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Department of English
The Raleigh Language Project

News

a street perspective photograph of Fayetteville St in Downtown Raleigh

Jul 28, 2015

Techies Are Destroying Raleigh’s Southern Accent

Techies get blamed for a lot of things, from gentrification to snobbishness to a lack of basic empathy. But it’s rare to hear that computer geeks are dismantling an entire city’s dialect, something that’s reportedly happening in Raleigh, North Carolina. Speech patterns among locals stayed about the same in the early-to-mid 20th century, according to Robin Dodsworth, a sociolinguistics professor at North Carolina…
skyline picture of Raleigh NC

May 13, 2013

Is The Southern Accent Fading In Raleigh?

It’s no secret that Raleigh and other parts of the Triangle have changed drastically in the past decades. But new linguistic research shows that along with social and industrial change, the Triangle is seeing its Southern accent fade. Although the prevailing notion suggests that the Southern accent is as old as the South itself, linguists…

Feb 8, 2010

Studying Language in South Park

Researchers are examining language patterns and dialect in Raleigh’s South Park neighborhood, one of the city’s historically African American communities. The linguistic study documents unique speech patterns that have developed over generations in the neighborhood, contributing to broader understanding of Southern American English. South Park, established in the late 1800s, has maintained strong community ties…