8 Green, Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech, 13-16; see also “Virginia Names Spelt One Way and Called Another,” WMQ1 3 (1894), 371; for the pronunciation of family names in the west of England, see R. Pearse Cheyne, The Dialect of Hartland, Devonshire (London, 1891, copy in the West Country Collection, Exeter Library, Exeter). Cheyne notes, for example, that Pennington was pronounced Tennent in his corner of Devon; Galsworthy was Gals’ry; Southward was Shaddick; Cookwood became Cookooda.
9 Most but not all scholars agree. Bennett W. Green concluded from long study that “there seems to be a distinctly southern, southwestern and east midland character in the speech of the Virginians, little or none of the East-Anglian or Norfolk.” Cleanth Brooks, who has studied this subject for fifty years, agrees that “the language of the South almost certainly came from the south of England.” The dean of linguistic geographers, Hans Kurath, also concluded that “American regionalisms … are derived from British regional dialects,” and that the speech of the American south came from southeastern and southwestern England. Also of the same opinion were Raven McDavid and Philip Bruce.
A small minority of radical and Marxist language-historians, of whom the most vocal is Joey L. Dillard, strenuously disagree, and insist that the southern accent came from Africanisms, Indian borrowings, and material conditions in America. There is an element of truth in this argument, but it is not an alternative to the prevailing view.
See Green, Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech, 9; Brooks, The Language of the American South, 13; Hans J. Kurath, Studies in Area Linguistics (Bloomington, 1972), 66; Bruce, Social Life of Virginia, 68-69; Raven I. McDavid, Jr., “Historical, Regional and Social Variation,” JEL 1 (1967), 24-40; cf. J. L. Dillard, Toward a Social History of American English (Berlin, 1985), 52.