The thick southern drawl is everywhere from books to TV shows to movies. Arkansas is placed firmly in the south, but in Northwest Arkansas, many people lack the thick drawl of a southern accent. On the surface, it seems that this way of speaking has disappeared.
NWA is part of the Ozark region, a region linguistically associated with the Ozark accent. According to Rachel Whitaker, a historian at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, the Ozark accent is a subcategory of the Southern accent with some pronunciation coming historically from the Appalachian region of the United States.
Whitaker is an eighth-generation Ozarker. When she was growing up in the Ozark region in the 1980s and 1990s, the Ozark accent was still spoken in the region. However, Whitaker says that she no longer has hers and that her vowels have gotten longer. According to Whitaker, in the 25 years since she moved to Oklahoma, she has begun to sound more like an Oklahoman…