Linguists have figured out a lot about the many different regional dialects of American English. They know why Brooklynites say “cawfee,” for example, and why Bostonians say “Hahvahd Yahd.” They’ve traced the history of our accents and phrases: how migration patterns influenced their development, and how technology shaped their recent evolution. But what do they know about how Americans will talk in the future?

Not a lot. Outliers in the field believe that the dialects of American English will die—or at least slowly fade—as technology expands connections between people from different regions. But everyone agrees that Americans won’t always speak like we do today. And one of the best ways to predict those future changes is to study places where American speech is shifting right now.

One of the most interesting such transformations is happening in New Orleans, according to Katie Carmichael. The linguistics researcher and assistant professor at Virginia Tech has been researching the Southern Louisiana city’s unique drawl for years. “It changes every six months, who lives there and what they’re arguing about,” she said. “Every time I go back there, it’s such a different place.”

In years of conversations with New Orleans residents, however, Carmichael has noticed one thing that’s always the same. “There’s not a single person who doesn’t bring up Hurricane Katrina,” she said. That observation led Carmichael to develop a unique hypothesis: Maybe the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005 did more than just change the city’s physical and cultural landscape. Perhaps it altered how New Orleanians speak, too.

New Orleans English can be confusing to those who aren’t familiar with it. “Some of them speak with a familiar, Southern drawl; others sound almost like they’re from Brooklyn,” Jesse Sheidlower, the former editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, wrote in a definitive explainer of the dialect in 2005, shortly after Katrina. “Why do people in New Orleans talk that way?”