Growing up in Atlanta in the 1940s and 1950s, Susan Levine's visits to New York City relatives included being the star of an impromptu novelty show: Her cousin invited over friends and charged 25 cents a pop for them to listen to Levine’s Southern accent.
Even though they too grew up in Atlanta, Levine’s two sons, born more than a quarter century after her, never spoke with the accent that is perhaps the most famous regional dialect in the United States, with its elongated vowels and soft “r” sounds.
“My accent is nonexistent,” said Ira Levine, her oldest son. “People I work with, and even in school, people didn’t believe I was from Atlanta.”
The Southern accent, which has many variations, is fading in some areas of the South as people migrate to the region from other parts of the U.S. and around the world. A series of research papers published in December documented the diminishment of the regional accent among Black residents of the Atlanta area, white working-class people in the New Orleans area and people who grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina.
More than 5.8 million people have moved into the U.S. South so far in the 2020s, more than four times the combined total of the nation's three other regions. Linguists don’t believe mass media has played a significant role in the language change, which tends to start in urban areas and radiate out to more rural places.
The classical white Southern accent in the Atlanta area and other parts of the urban South peaked with baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 and then dropped off with Gen Xers born between 1965 and 1980 and subsequent generations, in large part because of the tremendous in-migration of people in the second half of the 20th century.
It has been replaced among the youngest speakers in the 21st century with a dialect that was first noticed in California in the late 1980s, according to recent research from linguists at the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech and Brigham Young University. That dialect, which also was detected in Canada, has become a pan-regional accent as it has spread to other parts of the U.S., including Boston, New York and Michigan, contributing to the diminishment of their regional accents.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, the trigger point in the decline of the Southern accent was the opening in 1959 of the Research Triangle Park, a sprawling complex of research and technology firms that attracted tens of thousands of highly educated workers from outside the South. White residents born after 1979, a generation after the Research Triangle's establishment, typically don't talk with a Southern accent, linguist Sean Lundergan wrote in a paper published in December.
Often, outsiders wrongly associate a Southern accent with a lack of education, and some younger people may be trying to distance themselves from that stereotype.
“Young people today, especially the educated young people, they don’t want to sound too much like they are from a specific hometown," said Georgia Tech linguist Lelia Glass, who co-wrote the Atlanta study. “They want to sound more kind of, nonlocal and geographically mobile.”
The Southern dialect among Black people in Atlanta has dropped off in recent decades mainly because of an influx of African Americans from northern U.S. cities in what has been described as the "Reverse Great Migration.”
During the Great Migration, from roughly 1910 to 1970, African Americans from the South moved to cities in the North like New York, Detroit and Chicago. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have moved back South in large numbers to places like Atlanta during the late 20th and early 21st centuries and are more likely to be college-educated.
Researchers found Southern accents among African Americans dropped off with Gen Z, or those born between 1997 and 2012, according to a study published in December. The same researchers previously studied Southern accents among white people in Atlanta.
Michelle and Richard Beck, Gen Xers living in the Atlanta area, have Southern accents, but it's missing in their two sons born in 1998 and 2001.
“I think they speak clearer than I do,” Richard Beck, a law enforcement officer, said of his sons. “They don't sound as country as I do when it comes to the Southern drawl.”
Unlike other accents that have changed because of an influx of new residents, the distinctive, white working-class “yat” accent of New Orleans has declined as many locals left following the devastating Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The accent is distinct from other regional accents in the South and often described as sounding as much like Brooklynese as Southern.
The hurricane was a “catastrophic” language change event for New Orleans since it displaced around a quarter million residents in the first year after the storm and brought in tens of thousands of outsiders in the following decade.
The diminishment of the “yat” accent is most noticeable in millennials, who were adolescents when Katrina hit, since they were exposed to other ways of speaking during a key time for linguistic development, Virginia Tech sociolinguist Katie Carmichael said in a paper published in December.
Cheryl Wilson Lanier, a 64-year-old who grew up in Chalmette, Louisiana, one of the New Orleans suburbs where the accent was most prevalent, worries that part of the region's uniqueness will be lost if the accent disappears.
“It's kind of like we're losing our distinct personality,” she said.
While it is diminishing in many urban areas, the Southern accent is unlikely to disappear completely because “accents are an incredibly straightforward way of showing other people something about ourselves," said University of Georgia linguist Margaret Renwick, one of the authors of the Atlanta studies.
It may instead reflect a change in how younger speakers view Southern identity, with a regional accent not as closely associated with what is considered Southern as in previous generations, and linguistic boundaries less important than other factors, she said.
“So young people in the Atlanta area or Raleigh area have a different vision of what life is in the South," Renwick said. "And it's not the same as the one that their parents or grandparents grew up with.”
Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social.
Michelle and Richard Beck, right, stand outside their Atlanta-area home Thursday, May 1, 2025. They are Gen Xers who speak with southern accents while their Gen Z sons, Dylan and Richard, left, do not. (AP Photo/ Sharon Johnson)
NEW YORK (AP) — Reviving a campaign pledge, President Donald Trump wants a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a move that could save Americans tens of billions of dollars but drew immediate opposition from an industry that has been in his corner.
Trump was not clear in his social media post Friday night whether a cap might take effect through executive action or legislation, though one Republican senator said he had spoken with the president and would work on a bill with his “full support.” Trump said he hoped it would be in place Jan. 20, one year after he took office.
Strong opposition is certain from Wall Street in addition to the credit card companies, which donated heavily to his 2024 campaign and have supported Trump's second-term agenda. Banks are making the argument that such a plan would most hurt poor people, at a time of economic concern, by curtailing or eliminating credit lines, driving them to high-cost alternatives like payday loans or pawnshops.
“We will no longer let the American Public be ripped off by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Researchers who studied Trump’s campaign pledge after it was first announced found that Americans would save roughly $100 billion in interest a year if credit card rates were capped at 10%. The same researchers found that while the credit card industry would take a major hit, it would still be profitable, although credit card rewards and other perks might be scaled back.
About 195 million people in the United States had credit cards in 2024 and were assessed $160 billion in interest charges, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says. Americans are now carrying more credit card debt than ever, to the tune of about $1.23 trillion, according to figures from the New York Federal Reserve for the third quarter last year.
Further, Americans are paying, on average, between 19.65% and 21.5% in interest on credit cards according to the Federal Reserve and other industry tracking sources. That has come down in the past year as the central bank lowered benchmark rates, but is near the highs since federal regulators started tracking credit card rates in the mid-1990s. That’s significantly higher than a decade ago, when the average credit card interest rate was roughly 12%.
The Republican administration has proved particularly friendly until now to the credit card industry.
Capital One got little resistance from the White House when it finalized its purchase and merger with Discover Financial in early 2025, a deal that created the nation’s largest credit card company. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is largely tasked with going after credit card companies for alleged wrongdoing, has been largely nonfunctional since Trump took office.
In a joint statement, the banking industry was opposed to Trump's proposal.
“If enacted, this cap would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives," the American Bankers Association and allied groups said.
Bank lobbyists have long argued that lowering interest rates on their credit card products would require the banks to lend less to high-risk borrowers. When Congress enacted a cap on the fee that stores pay large banks when customers use a debit card, banks responded by removing all rewards and perks from those cards. Debit card rewards only recently have trickled back into consumers' hands. For example, United Airlines now has a debit card that gives miles with purchases.
The U.S. already places interest rate caps on some financial products and for some demographics. The Military Lending Act makes it illegal to charge active-duty service members more than 36% for any financial product. The national regulator for credit unions has capped interest rates on credit union credit cards at 18%.
Credit card companies earn three streams of revenue from their products: fees charged to merchants, fees charged to customers and the interest charged on balances. The argument from some researchers and left-leaning policymakers is that the banks earn enough revenue from merchants to keep them profitable if interest rates were capped.
"A 10% credit card interest cap would save Americans $100 billion a year without causing massive account closures, as banks claim. That’s because the few large banks that dominate the credit card market are making absolutely massive profits on customers at all income levels," said Brian Shearer, director of competition and regulatory policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, who wrote the research on the industry's impact of Trump's proposal last year.
There are some historic examples that interest rate caps do cut off the less creditworthy to financial products because banks are not able to price risk correctly. Arkansas has a strictly enforced interest rate cap of 17% and evidence points to the poor and less creditworthy being cut out of consumer credit markets in the state. Shearer's research showed that an interest rate cap of 10% would likely result in banks lending less to those with credit scores below 600.
The White House did not respond to questions about how the president seeks to cap the rate or whether he has spoken with credit card companies about the idea.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said he talked with Trump on Friday night, said the effort is meant to “lower costs for American families and to reign in greedy credit card companies who have been ripping off hardworking Americans for too long."
Legislation in both the House and the Senate would do what Trump is seeking.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released a plan in February that would immediately cap interest rates at 10% for five years, hoping to use Trump’s campaign promise to build momentum for their measure.
Hours before Trump's post, Sanders said that the president, rather than working to cap interest rates, had taken steps to deregulate big banks that allowed them to charge much higher credit card fees.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have proposed similar legislation. Ocasio-Cortez is a frequent political target of Trump, while Luna is a close ally of the president.
Seung Min Kim reported from West Palm Beach, Fla.
President Donald Trump arrives on Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport, Friday, Jan. 9, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
FILE - Visa and Mastercard credit cards are shown in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Feb. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)
