Howard Brazee wrote: > Lots of people were upset with Kevin Costner's accent - they probably > would have been quite happy with most modern English or even Tasmanian > accents. I lived a couple of years on the East side of the > Chesapeake - where are these islanders? I've also read that some > barrier reef residents have older accents than most residents of > England. Which doesn't make them closer to various Robin Hood > stories - but makes them candidates. If you wanted to be as > accurate as you can, where would you look for Robin Hood accents? > Smith & Tangiers? Right about where the Potomac empties into the Bay, a little south and to the east. Near Crisfield, on the Eastern shore. I think there are others, but those are the two I remember reading about & seeing on PBS shows. As for Robin Hood, if you check medieval sources, you'll find a dozen or more "Robin Hoods" spanning centuries & spanning the length and breadth of England. It was a fairly common name for an outlaw. I'd bet the original source stems from the resistance during the first 5 years of William the Conqueror's reign; there was a band that held out in the forests & marshes for quite a spell, led by a renegade nobleman. And that was a time when the Normans were busy dispossessing the Saxons that had survived Hastings, and the ordinary yeomanry to boot. But no matter how you slice it, Robin of the green wood would have been speaking virtually a different language from his descendents who colonized America first 4 to 5 centuries later. As well ask for the accent of Beowulf, or Julius Caesar. If you *still* aren't convinced, look for folks living in Nottingham who are country people & whose ancestors have been for centuries. You might consider their speech a faint approximation of that of Robin of Sherwood. That would be, what?, north Midlands? East of that, perhaps. FWIW, the usual claim is that Appalachia speaks something approximating an Elizabethan accent, not Robin's. But that really isn't true, especially as so many people came to the mountains from Scotland after The '45, as I said. The more recent claim is that the Bay islanders do so, and that is much more believable, as the islands were settled mostly before 1650, I believe, and stayed pretty isolated during the next 350 years. They certainly don't sound like other Marylanders or Virginians. Snarkhunter