> There was a distinct Midwestern accent by then.
The question is, is it the one that exists today, or was it
modified later?
> Most early settlers in the Midwest originated around Lancaster Co. >
PA, from where they went to the Potomac and Shenandoah valleys and
> from there either down the New River or the Monengehela to the Ohio
> Valley. This was the general settlement pattern until well into the
> 1800s and immigration from present day WV into Ohio never stopped,
> it still continues,
> The upper Midwest, i.e. the Great Lakes was largely settled from
> upper New England, upstate NY and Canada.
> The lower Ohio Valley and much of Missouri was largely settled from
> WV, VA, KY, etc.
> This was probably the most common pattern until the 1840s or so,
> when a new wave of German immigration moved into rural and small
> town Midwest.
And the Germans arrived thought New York in large numbers, in many
parts of the Midwest people of German extraction were the largest
component until recently.
> Irish immigration in the 1840s was mainly urban,
> although many had been farmer, they arrived penniless and couldn't
> afford to set up farms. many couldn't even afford to get out of
> Boston, NYC and Philly.
> There was a large group in far upstate NY who got off the boar in
> Montreal and walked to the US from there. The story I heard was
> they were rejected from the US in Boston and sent to Canada, they
> were refused entry into Canada until they got the idea of going
> over to the US from there.
>
You're making the assumption that the first settlers will determine
the language. That's not certain.
Besides, in all I read on /r/ in American English, they make a
semantic slide. They are looking for the origin as the American
English *retroflex* /r/ in the *rhotic* dialects of Britain. But none
of those AFAIK have *retroflex* /r/ which are the cause of the
American English *r-colored vowels*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel#R-colored_vowel
'A vowel may have either the tip or blade of the tongue turned up
during at least part of the articulation of the vowel (a retroflex
articulation) or with the tip of the tongue down and the back of the
tongue bunched. Both articulations produce basically the same auditory
effect, a lowering in frequency of the third formant. Although they
are rarely attested, they occur in some non-standard varieties of
Dutch and in a number of rhotic accents of English like General
American. The English vowel may be analyzed phonemically as an
underlying /&r/ rather than a syllabic consonant.'
Note that the article does not mention English dialects with retroflex
r's and r-colored vowels other than American, it seems to just assume
they must exist. On the other hand, retroflex r's and r-colored vowels
do exist in at least one Dutch dialect (calling it a 'non-standard
variety' won't make the dialect of Leyden go away, most Dutch
immigrants were pretty non-standard anyway), as you heard on YouTube.
Now, if there is a candidate dialect on the British Isles with
retroflex r's and r-colored vowels which anyone wants to claim as the
ancestor of the American English retroflex r's and r-colored vowels,
the I'd like to hear what and where it is. Otherwise I'll keep on
maintaining that the Americans are basically English-speaking Dutch.
Other than that, the article seems for some reason to confuse
r-colored vowels with syllabic r's, but that does not influence my
argument.
Torsten