You probably ought to read the book, and not depend too much on the movie.
However, to give you a little background on a relevant answer, until the advent of cable and satellite television, and better roads, there were people in the mountains of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina, to name just a few places, who still spoke an Elizabethan English.
They were descended from the original settlers in the 1600s and 1700s and were, pretty much, isolated, and pretty much away from any modernizing influences.
In the early 1970s I met a man from, I think, Arizona who told me of having gone to the area around Oneida, Tennessee, in the 1950s with a company intent on exploring for oil.
He told me his company had had to hire a local Baptist minister to translate, to interpret, because the indigenes still spoke that aforesaid Elizabethan English.
Let me also recommend a wonderful book by the superlative Poul Anderson, "The High Crusade," probably my favorite book by that prolific genius.
It might give you an idea how a relatively closed, and an intensely self-confident, society might resist those outside influences.
Anyway, the only way to enjoy those books and this movie is to suspend your disbelief.
Save your disbelief for the "news" programs.
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dakotasdad
14 years ago
Many African Americans pronounce ask as aks which I heard came from Old English. It was apparently passed down over the centuries.
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astockton_uk
9 years ago
You can blame Catherine Marshall's novel Christy for perpetuating the misconception. But while English as originally spoken in Appalachia was not the same English heard on the streets of New York and Philadelphia, it was not Elizabethan English.
Most of the first whites who moved into Appalachia were from Scotland and left their Old World homes after the Battle of Culloden (1746) put an end to any lingering hopes of restoring the Scottish monarchy. By 1746 Elizabethan English was long evolved. After all, the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 and twenty-first-century Americans have no trouble reading it.
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