Um…no offense, but wouldn’t Washington and Jefferson spoken with more or less British Accents? Perhaps slightly modified, yes, but still…
And here in Michigan suburbs, we have no direct “y’all” or “y’uns” type quote, we mainly say “you” or even just “everybody”, altough occasionally we let a y’all slip by.
You could call Mt Vernon and ask them how Washington and Jefferson sounded.
You don’t have to believe or like the answer but you’ll get an answer.
Are you driving with your eyes open or are you using The Force? - A. Foley
Y’all for one and one for y’all!
That’s the southern twist.
R.J.D.
Y’all need to say “you guys” 1 hundred times a day until you lose that slang.
R.J.D.
Wage wrote:
No offense taken, Wage.
The point I made in the earlier thread was that by the time of the Revolution, southern colonists had been here for nearly 200 years. (Jamestown, Virginia founded in first decade of the 1600’s.)
All of the conditions which would give rise to the Southern accent were present during that time (isolation on plantations, exposure to African influence, isolation from the mother tongue- no TV or movies, remember).
We also know (from soldiers’ letters home - written with phonic spellings) that by the time of the Civil War (four score and seven years after the Revolution) the accent seems to have been fully developed.
So what’s easier to believe: that the accent developed in the nearly 200 years between colonization and the Revolution, or that it magically appeared in the 80 odd years between the Revolution and the Civil war?
Sorry for the hijack, y’all. 
“phonic” should be “phonetic”. (Sorry --I am hooked on neither).
Y’all v. You all will never be a “Great Debate.”
R.J.D.
[Arms akimbo…]
Oh, yes it will!
I still think they would have retained somewhat British Accents (Washington and Jefferson and them all) in the 1770’s. Sure, there had been colonists there for a long time, but was that where they were from? Plus, I always thought Washington was British anyways, seeing as he was almost in the British army, but just wouldn’t accept the status of the equivalent of “Private”.
Guadere wrote:
I think the real reason is that I didn’t hear “you guys” at all when I was learning to speak. Anytime I heard the word “guy”, it was sex-specific. Nowadays, this might be hard to imagine, what with TV homogenizing our culture, but I was born in 1961, and growing up in the woods of East Texas I didn’t meet any yankees. Our only TV was a little black-and-white box that got only one channel, so we didn’t watch it much. We upgraded to color and got more channels in the 70’s.
It seems to me that the influence of TV is a major factor in how a kid sees the world. I think I was at the tail end of a generation that could still be culturally isolated.
Wage wrote:
Short answer: Yes.
Both Washington and Jefferson were born and raised on plantations in Virginia. They were “British” in the sense that they were British subjects until the time of the Revolution. That does not automatically mean that they spoke with what we would (today) consider a “British” accent. Please give the reasons you are so convinced that southern colonists, who had been in Virginia for over 160 years, would still retain a British accent.
(Again, my apologies for the hijack. If debate continues, I’ll open a separate thread.)