The city of Raleigh , North Carolina , is well below theMason - Dixon Line , but strike up a conversation with a alien and you might cerebrate you ’re in upstate New York . Over the retiring 50 year , Raleigh ’s Southern drawl has all but vanished , while some house physician of neighbor small township still sound like extras from " The Andy Griffith Show . " What in tarnation is belong on here ?
Robin Dodsworth , a sociolinguist from North Carolina State University in Raleigh , thinks she ’s solved the enigma . Researchers like Dodsworth analyze the impact of social forces on the phylogenesis of language . She receive aNational Science Foundation grantto collect and examine century of audio recordings of Raleigh resident for trace the end of a idiom .
“ There ’s a hatful we do n’t know about how and why spoken communication modification , ” Dodsworth says , “ but here in Raleigh , it ’s pretty vindicated when and why the southerly accent began to fade . ”
Post - World War IINorth Carolina was one of the poorest states in the land , with a sluggish economy largely dependent on tobacco plant farming . In 1959 , North Carolina legislators and veridical - estate developers created Research Triangle Park ( RTP ) outdoors of Raleigh , still one of the large enquiry and development centers in the world .
IBM arrived at RTP in the other 1960s , bringing with it throngs of Yankee proletarian . The white - choker Northerners inscribe their kids in local school , triggering what Dodsworth calls a “ dialect contact situation . ”
“ One affair we absolutely know is that how you sound depends a lot on your peers , ” says Dodsworth . “ That ’s not to say you do n’t learn anything from your parents and the medium , but in term of your vowel system and other features of grammar , you ’re go to sound most like your compeer . ”
When Dodsworth register conversations with Raleigh residents who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s , most retain their old - shoal drawl . But the nestling who grew up portion out classrooms with sons and daughter of IBM - ers exhibit a northernizing trend that only intensify over the decades .
“ The information show the stupefying uniformity with which changes happened in Raleigh , ” says Dodsworth . “ By far the strongest forecaster of what you sound like right now is old age . Most people in Raleigh in a give old age group sound exactly the same . ”
All of this raises some worrisome questions about the future of the Southern and other regional accent . With more and more more people living outside of their place of birth , how long can any alternate way of speak resist the influence of the dominant accent ? In other dustup , how long until “ y' all ” is totally dead ?
" It all comes down to “ stigmas , ” say Dodsworth , and some accents are stigmatize by the panoptic finish as “ substandard , ” even though there is no scientific or linguistic fundament for such a preconception .
“ People down here who wanted to have a certain variety of Book of Job or need to get along with certain type of people , or require to be reckon a certain way , of course they had encouragement to assume non - Southern lingual feature article that they were hearing all around them , ” says Dodsworth .
