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The Southern Accent: We're Losing It By Rob Marus The Moose Is Loose Have you ever noticed that people in our generation seem to be losing their Southern accents? "Hold on," most of y'all are now thinking, "I haven't noticed any lack of Delta drawls or backwoods twangs here at Rhodes." But stop for a second and listen very closely to the inflections of your peers. Now compare their accents with, say, your father's (or, if you're from the North, your roommate's father's). See the difference? And his accent is even a little milder than your grandmother's, isn't it? She...

Not to be outdone by Ebonics in California, the Southern Association of Colleges & Schools is requesting billions of federal dollars to teach "Y'allbonics" in all classrooms south of the Mason-Dixon line. Included here are some samples of "Y'allbonics." If you do not understand any of them, contact a Southerner for an explanation. HEIDI: (noun) Greeting. HIRE YEW: (complete sentence) Remainder of greeting. Usage: "Heidi, hire yew?" BARD: (verb) Past tense of the infinitive "to borrow." Usage: "My brother bard my pickup truck." JAWJUH: (noun) The state north of Florida. Capital is Lanner. Usage: "My brother from Jawjuh bard my...

Michael Stravato for The New York Times John O. Greer is an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University. But when a couple of researchers sat down and talked with him recently, they were less interested in what he said than in how he said it. COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — "Are yew jus' tryin' to git me to talk, is that the ah-deah?" That was the idea. John O. Greer, an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University, sat at his dining table between two interrogators and their tape recorder. They had precisely 258 questions for him. But it waddn what...

New Southerners are more likely to pick up the accent than to change it. 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 says, especially after a few generations. "If anything, those newcomers would strengthen Southern norms rather than weaken them." This raises...

In a June appearance on NBC's Today Show, singer Marc Anthony made an unusual but, according to some linguists, not-so-surprising word choice. When co-host Matt Lauer asked Anthony how he'd spend the upcoming weekend, Anthony said, "Y'all know I don't talk about my personal life." A New York native of Puerto Rican descent using "y'all," a distinctly Southern term? Linguists Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery would say Anthony is exhibit A in a national trend that is spreading the uses of "y'all" beyond the South. The two, who teach at the University of Texas at San Antonio, wrote an article...

Students get lesson in how Americans talk from 'NewsHour' ex-anchor By Katie Humphrey AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Tuesday, January 25, 2005 Y'all better get ready because the Texas drawl is the future of American English -- at least according to journalist Robert MacNeil, who has spent many years studying and chronicling how Americans talk. Maybe it's because of country music or migration from north to south, but any way you look at it, the number of people speaking with a Southern dialect -- particularly "Texan" -- is on the rise, MacNeil told about 270 area high school students who gathered at...

Y'all are being discriminated against. Maybe I should say, "y'all" is. The discriminators are the editors of some of our nation's dictionaries. They ain't from here.For instance, Webster's New World College Dictionary, which I use at work, offers such helpful entries as "grossularite," "cootie," "gill fungus" and "a**hole."But no "y'all," y'all.Other dictionaries are equally snooty. So I wanted to see if "y'all" made it into the new, 11th edition of the popular Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, rolled out, officially, on Tuesday.Some 10,000 "new" terms impregnate this lexicological work of art, including "frankenfood": genetically engineered grub; "dead presidents": paper money; "longneck": beer...