Question in regards to West Country English and American English.

[The Lawspeaker]

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I have listened to this song and it surprises me to find out how much this band from Somerset in parts sounds like a bunch of rednecks. I assume that this is their local dialect and I wondered whether people from the West Country played a role in the formation of spoken American English ?

[Beorn]

Allenson keeps reminding me that his "English friends" compare us real English to the American Rednecks.

I iz roight offended there mind.

EDIT: But in all seriousness, one may wish to peruse this article:Rhotic and_non-rhotic accents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_and_non-rhotic_accents)

[Joe McCarthy]

Hmmm, I'd need to double check but if memory serves the main point of departure for English colonists to Virginia and points elsewhere in the Southland was from the west of England. I do know that Puritan New Englanders came primarily from East Anglia.

[The Lawspeaker]

I was aware of those East Anglians and Lincolnshire. After all Bostom was named after Boston in Lincolnshire. The area around the Fens and East Anglia seemed to have been the Puritan heartland before large groups went to the America's.

But I wasn't aware of the fact that those that went South had come from the West Country. But's not impossible as the American English spoken in the North sounds very different from what I have heard from the American English that is spoken in the south which probably also has to do that the early colonists came from different areas in England.

[anonymaus]

I have listened to this song and it surprises me to find out how much this band from Somerset in parts sounds like a bunch of rednecks. I assume that this is their local dialect and I wondered whether people from the West Country played a role in the formation of spoken American English ?

Just a note of caution: the singing voice will often vary dramatically, both in tone and accent, from the singer's speaking voice. It's a known phenomenon that singers in the UK and OZ learned to sing, in part, by imitating popular American bands and so take on such an accent when singing. It's easy to read too much into it.

[Joe McCarthy]

i don't have access to my tome on British folkways among American colonists but a rudimentary Google search finds that some Southerners at least have roots in Somerset and East Anglia and surrounding areas were the main senders of Puritans.

[The Lawspeaker]

Ah. That explains the connections between spoken American English and the ways they seem to speak in those parts of England (of course there have been 300 years between it all) then.