[elbucko]

Thanks for your post regarding the origins of accents in the South. I have a more than passing interest in accents and their origins and appreciate your reference to a resource.

[Welsh Rabbit]

I found most of the Confederacy of Dunces reference I made online:
"There is a certain New Orleans city accent...associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, New Jersey, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans." --John Kennedy O'Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces