Quote Originally Posted by AggonyDuck View Post
What Ramsay is describing is a rather common linguistic phenomenom called dialect levelling. When a group of people with different dialects settle in the same area, it is common that the dialects start converging towards a new standard. It's also what initially took place in America, but as the US continued growing in both size, population and minorities dialectal diversity increased as well.

As to the deduction of speech; yes you might be able to deduce pronunciation from written sources, but this still ignores the fact that English of the 17th and 18th century had considerable regional variation. That said I could accept the claim that the variety of English, that arose in the American colonies, could be relatively close to the speech of those Beverly Hillbillies. After all isolated areas, like some areas in the Appalachians, tend to experience considerably slower linguistic change than commercial, cultural and transportational centers.
Every source I can find, not nearly or most but every, states that North American English retains the older forms of the language.

As you have stated, isolated groups tend to preserve their speech forms more than those in dynamic trade centers. Estuary English certainly fits that dynamic profile.

All of North America received less than 20,000 immigrants per year until the mid 1800s. They came from two places, England and Africa, likely the larger part from Africa. (African American is a non-retroflex speech)

Most North American speech is rhotic, as English was in most places in the 17th century. Rhoticity was further supported by Hiberno-English and Scottish English as well as the fact most regions of England at this time also had rhotic accents. In most varieties of North American English, the sound corresponding to the letter r is a retroflex [?] or alveolar approximant [?] rather than a trill or a tap.

Many of the differences between American and Southern British are because of innovations in Southern British. The sound r was lost (except before vowels) somewhere just under 200 years ago in London. This change spread out and is now established all across England except the south-west and East Anglia, and is also true of the Southern Hemisphere countries colonized in the last 200 years. So American resembles Irish in being a rhotic accent (one having r everywhere) because they are both survivors of the original situation that 300 years ago prevailed everywhere in England.

Again, the American can't with the same vowel as can reflects the original English, and it's England that's innovated to the ah vowel. This can be approximately dated by noting that Australia etc also say kahnt; but similar changes in dance, plant happened in England after the settlement of Australia, where they have not been taken up: the can vowel in common between American and Australian dance is also what was said in London 200 years or so ago.

Considerable detail can be found in The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 6: English in North America, a book I haven't seen, but there's a good thorough review of it at
http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/ne...cfm?SubID=4807

The same can be seen when you compare Brazil and Portugal…it was Portugal that changed.