And what’s it called?
I saw a documentary on PBS or Discovery or somesuch about this location in the rural United States (I don’t remember if it was one town, or a couple of counties). They spoke a language that was more-or-less English, but with an odd syntax and a ridiculously thick Southern accent. IIRC the number of speakers was in the upper hundreds to low thousands, and dwindling quickly.
Is this ringing a bell for anyone here?
Possibly Boontling - Wikipedia
Could be Gullah. Gullah language - Wikipedia
Gullah was my first thought.
It might also have been a Louisiana dialect, maybe some dialect of French that was heavily influenced by “Southern” English.
Pennsylvania Dutch country is associated with a dialect of English that has significant German influences on grammar and vocabulary, but not with Southern accents.
Could it have been the Ocracoke Brogue?
There isn’t enough information to go on. There are a number of culturally unique groups that have really odd dialects with really strong accents. Many of those can still be found in pockets of Appalachia or isolated East Coast communities. Cajuns in Louisiana generally speak mostly English these days but they mix in lots of French or French derived words and speak with a unique accent.
This is just a guess but you might have heard people from the Eastern Shore of Virginia/Maryland and its islands. That is the peninsula that was mostly cut off from the mainland for hundreds of years until bridges could be built. Some people say that some of them still speak in an accent that is very similar to older English accents from the time when their ancestors left England. That probably isn’t true for the most part but it is true that the standard received pronunciation that many British people speak today wasn’t invented (yes, purposely invented) until well after English colonists were already established in the modern day U.S. Shakespeare himself may have sounded much closer to some Americans today than Queen Elizabeth II.
Here is a video of some Eastern Shore islanders talking among themselves. They are really hard to understand:
It was Boontling that I was thinking of, but thanks for piquing my interest in these other languages as well.
If you like documentaries about strange accents and cultures that are indigenous to the U.S. and still exist to some extent, check out the documentary Dance for the Chicken to learn about the very unusual true Cajun Mardis Gras.
Cajuns are still a strong presence in Louisiana although there aren’t very many people left that can speak pure Cajun French and there are only a handful of very old people that speak it as a first language. However, in some places you hear a mixed version of English and French that is uniquely theirs even among younger people. You won’t hear that accent anywhere else. I am from Louisiana and generally understand the various dialects and vocabulary just fine.
Still, I once was almost out of gas once in 1992 and had to take a side road to try and find a gas station in a rural area. I didn’t have any luck but there was a cajun family reunion that was spilling out in the street so I stopped to ask directions to the nearest gas station. I went through 5 people before I could get an interpreter even though they were supposedly speaking some English/French mix that may only exist in that one family. I never heard it before or since.
Boontling am spoke in a small isolated community in Northern California. Do they have a strong Southern accent there, as OP specifies?
I was wrong about the Southern accent bit. My apologies, my memory was hazy.
I credit my success to the awesome power of random guessing.
Good point. The majority (if not vast majority) of accent differences in the US are found on the East Coast, in areas that have been populated by English speakers since the 1600’s. The West Coast has only been heavily English-speaking since the mid 1800’s, much less time to develop regional distinctions. This is why, for example, there are quite distinctive Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia accents on the one hand but on the other hand, people from Sacramento, California sound almost exactly like people from Portland, Oregon who sound almost exactly like people from Anchorage, Alaska.
That’s also why US accents have significantly more regional variety than Australian accents, and why UK accents have even more variety than both.
I was in Panama and drove across the canal on its north end thinking I could get back across the mountains to the main western highway. I came to a community of people descended from English speakers who came to build the canal. English was their first language and mine too, but we communicated in Spanish and more clearly than we could in English. Instead of calling me a white person they called me a “redlegs.” Since I have heard that there are a couple of Caribbean islands where there were white slaves at one time and the white people there are still today considered the underlings.
Boontling is a bit artificial in that it was deliberately created as an insider dialect. It isn’t a relic of some ancient way of talking or anything like that.
That is very similar to the Southern English country accent that ranges from Norfolk and Suffolk, around the north of London via Somerset all the way to Cornwall. Few young people speak like that today- London habits have spread over the whole of southern England, but before the second world war, many working people in that strip of England would have spoken like that.
Norfolk accent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0wrI-vqh54
That sort of sounds like Newfie. That could be because of the West Country influence.
For me that’s like the lingual equivalent of not seeing the forest for the trees.
It takes so much concentration to understand each individual word that there’s not enough left over to really pay attention to the meaning of what’s being said as a whole.
However, I did get quite a chuckle out of the one and a half brothers joke.
Seemed easy enough to understand for me. Keep in mind that you are listening to a scratchy old record, which introduces its own problems unrelated to accent.