Say goodbye to Southern accents, y'all

• Just ask any local who's ever spoken aloud in Boston, New York, Chicago or any other city where they talk weird.

The big picture: The erosion of the Southern accent began in the latter half of the 20th century when Americans started moving across the country in droves, per the AP.

• As more people moved south, and continue to do so, our soft "r"s and elongated vowels are fading away with each new generation.
• The drawl peaked with Boomers and dropped off with Gen X.
• The result: Americans everywhere, especially younger ones, increasingly sound the same. We have an accent (or so the British would have you believe) and it's basically California's. Blame Hollywood.

Zoom in: Southern accents, of course, vary across the south and within Virginia, Abby Walker, a linguistics professor at Virginia Tech, tells Axios.

• Two of the most prominent Virginia accents are Tidewater, heard in the eastern part of the state, and Appalachian, which you hear in southwest Virginia. (There's also a Tangier Island accent.)

Appalachian, in this sense, doesn't mean the region. Rather, it's the heavy long vowels that can be heard in rural areas around Blacksburg — the light isn't on, it's own.

• City dwellers tend to have less pronounced accents, if they have them at all (migration into southern cities played a huge part in that), according to experts.

So where does that leave Richmond?

• There hasn't been a whole lot of study around central Virginian or Richmond accents, Walker says, but when talking to this Northern-born, Chesterfield-raised Gen X reporter, she hears it — slightly.
• "I can hear that you're kind of southern," the native New Zealander tells me.

• The RVA accent is in our "O-fronting" pronunciation of words like "boat," "goat," "home" or "no," making the words sound "more southern."
• It's also in our elongated "i"s in words like "time" and "five," and sometimes in our dropping of the "g" in "ing," as this reporter apparently did repeatedly.

Until they disappear forever, that is.

Yes, but: We can hope. Walker notes that the Appalachian accent is something of an outlier within fading southern accents.

• It seems to be sticking around longer compared to other southern dialects.
• And a big part of that, she notes, is increasing regional pride from people who live there.
• "As things get more global," she says, "maybe you want to feel like you also belong to a particular place."

The bottom line: We have to live with it, y'all. As Walker tells me: "Language is always changing."