Fascinating origin of Southern accents and what makes them different from the ... trends now
The Southern American accent is one of the most recognizable in the world - but iconic sound varies depending on where a person lives below the Mason-Dixon line.
Linguists have found that the major divider is the coastal versus inland accent, finding the two groups mostly pronounce vowels differently.
Inland variations tend to form sounds with a tighter mouth, exemplified in words like 'goose' or 'boot,' while those along the coast pronounce the vowel sound with the tongue farther back in the mouth like 'gewse' or 'bewt.'
Coastal accents still include many pronunciations that are influenced by the British and Irish accents of early US settlers, while inland ones have drifted further away and become more of their own dialects, deeper and richer and more drawn out.
The inland accent is more closely associated with the classic Southern drawl.
Texas natives Woody Harrelson (left) and Matthew McConaughey (right) speak with the inland Southern accent which uses longer vowel sounds. They both grew up over a thousand miles from where this accent first took root on the Atlantic coast when settlers came from England, Ireland, and Scotland.
Walton Goggins, a native of Birmingham Alabama, speaks with more of a coastal Southern accent, characterized by speech that comes from the front of the mouth
Technically the South encompasses Maryland to Texas, a span that includes diverse geography, cultures, and ways of speaking.
In that sense, the 'Southern accent' can not be defined as just one thing.
Professor Margaret E.L. Renwick, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia, said that simply put, there are two major flavors of Southern accents: inland and coastal.
Classic Southern drawls can be considered the inland accents, she told Southern Living.
Linguistic quirks like 'mergers' and 'fronting' are essential parts of the inland accent.
Mergers describe when two different words begin to sound the same because of pronunciation changes, and fronting describes when a word is pronounced more with the front of the mouth - the tongue sitting closer to the teeth.
These traits exist alongside long vowels and little quirks like stretching one-syllable words until they're practically two syllables.
There are two major types of southern accent, according to linguist Margaret E.L. Renwick, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia
Renwick noted that the classic inland Southern accent is most commonly heard in North Alabama, East Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky, far North Georgia, western North Carolina, and western South Carolina, with the Appalachian Mountains being home to some of the most recognizable versions of the inland accent.
On the coastal side, Renwick pointed to how people talk in Tidewater Virginia or the Lowcountry. Here, accents take on a different flavor, dropping 'r's to make words like 'car' become 'cah.'
In some places like the Delmarva Peninsula of Maryland and Virginia, the Pamlico Sound area of North Carolina, and Tangier Island off the coast of Virginia, locals throw in surprises like swapping out 'ay' for 'oy' in words like 'prize.'
The locals in these places may sound much more like they are Irish or English than Southern American, pointing to the European origins of American English.
Reese Witherspoon, a native of Louisiana, speaks with a relatively light
