  Here some contribution you may regard as trivial but are contributions all the same.:D How about the southern twang? It's without doubt African. Wanna know, why cos the accent is only in the south. In the north and Canada, nada.:D Words ending with ING minus G like in Talkin', goin' and so on. west African in origin.  Like Leofric said...poor and working class people in England/Britain and Ireland have been droppin' the g from words for hundreds of years...since before America was even a country... That's just how poorer people talked, probably because they weren't well educated and proper like the rich people. Ever heard of Cockney slang? Haven't you ever heard an Irish or British person say, top o' the mornin' to ya?:D Go watch some old movies set in England and stuff, go read some old books from 19th century England, some Charles Dickens or something. You will see that English people have been speakin' like that for a long long while, so that has nothing to do with Blacks or anything African.:rolleyes:     Also, if you haven ever noticed, most Blacks have a noticeably different accent from your average White Southerner in the first place, Blacks speak Ebonics. I imagine the Southern accent comes about from a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic influences, coupled with the fact that a lot of the people were poor farmers and not real well educated so they minced a lot of words and created a lot of slang and such. The North was also very homogenously Anglo and not much Celtic influence, unlike the South.     Think about it...Blacks were contained on plantations and not let off until after the Civil War in 1865/1866...Southerners had already been speaking with the Southern accent since long before the slaves were freed.... Most Whites never owned slaves, only a few really rich ones. So since they didn't own Black slaves, and all of the slaves were on plantations and not let out...Your average White Southerner barely ever would've had contact with Blacks before the end of the Civil War in 1865...Yet they already had the Southern accent... Your theory..it's not logical. There's no way a bunch of Blacks who were confined to plantations up until after the Civil War could've had that much impact on general White, Southern society/culture, and when they were finally freed they were the ones being assimilated/acculturated by the large, dominant, majority, well established White Southern culture, not the other way around. The acculturation process began on the boat ride over. They adopted our styles of clothing, our language(although they butcher it of course), our names, our religion, our foods, our instruments, our music, our customs, our holidays, our games and sports, etc... Plus, White Southerners already had that accent long before the slaves were freed. What I'm trying to say here is... FAIL.:D       Did I mention animal fables the likes of Roger rabbit and the multibillion dollar cartoons industri often featuring animal characters... African in origin.:D It's African tradition to tell children stories using animal characters.  In Africa, stories may explain, teach, instruct, and entertain. Animal fables are among the most popular. These give animals human ideas and feelings and emphasize close relationships with nature.   I'm sure that is all very true. But it's nothing unique to Black Africans. Indians in America did that too, as did Europeans. Ever heard of Puss In Boots? An old European fairy tale about a cat that wears boots and talks, it dates back to at least the 1600s.      The Uncle Remus stories about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were originally told about the Hare and the Hyena in Africa. Brer Tarrypin and Annancy of American stories were originally Tortoise and Anansi from Africa....    Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus? Fast forward to the 3 minute mark if you wanna see Brer Rabbit and don't want to listen to Uncle Remus sing zippity doo da'. Enjoy:D:rofl       YouTube - Tales of Brer Rabbit (01)                   YouTube - Tales of Brer Rabbit (02a)                   YouTube - Tales Of Brer Rabbit (02b)              Uncle Remus is my favorite negro:D