Mobility and education are reshaping Black accents in Georgia

The vanishing Southern accent in Georgia has been well-documented, most recently by linguists from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech in 2023. In a new study, the same research team shifted their investigation from the White population to the accents of Black Georgians, with results that highlight the effects of migration and education on the accents of Black Generation Z speakers.

The study, published by the American Dialect Society, looks at only Black speakers from Georgia, from the Baby Boom generation to Gen Z. Researchers used speaker data to connect demographic change in Georgia, migration, and the socio-linguistic history of African American Language.

"From the Baby Boomer generation, we see the African American vowel system quite prominently and relatively stable until Gen X, and then for Gen Z, we see a lot of it going away," said Jon Forrest, assistant professor of linguistics in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and lead author on the study. "At least a segment of these youngest Black speakers is doing something very different with their vowel systems that is probably connected to professional mobility."

Census data for Georgia and Atlanta reflect out-migration and the re-growth of the Black population over the 20th century.

During the Great Migration, from 1910 to 1970, Black residents in the South moved to large urban centers in the North and Midwest, such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York.

The migration occurred in two waves, one from 1910 to 1940 and one during the post–World War II period to 1970, with both waves having different sources and destinations. The first wave saw migrants from the South from primarily rural areas, and the major destinations were industrial centers outside the South. The second wave occurred after the collapse of cotton farming in the South, among other political and institutional changes, resulting in both more migration from Southern cities to the North and more migration within the South from rural areas to major urban centers like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Memphis. In each of these major destinations, perceptions of linguistic uniformity in African American Language across regions persisted. 

A second, ongoing population shift, known as the Return Migration or the Reverse Great Migration, covers the period from 1970 onward. During this time, the South has been the primary regional migration destination for Black Americans. 

Three major themes emerge from census-level trends. First, that part of the motivation for migration may be due to family connections, where individuals return to states or communities that were left in previous generations. Second, more of the return migrants to the South are women, compared to both White migration trends and the patterns found in the original Great Migration. Finally, migrants are more likely to have a bachelor’s degree or higher than the national average.

"It's a story of the convergence of migration and education and how that is reflected in people's speech," Forrest said. "The next generation gives us a picture of what Georgia is and what a new segment of Georgia is going to sound like."

The researchers emphasize that evidence for changes in African Americans’ accents across generations reinforces the fact that African American Language is much more diverse than widely perceived.  

"There is a misconception that that African American ways of speaking are uniform across the country, and this research speaks to the fact that they are not," said Margaret Renwick, associate professor of linguistics at UGA and co-author.

According to the researchers, the new study shares trends with the results of their 2023 study that focused on changing accents among White populations in Georgia.

"The finding of rapid accent shift from one generation to the next cuts across race," Renwick said. "Among White speakers, we found crucial changes in pronunciations between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, which reflected economic changes that began after World War II. For African Americans in Georgia the tipping point is after the Reverse Great Migration began, so we see differences later, between Gen X and Gen Z.” 

The researchers note that the change in accent is only one piece of the bigger system of what makes up African American Language, which includes things like new words or styles of interaction.  “There are other elements of African American Language in Atlanta that are changing too, but changing in different ways,” Renwick said. 

"Culture changes affect language, that is universally true," said Forrest. "Shifts in demographics, migration and cultural norms are always going to change language, just as time changes language. It never stays the same."

Co-authors on the study include Joseph A. Stanley, assistant professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University, and Lelia Glass, assistant professor of linguistics at Georgia Tech. The full study, "Demographic Change, Migration, and the African American Vowel System in Georgia," was published Dec. 1, 2024.

Image: College students in Atlanta, 1990's, via Flickr