When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

[Igel]

34. Southern English was non-rhotic early on.

Northern English was rhotic.

For the same reason: They primarily came from areas of England that were rhotic or non-rhotic. There are still rhotic varieties of English, varieties of British English that sound more "American" (meaning mid-Atlantic) than others.

Think about where blacks in the South picked up English. From Southerners. Try as linguists may, they keep losing ground in trying to claim that AAVE is a creole. If it was--and a pidgin probably occurred early--it was certainly relexicalized and subject to a lot of acrolectal influence very early on. Most AAVE dialectal features are attested in older Southern dialects.

In fact, it's pretty much a slam dunk that African-American Vernacular English has increased its rate of change in the last 50 years or so. In other words, go back to 1920 and "black English" would sound a lot more like "Southern English" than it does now--and go back to 1820 and it would sound even more similar. De-segregation didn't speed up the rate of change; probably the desire to be distinct did (two Oaxacan villages that developed very hostile relations but spoke nearly identical dialects really changed quickly, in decades; the same has been observed in other areas, as well, from the Balkans to Australia).

Southern English, of course, has also had some changes in how it handles the replacement for /r/ and long vowels that resulted from diphthongs. It's not like either is unchanged--any more than British English is unchanged. (But most dialects have some archaisms.)

Dickens picked up on educated versus uneducated speech: Educated Southern speech tended to lose some of its features when Southerners went north for education.

It works the same in Latin American Spanish--there are large-scale dialectal features that derive from local Spanish features. Southern Spain didn't have the Castilian s/z distinction. So Latin American Spanish doesn't. In other cases, change went equally well in both areas--for example /j/ went from a "sh" to a "kh" sound.