Texas talk is losing its twang

"It's one of the most vibrant places to study language change and dialects," Hinrichs says. "Dialects used to be a simple function of place. Now they're a more complex function of identity."

Another doctoral student working with Hinrichs, Kate Shaw Points, is a 32-year-old Boston native who has lived in Texas for almost a decade. In that time she's learned to talk Texan, but deploys it strategically.

"When I'm at the mechanic, I talk like a Texan because I don't want them to cheat me," she says, but when she's watching a Red Sox game, she reverts.

She researched people who, depending on the setting, changed the way they said the "i" in "time." They might give it a Southern "ah" sound among fellow Texans, then switch to the clipped standard English "eye" in other settings.

In many ways, talking Texan is about belonging and regional pride. "That's another reason you're never going to see the Texas accent go away," Points said.

That's true. But the way of talking is changing.

Deborah Darnell, 51, a substitute teacher from Austin interviewed by the Texas English Project, says students are sometimes surprised by her pronounced accent.

"Where are you from?" they ask. "Do you live in the country?"

Sometimes she jokes with them: "Oh yeah, I've been up since dawn, milking the cows and roping the horses."

Darnell doesn't even consider her accent that strong, certainly not compared with her grandmother "from San Antone" or her mother.

"My mom — she's got a strong accent! She's 75 and she'll say, 'Oh my heavens, I sound like Lady Bird Johnson!'" Darnell said. "There's not as many Texans, true Texans, anymore, because there's a lot of people moving here from all over."

The state is full of new arrivals, and they are probably having an impact on Texas speech, Hinrichs said. Texas led the nation in migration from other states as of the last census with 486,558 newcomers — the majority, nearly 69,000, from California.

The late Larry Hagman of "Dallas" fame noticed the change as well.

"Now people are from Milwaukee or New York — someplace else. Dallas has just exploded," Hagman, 81, said while filming in Dallas a few months before he died in November.

Hagman, a native of Weatherford, outside Fort Worth, had lived all over the world — including Malibu and London. But when in Texas, he talked like his oil baron character, J.R. Ewing — for instance, "It was so hot you could fry eggs on the cement." And that's pronounced SEE-ment.

"And I still say ice box," he said. "When you're down here, you try to fit in. It makes people more comfortable."

Another of Hinrichs' students, Gina Forsythe, 22, is among the vanguard of young Texas speakers. Her mother is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, her father white. She definitely sounds Southern but doesn't consider her accent truly Texan.

"Whenever I hear the true Texas accent, I think it sounds so funny," Forsythe said. "I don't know if it's because me and my peers are not using it as much, or if we're subconsciously choosing not to."

Among Forsythe's set, there's a stigma attached to talking too traditionally Texan.

"So much of what's driving the new vocabulary is Internet culture — Facebook and Twitter and shortening words," she said. "I still hear Valley Girl lingo constantly, and of course I'm a part of it — like, like, like, every other word."

Two key indicators that Forsythe speaks with a new Texas accent: She pronounces "pin" and "pen" differently (in traditional Texan, both sound like "pin") and "cot" and "caught" the same, like someone outside the Lone Star State. She also avoids phrases like "might could," "fixin' to" or "down yonder."

But there are certain shifts even Forsythe is unwilling to make. Her boyfriend is from Connecticut, and instead of "y'all" says "you guys."

"It sounds so outdated and gender-unfriendly," she said.

And then there's "yous guys," a "Sopranos" staple Forsythe heard during a trip to New York City — and won't be repeating.

"That doesn't even make grammatical sense!"

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com