was reported earliest in Virginia. Plantation South Older speech of the Plantation South included those features above, plus: Non-rhoticity: R-dropping historically occurred in the greater central sections of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and in coastal Texas and some other coastal communities of the Gulf states. Rhoticity (or r-fulness) was more likely in the southernmost sections of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, as well as in northern Florida, western Louisiana, and eastern Texas. Trap–bath split: Words like bath, dance, and ask, used a different vowel () than words like trap, cat, and rag (). A similarly organized (though different-sounding) split occurs in Standard British English. , as in face, was inconsistently pronounced . , as in goat, was inconsistently pronounced . , as in strut, was conservative. , as in choice, was . , as in nurse, was predominantly up-gliding, non-rhotic in the "Deep South" (all the Plantation South except North Carolina). Appalachia Due to the former isolation of some regions of the Appalachian South, a unique Appalachian accent developed. This dialect is rhotic, meaning speakers consistently preserve the historical phoneme . Moreover, Appalachians may even insert it innovatively into certain words (for example, "worsh" or "warsh" for "wash"). The Southern Appalachian dialect could be heard, as its name implies, in north Georgia, north Alabama, east Tennessee, northwestern South Carolina, western North Carolina, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, western Maryland, and West Virginia. Southern Appalachian speech patterns, however, are not entirely confined to the mountain regions previously listed. The dialect here is often thought to be a window into the past, with various claims being made that it is either a pocket of Elizabethan English which survived or the way that the Scots-Irish-origin people that make up a large fraction of the population there would have spoken. However, these are both incorrect. Though some of the distinctive words used in Appalachia have their origins in the Anglo-Scottish border region, a more realistic comparison is the way that some people in North America would have spoken in the colonial period. Researchers have noted that the dialect retains a lot of vocabulary with roots in "Early Modern English" owing to the make-up of the early European settlers to the area. Charleston The Lowcountry, most famously centering on the cities of Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, once constituted its own entirely unique English dialect region. Traditionally often recognized as a Charleston accent, it included these