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Did the 18th-century Virginians George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry speak with what we now call a "Southern accent"? Probably not.

To be sure, the colonial period saw some regional differences in American speech. With no audio recordings of early Americans, we have to rely on written accounts, and several 18th-century travelers noted that white Virginians spoke with the "Sussex accent" of their native counties in southern and western England.

And, as Bill Bryson points out in his book "Made in America," as early as the 1600s, observers were noting that Southerners said "holp" for "help" and used "y'all" for the plural "you."

Two local Southern dialects had also emerged by the late 1700s. Scots-Irish immigrants in Appalachia spoke with the inflections of their native Scotland and northern Ireland, and immigrants to Tangier and Smith Islands in Chesapeake Bay, who had come from the West Country of England, pronounced "s" as "z" ("zider" for "cider") and "tide" as "toid."

By contrast, most early settlers of New England came from a different region of England, East Anglia, and visitors to colonial Massachusetts remarked on the resemblance between the "New England twang" and the "Norfolk whine" of East Anglia.

But, despite these specific variations, what most impressed colonial observers was the surprising UNIFORMITY of American speech.

In 1770, for instance, William Eddis found it amazing that "the language of the immediate descendants of such a promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform and unadulterated." Another contemporary observer stated plainly, "There is no dialect in all of North America."

In fact, it wasn't until after the Civil War that observers began to describe a distinct Southern drawl. In 1866, a Northerner spoke of New Orleans lawyers' having "a marked southern accent." Ten years later, a story described a young Alabama woman whose words "came so slowly from her careless lips, and lingered so softly on the air. (Oh, the sweet voices of the South!)."

In fact, many of the features we now associate with "the sweet voices of the South," such as the pronunciation of "i" as "ah" and "pen" as "pin," and of the final "r" sound as "ah," as in "fah" for "for," didn't fully develop until the late 1800s.

So, when Jefferson read aloud the first phrase of his Declaration of Independence, it's unlikely that he said, "Win in the cawes of human EEvints." But perhaps he did toy with writing, "Y'all are created equal."

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Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to WordGuy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

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