Southern Appalachian dialect fades from daily speech but remains resilient

Southern Appalachian dialect fades from daily speech but remains resilient

America has always been a patchwork of voices — drawls, twangs, clipped vowels and long ones — but many people now admit they are softening, editing or abandoning the very sounds that once rooted them to a place. From the fading Appalachian lilt to the vanishing SoCal vocal fry, the nation’s most recognizable dialects may be slipping into something closer to a smooth, uniform “General American.” To understand just how quickly this linguistic san…