Evaporating wooder sign of changing dialect

                 It was my first date with the young woman from Philadelphia.  The summer day was hot; she sizzled.  I sat fidgeting on her living-room sofa as she finished getting ready, the anticipation building.
                Then she broke the nervous silence.
                "Can I get you something?"  she called out from the bedroom.
                "Wooder?"
                Mental paralysis set in.  I thought, Wooder?  What's wooder?  My mind raced.  My eyebrows scrunched together like lovers parked in the moonlight as I searched for its meaning.
                Was wooder a trendy beer or wine?  Was it a Philly snack food?  Was it Philly slang for a joint?  If wooder was something I'd find only in her bedroom, I'd have been all in for wooder.
                But as someone who wasn't raised in the Delaware Valley, I hadn't a clue what wooder was, and I didn't want to embarrass myself by admitting as much.  Remember, this was before smartphones; a Google search then would've served as a ring buoy in this unfamiliar wooder.
                I soon learned that wooder was Philly for water.  And if I wanted my wooder cold, I should drop in a few "oyce" cubes.  And if some wooder dribbled on my shirt, I'd dry it with a "tal," which is Philly for towel.
               My relationship with the Philly girl so many years ago didn't last.  The myriad reasons why are, well, wooder under the bridge.
               And according to a team of University of Pennsylvania linguists, some of those interesting pronunciations are seemingly on their way out too.
               The researchers have found that the traditional southern inflections associated with Philadelphia native-born speakers are being displaced by northern influences.  The results of the study, "A Hundred Years of Sound Change," were published in the March issue of the journal Language.
               According to a Penn media release, the study documented the changing accent through an analysis of speech patterns of city residents spanning more than a century.  William Labov, a professor of linguistics and director of Penn's Linguistics Laboratory, co-authored the study.  He and his team developed new computational methods to research the way in which vowels have been pronounced by Philadelphians since 1973.
              "This is a breathtaking view of language change over a long period of time," Labov said.  Approximately 1,000 people were involved in the study with 380 analyzed so far.
              Nearly a million measurements show that two-thirds of the Philadelphia vowels are in the process of change.  The vowel of "out" and "down" has reversed direction, after moving toward a distinctively different Philadelphia sound for the first half of the century.  For those born in the 1950s and later, this vowel moved progressively back towards the position it held in 1900.
              If the trends found in the Penn study continue, Philadelphians may someday all pronounce "wooder" water, "oyce" ice, "tal" towel, "shoor" shore, "vurry" very, "dee-uhn" down,  and "haywse" house.
              But rest assured, if you cut someone off in traffic  in Center City, expect to continue understanding them in the form of the widely popular, unambiguous hand gesture.
              Some things in Philadelphia will never change.