It’s getting harder and harder to find New Orleanians who have the classic “Yat' accent of the past.
There seems to be a generational divide, as younger people (Millennials and younger) increasingly seem to be losing the accent altogether. While some may blame the flattening of speech on the internet, movies and TV shows homogenizing the speech of all Americans, it’s more complex than that.
Research from Virginia Tech professor Katie Carmichael says that Hurricane Katrina had a great deal to do with the loss of the classic dialect. Professor Carmichael knows a thing or two about the accent, as she graduated from Tulane University.
Hurricane Katrina scattered many residents to brand-new places. When those who were previously from the NOLA area became displaced and surrounded by those with different accents, it made them acutely aware of having the Yat accent in the first place.
Professor Carmichael says that led to a great deal of change for the dialect. “The truth is, the Yat dialect was already going away before Katrina happened. Some of that has to do with what linguists call ‘stigma’,” Carmichael notes. “People notice certain ways of speaking and associate it with qualities they may not like. Folks get that connection and decide they don’t want to speak in a stigmatized way … so, they’ll change the way they speak altogether,” Carmichael illustrates.
Professor Carmichael explains that the frustration for many people who have a pronounced accent of any kind is the feeling that people are listening more to HOW you say things than WHAT you’re actually saying. “It’s really disorienting to think about how you sound to other people all the time, and many people have an experience where they realize that people are noticing it in a way that isn’t necessarily positive. That makes many people hyper-correct the way in which they speak,” explains Carmichael.
However, don’t mourn the death of the Yat accent too quickly. Professor Carmichael notes that there may be a bit of a comeback on the horizon. “What’s really interesting about New Orleans is that after Hurricane Katrina, people noticed that ONLY people born and raised in New Orleans sounded this way. When you lost a significant portion of the population after the storm, and many newcomers moved to the city from elsewhere and didn’t have that accent. There’s been a bit of a revalorization of the Yat dialect now because people are noticing it more. People are now noticing that it’s going away and that’s causing people to value that accent more,” she goes on to say.
There is a uniqueness and a history to every accent, and the Yat accent is no different. Only time will tell if it fades into obscurity as many dialects of the past have… or if it flourishes under new generations who exclaim their pronunciations with pride.