British English And Early Modern English

The British English was the language which had the biggest influence on current American English. Thus, it is important to introduce the features of British English.
As we know from the History, the Germanic tribes, namely the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes invaded Britain and pushed away the Celtic language already spoken there. This way the Old English was developed. It is quite difficult to understand it even for the contemporary Native English speakers.
Next step in the development of English was the Normand invasion in 1066 bringing the French language, spoken by royalty through the following centuries until the English language became dominant again in 14th century. This period is called Middle English.
With a Great Vowel Shift, change of the pronunciation, and the invention of the printing the English spelling and grammar became fixed. This period is called Early Modern English.
From the beginning of the 19th century we speak about the Late Modern English mostly affected by Industrial Revolution and the fact that British Empire took over a large part of the world what had an impact on nowadays status of English as the most widespread language.
Even though the British and American English separated and had their own way of development, we can hear the influences in some American dialects from the languages of British Isles.
The Mountain dialects or, in another words, Appalachian dialects serve as a very good example. This kind of the southern dialects are consider to be more guttural and in the way how it sounds it ´ought to be classified as archaic.´ [online] and as some linguists assume today´s Appalachian dialect is ´ actually a sort of Scottish-flavoured Elizabethan English.´ [online]
Since the first wh...

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...e to concrete regional dialects and see their history and the way of developing through the last decades and how it is with these dialects nowadays.
We can start with a statement from the book A History of English Language by Albert C. Baugh who wrote ´All the regions except eastern New England, metropolitan New York, and Southern are often spoken of as constituting General American.´ and ´in this wider sense General American covers about two thirds of the area of the United States and contains two thirds of the total population.´ (Baugh, 1957, p. 442) Therefore, we should based this chapter right on this Baugh´s quote. Surely, it is not so easy to divide all the US varieties into four categories however we should consider the complexity of this theme and unfortunately the length of the bachelor thesis does not allow us to explore all the accents into such a depth.