Where did southern accents in the US come from?
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The “southern accent” in the US is a historical remnant of the English inflection from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a massive and successful effort was made to eradicate this articulation in Britain and elsewhere and adopt “the king’s english”, which is the modern English accent, or what we know as the “upper class New England” accent (complete with mandatory underbite) in the US. These posh inflections were thought to be physically and morally superior for a number of entirely fabricated reasons, and the only place the old speech patterns endured were the hinterlands lacking in any formal system of education.
I once read that Olde English should be “read with a southern drawl”, and that Chaucer in real life sounded more like a cowboy than like Shakespear.
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