Gen Z to blame for fast-disappearing Southern drawl, y’all: new study

Well, bless their hearts — Gen Z is killing the Southern drawl, y’all.

That’s according to a new study published in Language Variation and Change, which claims the classic Southern American accent has been slowly fading over time — with the younger generation now helping to hammer the final nail into the proverbial pine box.

Researchers over yonder at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech listened to hundreds of hours of archived and new speech recordings of white individuals native to the Peach State, starting in the late 19th century.

The study focused on how the speakers pronounced their vowels. Using a computer model, linguists estimated where speakers placed their tongues when pronouncing the sounds, quickly finding distinctive differences.

The collaborative team claims to be the first to identify this here accent shift in Georgia.

“We found that, here in Georgia, white English speakers’ accents have been shifting away from the traditional Southern pronunciation for the last few generations,” lead researcher Margaret Renwick said in a press release.

“Today’s college students don’t sound like their parents, who didn’t sound like their own parents,” Renwick reckoned. “We noticed that older speakers often had a thick Southern drawl, while current college students didn’t.”

For example, the team found that older Georgia natives pronounced the word “prize” as prahz and “face” as fuh-eece, but the youngest speakers use prah-eez and fayce.

Renwick said that “changes to the diphthong in ‘prize’ are the oldest characteristic pronunciation in Southern speech,” with the distinctive speech trait having existed for “well over” a century.

“The Southern pronunciation of words like ‘face’ emerged in the early 20th century. These are distinctive features of the traditional Southern drawl,” she said.

The most notable changes were found between Baby Boomers (those born between 1943 and 1964) and Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1982).

“We were surprised to see how rapidly the Southern accent drops away starting with Gen X,” Renwick said.

Study co-author Jon Forrest, UGA assistant professor in the department of linguistics, explained that “the demographics of the South have changed a lot with people moving into the area, especially post World War II.”

But he was sure to note that the loss of regional accents has been noticed all across the country.

“We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics,” Forrest continued.

Closer to home, New York’s own distinctive accent is becoming an endangered species as well.

Meanwhile, the team at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech are fixing to pursue a study of cross-generational accents among the Black population.

But hold your horses — this isn’t the only way younger people are changing language.

Millennials and Gen Zers have become known for the incessant use of “vocal fry” — the long and deep enunciation of certain syllables so they vibrate at the back of the throat.

The style of speech was first popularized by female celebrities — think Britney Spears (“Oh baby, baby”), the Kardashians (any time any of them speak), Julia Fox (that viral “Uncut Gems” moment) and Paris Hilton (à la her catchphrase, “That’s hot”).

Other Gen Zers are picking up English accents after watching too much British TV — thanks in part to the bombshells of “Love Island.”