The people in the American South were Tudor, then Stuart, then Restoration and finally Regency Brits when they came over; the youngest lived nearly half a century before Queen Victoria was even BORN. Most who CAME rather than being born in the colonies arrived during or before the Glorious Revolution, a century and a half before Victorias birth and nearly two centuries before her reign (i.e. Victorian England.) It is a free country, but if you insist on continued digging, I am obliged to at least RECOMMEND "digging up." Mistakes are never desirable, but some things are worse; remember: A mistake becomes an error when one refuses to correct it, because once responsibility replaces ignorance obstinance causes culpability ignorance lacked.

The vast majority of Southern accents sound NOTHING like either the Victorian or modern British accents, and the one exception sounds more like New England Yankee, British and South African accents than they do ANY of their Southern relatives. Name three linguists (or even English speaker) who agree Texan, Cajun, Appalachian or Deep South accents sound anything like past or present British English, let along more like it than ANY other English dialect/accent does.

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View original postMy bad; I should stop overestimating people, but it will not happen again: Promise.

You would have to understand them to make any accurate estimate all.

"There you go again:" I understood you perfectly; what I did not do was AGREE (precisely because I understood you.)

Dialect would have been, yes, particularly since 1) it is the subject of Mins thread and 2) it is practically uniform throughout the South, while Southern accents are highly numerous and varied. If, in this case, perfectly understanding what you SAID prevented perfect understanding of what you MEANT, the sole remedy is also solely yours to provide, not mine: Say what you mean and mean what you say.

Perhaps so, but irrelevant since 1) 1750 British Islanders and colonials alike lived nearly a century before the Victorian Era, 2) while UK English continued evolving in the interim, US English separately and divergently did the same and 3) both have continued since. The key difference is that separation: Each regions "recipients" of each orthographic and pronunciation evolution got them from regional forbearers, not across an ocean. It is therefore implausible that modern UK English has moved further from Victorian English than Southern US English has toward it, because NO US English ever moved TOWARD Victorian English in the first place. Your arguments chronology and geography are factually and deeply flawed.

See the preceding. Just because someone does not like the FACTS does not make them untrue either; as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Let people choose whatever facts suit them, in defiance of truth, and one end up with ones vice presidential nominees telling the public Paul Revere tried to EVADE the British in a brave effort to "warn" them of American guns they were ALREADY marching to seize (presumably due to a prior "warning" that made Reveres superfluous.)

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View original postBut yes it does all come down to how you subdivide the accents and I went with what linguist say but you go with whatever makes you happy. Just treat it the same way you do politics and religion.

View original postWhen discussing "ya'll" v. "you guys" etc. it comes down to dialect; accent is a(n irrelevant) question of how to pronounce words like "tomato" that are spelled and used the same in all English dialects. It might be wise to consult Wikipedias authoritarian lingual scholars further before proceeding further here. Either way, while majorities on half of all continents use English as a native language (and the majority of a fourth speaks it,) "ya'll" is rarely found outside the Southern US (ironically, the biggest exception is in urban US areas, largely due to the Great Migration from the South.) In terms of accents (once again) only ONE of many Southern accents is even remotely like Victorian OR modern British English, and that particular "Southern" accent is closer to New Englands, Britains and South Africas than to ANY other Southern one. Just treat "dialect" and "accent" like "patriotism" and "proof," declaring them redefined however serves your preferred worldview.

Y'all is new creation that did not become commonly used until the 1800s so it is hardly surprising that is used mostly in the US but there is a lot more to the American southern dialect than that one contraction.

True: There is far more to dialect generally. That only underscores the significance of modern British English being practically indistinguishable from that taught and spoken in India, all of Western Europe, most of Africa and the remaining British colonies (just for the record: Indias population ALONE outnumbers the US (not just its Southern region) by a factor of 4, and Europes by a factor of 2.) Given all dialect involves, the nearly perfect equivalence between UK, Continental European, African and Indian English strongly suggest they are not just superficially and/or incidentally identical, but ACTUALLY so. That those speakers outnumber Southern US English speakers by an order of magnitude irrefutably establishes British English as the "larger" dialect by population as well as area.

If one instead considers ACCENT (despite your concurrence none should,) we are consequently forced to concede there is no single "Southern accent" but multiple closely related ones, and that one of them is at least as closely related to New England, UK and South African accents as to any Southern one, so the most tenable argument is that ALL US accents (Southern or otherwise) are subgroups of a British one by far the largest. That argument has the further advantage of being historical fact.

"Ya'll" is almost certainly the most widely occurring INSTANCE of the Southern dialect but, as you say, dialect involves far more than just a single word (which is not uniform even within that dialect, hence the recurring debate between Min, me et al.) In terms of dialect in toto, it is a safe bet Englishs mother tongue (or at least, the modern form of the original English language) is by far the most widely written and spoken.

The real question is how the modern form of the original "Germanic" language is also the LEAST spoken (and the answer is probabaly Hellenism.)