[Wyrd bið ful aræd]

The Southern dialect is the closest to what Brits spoke like when they first came here what with the “y’alls” (ye all) and drawls and so forth.

[Wallace T.]

The upland Southern dialect is largely based on the Scottish lowlands dialect, first carried to Northern Ireland in the 17th Century, and to Appalachia and beyond in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. Andrew Jackson was a son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, as was John Calhoun. The Tidewater dialect, especially on some of the isolated islands on the North Carolina Outer Banks and the Chesapeake Bay islands belonging to Maryland and Virginia, has antecedents in the West Country of England. Additionally, the South (except Texas and New Orleans) never received the immigration waves from Germany, Scandinavia, the Catholic part of Ireland, and the Netherlands that the North experienced between 1820 and 1860. The 1880-1920 wave of Eastern and Southern Europeans also had only slight impact on the states of the former Confederacy. As a result, the South is the most British part of the United States, at least by ancestry.