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I've heard more than one person in rural NC (or SC) that pronounced certain words in an English way, they had sort of a Southern accent for the most part though. It threw me off.
Well, according to Wikipedia, Eastern New England has one of the closer dialects to British English.
"This region of the United States historically had more contact with British varieties of English (being nearer to the Atlantic coast) and looked to England as a standard of prestige for their speech. Hence, the Eastern New England dialect has in some respects more similarities with British English than many other dialects of American English have."
Western New England dialect is related to the eastern one, obviously, so that might be another good contender. Also, I forgot to get a quote, but I read the Philadelphia/Delaware accent shares "word use" similarities with British English, like the meanings of certain words.
I also saw something pretty interesting on Wikitravel a while back. Apparently, "you can even find 17th century English accents if you look for them among the isolated island communities of the Chesapeake Bay." Now that's cool.
The Chesapeake area is where North and South kinda blend, so it's hard to really say which region that belongs to. Anyway, you should know, there is no real Northern accent, it's really diverse. There's Eastern and Western New England, New York, Baltimore, South Philly, and "Picksburg" to name a few. I don't really know about southern dialects, but I'm sure it's just as diverse. Actually, the East Coast in general is the most linguistically diverse region in the country, as you move farther west the accents get fewer and start to blend.
Wikipedia, "Regional dialects in North America are most strongly differentiated along the Eastern Seaboard." "Dialects on the East Coast of the continent are most diverse chiefly because the East Coast has been populated by English-speaking people longer than any other region. Western speech is much more homogeneous because it was settled by English speakers more recently, and so there has been less time for the West to diversify into a multiplicity of distinctive accents. A reason for the differences between (on the one hand) Eastern and (on the other hand) Midwestern and Western accents is that the East Coast areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of British English at a time when those varieties were undergoing changes. The interior of the country was settled by people who were no longer closely connected to England, as they had no access to the ocean during a time when journeys to Britain were always by sea, and so Western and inland speakers did not imitate the changes in speech from England."
"The tiny island community has attracted the attention of linguists because its people speak a unique English Restoration era dialect of American English, hypothesized to be nearly unchanged since the days of its first occupation by English colonists. Each of the original surnames and several of the present surnames on the island originated in the United Kingdom, predominantly from Scotland."
We should keep in mind that the British accent itself (London, i take it we are talking about (cockney)) has been changing much over time, and does not sound much like it did in, for example, Shakespeare's time much at all.
I've generally heard British actors say they find a Southern accent either and Bronx or Brooklyn accent about the hardest. Although some of "Old New England", like Katherine Hepburn or more patrician elderly Connecticut, is said to be a bit more like English.
Neither one. There are too many US accents and too many English ones.
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