[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Boyd Crowder: Should we just do us a shot of Jim Beam, just for old time's sake?

Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna, filling in for Brian today. That was Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder on the FX series Justified. If you've seen that show, Crowder's is a voice thick with history, menace, and humor. Even if you haven't seen it, you can hear the music in his particular Southern accent. In real life, off-screen, linguists say the voice is fading. Young people across the South are losing their accents or learning when not to use them. As those accents fade, something else fades with them.

My guest is Annie Joy Williams, assistant editor at The Atlantic. She's a Southerner herself, and in a new essay called The Last Days of the Southern Drawl, she writes about accents she grew up hearing, about quieting her own accent as a teenager, and about what disappears when a regional way of speaking slips away. Hi, Annie. Welcome to WNYC.

Annie Joy Williams: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Amina Srna: Listeners, we can take your calls on this. When does your Southern drawl come out, and when do you choose not to use it? We can also hear your celebrations of the Southern accent. 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. I would say you can text as well, but I think we'd prefer for you to call on this one. Annie, you open the essay with a description of your father's voice. You write, "His words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound if it could speak, thick and slow." I love the way you put that. Why don't you tell us about him? Where is he from? Where did you grow up hearing that sound every day?

Annie Joy Williams: My father is from Georgetown, Kentucky. Kind of a small town in Kentucky outside of Lexington. My mother is actually from the same place. They met when they were little kids. Now they live in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where I grew up. When I was a younger child, it was more of a small town, but now it's become quite the big suburb outside of Nashville.

Yes, I heard this voice all the time. We lived on the county side of things as opposed to the city. At school, I went to school in these trailer home buildings, like portable buildings in rural Tennessee. I remember learning from super Southern teachers, and the way they would pronounce things I always assumed was right because I hadn't been really exposed to people from other places.

My parents both have pretty strong Southern accents. My dad is a cattle farmer, so his is very-- sometimes it just sounds like one giant word, and you can't really distinguish what he's saying. He has his West Coast relatives. He was a pilot for a long time, so he would kind of code-switch into this more digestible Southern accent, I guess, for the sake of clarity and maybe being taken more seriously in those circles. My mom also has the Southern drawl that mainly comes out in church pew greetings. She's a psychiatrist, and she can really-- when she's calling in a prescription, she kind of turns it off to make sure her point's received and all of that.

Amina Srna: When linguists talk about a Southern drawl, what do they actually mean? What's happening in, maybe the mouth and the vowels when we hear it?

Annie Joy Williams: I'm going to try not to butcher this, because I am no linguist. I am learning along with y'all when I wrote this article. What they mean by the Southern drawl is really this thing called the Southern vowel shift. This began in the late 1800s after the Civil War. Pretty much the first thing that happened is the "I" became an "ah" sound. Like, time turned to time.

The Southern vowel shift treats long vowels and short vowels differently. With a long vowel, like beat or bait, you add a little ah sound before the original vowel. Beat, there's like a little ah if you listen really closely. With the short vowels, like bit or bet, the ah goes after the original vowel. It's like bit. You hear that little hesitation. That's where we get the word like the Southern drawl, because it's drawing out that vowel section of the word a little longer, adding a little flavor. Yes, that is the main thing that distinguishes a Southern accent from any other accent is the Southern vowel shift.

Amina Srna: Let's go to a call. Greg in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Greg.

Greg: Hi. Thanks so much. This is really interesting. It's funny that you were just talking about the way that the vowel gets held out. Because my parents were both born in the Midwest. I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. I came back from kindergarten on the first day, and my mother told me. I was like, "Hi, Mom, it's five, and I'm alive." My mom was like, "No, Greg, it's five, and it's alive."

I think about Tom Petty's record Southern Accents. The first title track was I Was Born a Rebel. That sentiment isn't really where we're at anymore. I love the South. I love the people I left. Do I want to return? No. When I think of the Southern draw, I think a lot of white supremacy and the history of that. I mean, Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898. Hello. A racial coup, basically a massacre.

I think also about Charles Blow and the great reverse migration that he wrote about. For a reason why this is happening, why this intermixing is happening, and why-- I grew up with neighbors from Jersey. My neighbor would be like, "Hey, Greg, you want to go to that batting cage?" He would call my brother Billy and be like, "Hey, Billy." I didn't understand the accents at the time, but when do I use it? It was when I go back. It's a great rapport. It's a form of code switching, as you said, which I thought about. Then, it's just like connecting with my roots without judgment, I think.

I dated someone from Long Island when I first moved to New York. Now, I don't know, the screener said they could hear a Southern accent. I'm curious if you do hear one.

Amina Srna: Greg, thank you so much for your call. Let's take another caller back-to-back here. Tom in Bed-Stuy, who does like to lay on the accent every once in a while here in Brooklyn. What would you like to say, Tom?

Tom: How's it going? I'm from North Carolina, and where I'm from, in the cities in the urban area, like Durham and Greensboro, where I went to college, you don't hear it much, but if you go 15 minutes outside of any of these urban centers, you hear it a lot more. I've been in New York for 13 years, and as a bartender, sometimes I'll catch myself, or kind of lean into it a little bit when I'm trying to lay on the service a little bit more to be a little sweeter, more ingratiating, I'll lean into it a little more. I don't really hear it much, but other people around me kind of hear it some. If I'm around other people from North Carolina, it definitely comes out.

Amina Srna: I love it. Thank you so much for sharing that story. That's the last word, actually, that last Southern drawl we have for today. My guest has been Annie Joy Williams, assistant editor at The Atlantic, where you can read her story, The Last Days of the Southern Drawl. Annie, thanks so much for coming on.

Annie Joy Williams: Thank you for having me.

Amina Srna: Stay tuned for All Of It.

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