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 State University. But after the 1950s, people began to talk differently, losing typical vowel sounds—for instance, saying “kid” instead of “kee-yid”—and speaking in a more Northern way.