Quote:
Originally Posted by masaegu
To everyone else, I was talking about my experience in the isolated areas of the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee and Kentucky in hearing English from over 200 years ago, the kind of English that has comepletely disappeared in England itself as England is too small and flat for the fossilization of language to occur. It has occured in Japan because, unlike in England, it has many mountain ranges and major rivers that kept people from moving around freely for centuries before the age of railroads and highways. (Looks like I got excited again and put it all back on here.)
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That's pretty cool. I remember when I was chatting with a friend of mine in Japan. He was really hardcore about learning English, and had gotten a family in Japan from the US to make a recording of them reading some sentences.
He asked me if I could tell where they were from (I am a collector of accents). I correctly responded: Kentucky.
KY and Tennessee natives have unique accents due to what you called the fossilization of language. The states were settled by a metric crapload of Scots-Irish and some English, IIRC.