I’ve noticed a lot of young Southerners sound like they are from the Northern states or even the West Coast, though most still do retain at least a little bit of the accent.
Is the Southern accent destined to become extinct? If it’s already so faint among many young people today, it seems reasonable to assume their kids will sound like they are from Orange County.
No. I work with a woman in her 20s from Arkansas who has a very pronounced southern accent despite working in DC for years. Same goes with some other colleagues in my DC office.
No, it is very area specific but many areas are still producing Southern accents as strong as they ever were. My tiny hometown on the Louisiana/Texas border is one of them as are hundreds of other, similar towns in the same region. There is no difference between the young kid’s accents today and when I grew up there or my father and grandfather before me. My Arkansas nephews have extremely strong but pleasant and polite Southern accents even though they live in a mid-sized city in Northern Arkansas that isn’t especially Southern overall.
“The South” is now the most populous region of the U.S. believe it or not so you do see a lot of more variation as people move in and some areas become more urban but the smaller areas that produced some of the strongest Southern accents are still there and producing as many of them now as ever before. Just because many people in Atlanta, Dallas or Charlotte don’t speak with a strong Southern accent doesn’t mean that it is dying out overall. I could take you on a tour of many Southern areas comprising hundreds of thousands of square miles where the Southern accents are still very strong. The key is to stay out of the airports and the larger cities and drive around to the areas with lower population densities.
There are lots of academic studies that show that the Southern accent and vernacular is not dying out but we might as well start with the Wikipedia article on the subject.
“The Southern U.S. dialects make up the largest accent group in the United States,[10] from the southern extremities of Ohio, Indiana, Maryland, and Delaware, as well as most of West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the southern Atlantic coast extending to most of Texas and Oklahoma, and the far eastern section of New Mexico. Southern American English can be divided into several regional dialects and sub-dialects. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has common points with the Southern dialects due to the strong historical ties of African Americans to the region.”
The really odd thing is that some areas that speak with a mostly Southern accent aren’t even traditionally thought of as Southern at all. I can attest to that. I used to work on the Ohio/Indiana border (Richmond, IN area) and the people that are from there generally speak with a pronounced Southern accent as well. It really through me off until I looked that a dialectic maps that show some strange protrusions of the general accent that extend well outside the South including parts of solidly Midwestern states like Illinois, Ohio and Indiana but also well into the Mid-Atlantic region in parts of Delaware.
I was surprised by that too, in southern Indiana.
I’ve noticed, though, that people in those “fringe” regions of the southern accent will more often say that they talk “country” rather than have a southern accent, even if they sound practically identical.
Half the people I meet in Ohio have a “Southern accent.” I’m from MD, where the typical accent is not standard, either.
Yeah around here Akron and all parts south (or maybe southeast) has a West Virginia accent.
I have been in Houston for more than a year now. Have yet to meet one person speaking with a Southern accent… Too bad, I like that accent.
To this Yankee, Southern Indiana feels South. Southern accent, Southern hospitality*, real sweet tea in the restaurants, yes, sir, that’s Southern.
I had this conversation last month with a friend born and inbred (her words…also, “my family tree is a wreath.”) in, I think, Harrison County, IN. I asked her if the people who are from there consider themselves Northern or Southern. She said, “This county? Southern. We have a lot of cultural influence from Louisville. But go one county north, and them’s yankees. They identify with Bloomington, and the flat part of the state to the north.”
She has no discernible Southern accent to my Chicago ears, but she admits she worked hard at that. She slipped into her “real” voice for me for 200 words or so, and it was thicker than cream on a cold morning.
*Southern hospitality: The same trip, I broke my glasses, which I desperately need. I had no time to get an eye exam and get them replaced before we had to leave town. (My prescription doesn’t do “one hour” or even “same day”. More like 2 weeks.) The ladies at the Walmart Optical spent 20 minutes searching every pair of frames they could find for a $9 frame that would hold my lenses. I tried leaving a couple of times because I felt bad taking up their time, but they were not about to let me leave until they’d fixed my problem for me. So sweet. That doesn’t happen here.
Houston is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the U.S. so you are more likely to encounter some random foreign accent than a Southern one. However, I assure you they are there if you want to find them because many of my friends that have pronounced Southern accents live there too. Check out an authentic BBQ joint, urban cowboy bar or go to the (extremely good) annual livestock show. You will get all the Southern accents you could hope for. Once you venture outside of Houston to the east towards Louisiana, things become decidedly Deep Southern in a good way. Houston is just another very wealthy international mega-city but it is surrounded by the Deep South. You can encounter experience it yourself with just a fairly quick car ride into the rural outskirts to the north or east.
Meh, I don’t hear too many traditionally Southern accents in Houston.
If you want to hear Texas regional accents, on the other hand, there’s no shortage of 'em in Houston, primarily of the East Texas variety.
Probably not where I live…
Everyone I know is from somewhere else. Several were born in Oklahoma - and I don’t hear any accent at all.
It’s going to be interesting as the ‘set them down in front of the TV’ method of child rearing* gives way to 'give ‘em a video game’.
Watching TV exposes children to the ‘TV voice’ - always a flat, mid-western accent.
Video games don’t have continuous dialog, so the child will follow parental speech more.
We might see a resurgence of regional dialects. Probably too late for the ‘Boston Brahman’ dialect.
(Chas. Winchester on MAS*H had a weak attempt at it, but not many still use it)
I certainly think regional vocabulary distinctions are still quite strong, even among people who use general American English pronunciation (ie. saying coke vs. pop vs. soda, or crawdad vs crawfish and so on).
I don’t think southern accents are dying out, but IIRC rhoticity (pronouncing Rs that come after vowels) is much more common in the South than it used to be even 50 years ago.
I don’t know if the same is true for southern states, but here in Texas, the “Texas Twang” can be turned on and off like a light switch.
I’ve know plenty of coworkers (and family members) that speak perfectly “normal” when in a formal setting, but man, get them to happy hour after work, and on comes the twang.
I’d say they’re changing, rather than disappearing. I don’t sound like my east-Texas reared mother, who pronounced my given name as a single syllable word. However, when I attempted to assert that I didn’t have an accent, my family disabused me of that notion. After listening to a recording of myself, I had to agree. However, I have several friends/acquaintances who are barely of drinking age that sound indistinguishable from myself in terms of accent*.
And as has already been observed in the thread, there’s not really a unified “Southern” accent anymore than there’s a unified “Yankee” or “English” one. My Kentucky-born wife’s family has a different set of sounds that belie her accent than mine, people from Mississippi and Georgia sound different to me still. Folks from Oklahoma sound like east Texas, but usually don’t have as much mush-mouthed drawl. Louisiana is a whole 'nother ball of wax. There’s not even a unified “Texas” accent. If you’re from west of Abilene, I can hear it.
*Not quite “southern”, something like Matthew McConaughey. My mother had an extremely thick version of that accent.
ETA: I think I can turn it on and off, and sound like a newscaster, but I’m probably not half as good as I think I am at it. Even then, I’m liable to throw a “y’all” in there, and the cover is blown.
Perhaps it is.
It’s not official until it’s printed in the Atlantic. 
I can report that the rich, flavorful Kentucky accent is alive and well in the Bluegrass State.
Y’all may be blaming me that yer accent is fixin’ to change, but I ain’t got no personal beef with drawl or twang or bluegrass. 