. Putting these findings from linguists and political scientists together, alongside a spate of studies examining correlations between voting patterns and vowels, hints, I believe, that the increasing conservative-liberal divide in American politics just might be the key to understanding what's driving the decline of the drawl in the urban South. The traditional Southern accent has no shortage of stereotypes: From positive, friendly, country and down-home vibes to negative, backward, uneducated and lazy tropes, the accents of William Faulkner, Bill Clinton and the hillbilly Clampetts have weathered it all.
The reality, of course, is that the Southern accent is not some incorrect version of a national standard but instead a historically separate and unique dialect—or, more accurately, set of dialects. As explored in my recent book, this dialect formed from linguistic variation that came in with colonial-era settlers from different places and stations. The incipient differences increased after the Civil War intensified hostilities and cultural differences between the North and South.
The association with "countryness" often triggered by a Southern accent grew out of this region's agricultural past and its related cultural folkways. But what "country" has come to mean relies largely on stereotypes about what a country lifestyle involves. They include things like hunting, gun ownership and less socially progressive views—often arising from media portrayals of and beliefs about the South.
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