The Crescent City looks, smells, and sounds different in the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina hit the region and scattered many area residents across the country. Lifelong residents are more aware of these changes having lived through them over the years. One of the more notable differences since Hurricane Katrina is the fading of the “Yat” dialect in the region. People under the age of 20 may have never heard the accent “in the wild” so to speak and linguists have been following these changes over the years.
Katie Carmichael is a linguist at Virginia Tech who attended Tulane University in New Orleans and she’s been tracking the shifting language trends in the years since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. While she admits that the “yat” accent was already on its way out before the storm due to a confluence of factors (Carmichael pointed to societal stigma among the younger population as a major reason), Hurricane Katrina was a bit of a death knell for the regional dialect.
“One of the things that came up in my data, especially when it comes to younger people (Millennial or younger) … maybe they moved to Houston, maybe they moved to the Northshore which is linguistically different from New Orleans. But, they realize they’re being pointed out as being different and they try to change that,” explained Carmichael. That often leads to a conscious effort to flatten or change one’s accent in order to fit in.
Another factor that hastened the fading of the “yat” accent was an influx of people from all over the country moving to New Orleans and deciding to stay. As older New Orleanians who had the accent as lifelong residents aged out and started dying off, there wasn’t a new generation waiting behind them to carry on that traditional dialect. Media influences, peer pressure, and rapidly changing demographics within the region all seem to be reasons for the lack of new “yats” in the city. What used to be the norm is now a rare breed in the Crescent City.