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Figure 2. A linguistic outline of the US South based on the data in Labov et al. (2006) and the public-domain USGS's national map. The 15 states where the Southern English is spoken are listed in standard and folk orthography (see Multimedia5 at acousticstoday.org/shportmm; Powers and Powers, 1975).
years show that /ai/-monophthongization is in decline in the speech of younger generations of Southerners in metropolitan areas (Thomas, 1997, in several Texan sites; Fridland, 2003, in Memphis) and in nonurban areas (Jacewicz et al., 2011, in North Carolina). Female speak- ers may be using this marker of Southern identity less than male speakers (Fridland, 2003). Even within the same Southern family, the rate of /ai/-monophthongi- zation may differ significantly among family members depending on the strength of speaker’s orientation toward (or affiliation with) their local community (Reed, 2014).
Urban/rural divide, speaker age, gender, ethnicity, socio- economic status, and local orientation influence the selective use of all elements in the standardized Southern speech element palette, not only /ai/-monophthongization to long [aː]. Other indexical features of Southern speech in the 20th century listed above also undergo similar distri- butional changes. They have been in decline in speech of mainstream-oriented speakers, especially in younger and urban populations (Fridland, 2001; Jacewicz et al., 2011; Dodsworth and Kohn, 2012).
Figure 3 illustrates differences among Southern speakers in adopting Southern-like vowel pronunciation by contrasting
acoustic characteristics of vowels in two young adults from Memphis, TN (Gunter et al., 2020). Compared with the more locally oriented speaker, Isaac, the less locally oriented speaker, Brittany, has a longer /ai/ trajectory, showing that it is no longer an /aː/-like monophthong in words like I like my bike riding in the time of coronavirus. Furthermore, Brit- tany has less overlap between her /ɛ/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/ vowel categories, resulting in a more mainstream pronunciation of words like beg-big and beg-bag. Similar findings were reported for comparisons of locally “rooted” adults and child speakers in North Carolina in the study by Jacewicz and Fox (2020), adding to the numbers of non-Southern- sounding residents of the US South, at least in terms of their vowel pronunciations.
Whether the distributional changes (declines) in the use of Southern speech markers influence the robustness of this regional English variety and endanger it (in the same way other dialects or languages become endangered) remains to be seen. Alcorn et al.’s (2020) study on the ability of Ameri- can English listeners to classify talkers’ speech as pertaining to six major dialects of North American English showed a surprisingly low accuracy of grouping Southern talkers together compared with talkers from North, West, and mid-Atlantic regions of the country. This finding may
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