The original article doesn't debunk it, it states without giving a single citation that "claims about the accents of the Appalachian Mountains, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region and Virginia's Tangier Island sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists."
Most likely his source is a single linguist, Dr. Michael Montgomery, who is from Knoxville and has written several articles on "Appalachian English", but which articles actually pertain only to East Tennessee rural english, and not other parts of the Appalachians.
He does a good summary of the language of that region and can be reasonably considered an expert. He makes a convincing argument that much of the novel vocabulary is Scotch-Irish vocabulary from the early settlers of the area. He makes a less convincing argument that since the mountain people of the region are not familiar with idioms of Shakespeare, their speech is not related in any way to Elizabethan English. Elizabethan era people did not speak exactly the way Shakespeare wrote though. Pilgrims so desperate from religious oppression by the Church of England at the time to would not necessarily be experts in Shakespearean idioms.
Dr. Montgomery's articles are certainly worth a read and make many reasonable arguments about the dialects he is familiar with. The notion that the idea that any archaic language dialects have influenced certain dialect pockets that have survived to the present has been debunked, and such an opinion is held by all linguists is not established, cited or proven by the article.
Most likely his source is a single linguist, Dr. Michael Montgomery, who is from Knoxville and has written several articles on "Appalachian English", but which articles actually pertain only to East Tennessee rural english, and not other parts of the Appalachians.
Here are all his articles on the topic:
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/articles.html
He does a good summary of the language of that region and can be reasonably considered an expert. He makes a convincing argument that much of the novel vocabulary is Scotch-Irish vocabulary from the early settlers of the area. He makes a less convincing argument that since the mountain people of the region are not familiar with idioms of Shakespeare, their speech is not related in any way to Elizabethan English. Elizabethan era people did not speak exactly the way Shakespeare wrote though. Pilgrims so desperate from religious oppression by the Church of England at the time to would not necessarily be experts in Shakespearean idioms.
Dr. Montgomery's articles are certainly worth a read and make many reasonable arguments about the dialects he is familiar with. The notion that the idea that any archaic language dialects have influenced certain dialect pockets that have survived to the present has been debunked, and such an opinion is held by all linguists is not established, cited or proven by the article.