Rush Limbaugh is of German ancestry from probably 19th century German settlers in Missouri and they rarely picked up the southernized accent. He has a little bit of it and can imitate it to perfection, though, as when he does Clinton.
Most Midwestern big-city accents are strongly influenced by German pronunciation. That’s mainly where the Germans immigrated to.
I was recently in the Arkansas Ozarks and heard a local town councilman speaking with the broadest accent I ever heard; he said ‘whar” for “where” and “thar” and “I was not awar of...” something. Then this other guy came along from the hills of North Carolina and guy # 2 spoke in exactly the same accent. You couldn’t have told them apart. So with that distance between them in terms of miles and area, I am assuming that that was the original way of speaking for what you might call Scots Irish hills people. It had just the slightest tinge of an English rural accent. I found it very interesting.
That is very cool. I bet you are right. That amount of distance, they were both more isolated populations, so that identical sound came from whence they both came!
I watched the Harrison Ford movie The Witness (about a murder in Amish country) before and after I lived a decade in Switzerland. I was stunned the second time I saw it to actually understand the Amish. They are still speaking Swiss German!