Where did southern accents in the US come from?
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The same place any accent comes from, a group of people geographically isolated from another group of people, so small changes in pronunciation don’t move between groups until over time there is a noticeable difference.
The same thing happens on a larger scale to make new languages. That’s how Latin evolved into the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc)
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From different groups mixing over generations. The Cajun accent for instance came from the expulsion of the French from Eastern Canada. The Acadians as they are known settled in the south after being forced out of Canada (among a lot of other places) and brought a French dialect that evolved into what you hear now. Even the word Cajun came from the word Acadian. With a French accent, ‘Acadian’ becomes ‘A Cajun’!
*Edit – To be clearer the Acadians didn’t leave Canada. They were rounded up and forcibly removed by the British. There’s a lot of terrible accounts of families being purposely separated and sent around the world.
Most American accents started as British accents, and then changed in their own unique ways in each region within a couple of generations. The south is a very big, spread out place so there are also different types of southern accents in different regions. For example, people from Tennessee do not sound like people from Florida, and people from Dallas TX do not sound like people from San Antonio TX.