Older Southern American English

One theory of historian David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed is that indentured servants chiefly from England's South and Midlands primarily settled the Tidewater (Virginia) region and poor Northern English and Ulster Scots families primarily settled the Appalachian Southern backcountry, so that the Tidewater and backcountry dialects were most directly influenced by those two immigrant populations, respectively.

[8] For example, an Appalachian Journal linguistic article reveals the flawed premises and misrepresentation of sources in Albion's Seed and asserts that the early Southern dialects are actually difficult to trace to any singular influence.

Contrarily, in Southern areas away from the major coasts and plantations (like Appalachia), on certain isolated islands, and variously among lower-class White speakers, accents mostly remained rhotic.

[11] Today, this linguistic divide on the basis of rhoticity, alongside other accent features, largely persists between Black versus White Southerners.

The dialect here is often thought to be a window into the past, with various claims having been made that it is either a surviving pocket of Elizabethan English or the way that the people of Scotch-Irish origin that make up a large fraction of the population there would have spoken back when they first migrated and settled there.

Though some of the distinctive words used in Appalachia have their origins in the Anglo-Scottish border region, a more realistic comparison is the way that some people in North America would have spoken in the colonial period.

The Lowcountry, most famously centering on the cities of Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, once constituted its own entirely unique English dialect region.

Traditionally often recognized as a Charleston accent, it included these additional features, most of which no longer exist today:[27] The "Down East" Outer Banks coastal region of Carteret County, North Carolina, and adjacent Pamlico Sound, including Ocracoke and Harkers Island, are known for additional features, some of which are still spoken today by generations-long residents of its unincorporated coastal and island communities, which have largely been geographically and economically isolated from the rest of North Carolina and the South since their first settlement by English-speaking Europeans.

This French dialect is spoken by many of the older members of the Cajun ethnic group and is said to be dying out, although it is experiencing a minor resurgence among younger Franco-Louisianaise.

A project devised by Old Dominion University Assistant Professor Dr. Bridget Anderson entitled Tidewater Voices: Conversations in Southeastern Virginia was initiated in late 2008.