UGA linguistics professor Bill Kretzschmar, a faculty member in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, was quoted in a Florida Times-Union article about the gradual loss of the Jacksonville accent.
Kretzschmar noted in the article that a person’s accent tends to be shaped by those who surround him.
“The thing about Jacksonville now is that it’s urbanized, and you’ve got people coming in from all over the place,” Kretzschmar said. “You can’t expect it to have the kind of accent you might have heard when everybody was local.”
