British dialect that sounds southern?

Question

someone told me that there is a particular british dialect that sounds strikingly similar to an american southern accent. Does anyone know what this is called?

Answer 1

British rock singer, Mick Jagger, has an accent that sounds somewhat American Southern. He was born in Dartford, Kent in southeastern England,  an area where a lot of Jutes (a Germanic tribe from Northern Denmark) settled in ancient times.  

Answer 2

All North American English is an amalgamation of various British(English, Welsh, Scottish, & Irish) dialects.  And there are even huge differences within the varieties of Southern US English to pinpoint an exact location in the UK where they derived.  For the most part you have to trace the history of whom settled in a particular region to identify which British dialect most closely correlates to that area.

For example, the Appalachian variety -- spoken along both sides of the Appalachian mountain range -- was mainly settled by Scottish immigrates (chiefly the Scotts-Irish, or "Ulster Scotts") shortly before the Revolutionary War.  Some isolated pockets along that mountain range still employ Elizabethian & Jacobine pronouncations and Shakespeare-esque slang which is archaic to the rest of the entire English-speaking world because they lived in remote areas which didn't assimilate at the same pace into mainstream American or global Anglophone culture as most other varieties.  

Because of this influx of Scotish/Irish folk in the South, this is one reason why most Southerns (except for those in more rurual areas of GA) have such a profound pronouncation of the [r] phoneme in their speech.  And as people descended from these early immigrants pushed westward, they brought this strong [r] sound with them.  The best example is Texas: most of the earliest Anglophones to arrive there with Stephen F. Austin in the early 1800s mainly came from TN or KY.  That's why the TX & TN accents have so many features in common, and thus both locations can trace their lingustic heritage to the Scotts who came in the mid-to-late 18th century.  

I provided a good link below that details factors which contributed to overall standard US dialects.