When did Americans lose their British accents? (1930s, state, Spanish)
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I'd love to know when we lost our British accents or actually, when and how did each country develop their accents. No way can we ever know. I've heard the Boston accent and it sounds harsh and mostly ugly to me, rather nasal, unlike the British except for the "r".
Funny, but if you go to Somerset in England, you can sometimes still hear the old British accent. I was there a few years ago and thought I was speaking with another American until he said something that let the cat out of the bag that he was a Brit. It was almost exactly like an American accent--so we possess something close to, or the same as, the old British accent. They pronounced the "r" and their speech had the same intonation as ours. Maybe we didn't change much after all.
However I have read that the Somerset accent is looked down upon and so is fading away. It's not posh enough, not the Queen's English. If you want to go onto You Tube I think you can hear examples of the Somerset accent. (Somerset is sort of an out of the way area, rural, and it's out just before you get to Cornwall in the south west of England.)
On the other hand, if you go to the North, some of the old timers in places like Lancashire really use a strong "R". Like a brrrrr, the way it sounds in Scotland. I think the use of the "r" is the normal, old way but you have to go to Somerset or North almost to Scotland to still hear it.
Wait, the British came over to America, yes, but so did boatloads of Germans. I’m a product of that, and don’t forget the Dutch in New York, I got some of that too.
There has to be some sort of effect that a great melting pot had on our accents.
And language does change. Did the Brits in England posh up their accent so they wouldn’t sound like us? I somehow really doubt that. I think more along the lines that it would be a natural change in language.
In Britain there are English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish accents, and then you have numerous local accents, in England for instance you have Cockney, Scouse (Liverpool), Lancashire (Manchester), Geordie (Newcastle), Brum (Birmingham), Yorkshire, West Country (Bristol) etc etc.
Accent can also denote class, and I think what you are referring to, is an English upper class refined accent, where as regional accents are far more common in Braitain.
<<One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”>>
This BBC article seems to reflect much of what I've concluded after several hours of research.
An "Advanced Search" in this forum for "Received Pronunciation," the British dialect that replaced the British dialect exported to the U.S. in the 18th century, produced this thread.
The last post was in 2010. Many of the posts have apparent inaccuracies, but I found most interesting posts 10; 17 (discusses regional English accents similar to the American accent); post 36 (discusses an American named Ray Hicks, whose speech allegedly (not so) resembled Elizabethan English; I linked a Youtube video of Hicks below); post 42 (a very interesting, seemingly authoritative post written by a linguistic historian); post 50 (with this interesting claim: "Scholars generally agree now thanks to vowel analysis in poetry that Shakespeare spoke in what we might think of today as a Mid Western American accent."); and post 53 (claims that Tangier Island in the Chesapeake still has speakers of original American English, a claim disputed in the Wikipedia article on Tangier Island and all other research that I've read).
<<The stories were all the better thanks to his distinctive manner of speech, which was as much a holdover from the early Scots-Irish and English pioneers as his Jack tales. His brogue was more than a drawl; it carried the familiar mountain twang, but was punctuated with guttural stops reminiscent of those heard in speech on the Yorkshire or Scottish moors. As one of his daughters said, “I don’t know how it popped up in Daddy…. He has the dialogue that come over with the ships from Shakespeare’s country.” Scholars have referred to Hicks’ unique manner of speaking as close to the purest form of the dialect spoken during the time of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.>>
<<Ray Hicks, named a national treasure by the National Endowment for the Arts because of his uncanny ability to tell stories rooted in medieval folklore in hillbilly-honed Elizabethan English with Chaucerian flourishes, has died. He was 80.>>
Many, if not all, episodes of Robert McNeil's PBS series, "The Story of English," are available on Youtube. Here's apparently episode 1. Near the end of the episode, McNeil explains (at about the 52 minute mark) that early printers spelled words phonetically, so we know how words were pronounced.
At the 33-minute mark of this next episode, McNeill says Ray Hicks does NOT speak Elizabethan English, but Scots Irish English, which in a moderated form has become the predominant dialect of the Sun Belt, according to McNeil.
<<The British Library has completed a new recording of 75 minutes of the Bard's most famous scenes, speeches and sonnets, all performed in the original pronunciation of Shakespeare's time. That accent sound a little more Edinburgh, sometimes even Appalachia, than Lord Olivier.>>
Shakespeare's dialect was "Original Pronunciation."
<<What linguists call “Original Pronunciation” (OP), the actual Shakespeare accent, had a flavor all its own, likely combining, to our modern ears, “flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent,” as Ben Crystal tells NPR, “and indeed American and in fact Australian, too.”>>
Here's the Wikipedia article on "Received Pronunciation," or the King's/Queen's English, that supplanted the Original Pronunciation that so heavily influenced the American dialect.
<<Received Pronunciation (often referred to as RP), or the Queen's/King's English,[1] is the accent traditionally regarded as the standard for British English. For over a century there has been argument over issues such as the definition of RP, whether it is geographically neutral, how many speakers there are, whether sub-varieties exist, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard and how the accent has changed over time.[2] RP is an accent, and so the study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation; other areas relevant to the study of language standards such as vocabulary, grammar and style are not considered....
According to Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965), the correct term is "'the Received Pronunciation'. The word 'received' conveys its original meaning of 'accepted' or 'approved', as in 'received wisdom'."[7]
RP has most in common with the dialects of South East Midlands, namely London, Oxford and Cambridge.[8] By the end of the 15th century, "Standard English" was established in the City of London, though it did not begin to resemble RP until the late 19th century.[9][10]
BTW, found this web page demonstrating the Confederate rebel yell of Civil War fame. The rebel yell was likely much more impressive when made by thousands of young men charging at you in a life-or-death struggle.
The British were not the only colonists. French, Dutch, and Spain colonized America.
The Dutch were in New Amsterdam in what is now Albany, NY, by 1600, then the British overcame the Dutch and ruled there. It stands to reason there was a homogenized Latin and Dutch language being used.
The french L'Acadians from the east coast of Canada were expelled and found themselves resettling in Louisiana and became known as Cajuns. They have distinct dialects.
The simple explanations is that the languages of immigrants from all over the world melded into an indistinct dialect of Latin English in America. In my view, the Queen's English has ever been predominant in America.
Honestly, I really didn't read what was in the book. It's purely my anecdotal evidence having grown up on the south shore of Massachusetts and my travels to England.
I was coming into this thread to post the same thing.
I too have noticed some similarities with the English accent and the Boston accent. Wasn't ever sure if they were related or just a coincidence.
I was coming into this thread to post the same thing.
I too have noticed some similarities with the English accent and the Boston accent. Wasn't ever sure if they were related or just a coincidence.
To me the Boston accent and the English accent don't sound much alike except for the dropping of the "r".
The Bostonians, as we've said, copied the new English accent because they wanted to sound upper class. But that wasn't they way they had originally spoken, just as it was not the way the English had originally spoken.
If you want to hear an accent from Boston that really does sound posh and upper class, it would probably be the Boston Brahmin accent. Probably extinct now, but it sounds more like the current English accent to me, sounds very posh and the Brahmins were supposedly above us all. You know,
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.[6][7]
My childhood summers were spent on Harker's Island, North Carolina where the local dialect is said to be very close to a specific region of England. The accent, sentence structure, and pronunciation of certain words *is* very distinct from the usual N.C. accent of those living in the rest of the state. (Although, to be honest, there are so many different accents in mainland N.C., too.)
The island had been cut off from the mainland for so long that the English spoken there became a linguistic isolate. Sadly, the accent is dying out on Harker's and the other barrier islands, but last time I revisited the island as an adult, I could hear it still when talking with the locals. Some say that's it's difficult to understand, but since I grew up hearing it, I don't have a difficult understand the older folks who still speak that way.
There are a few isolated pockets up in the Appalachian mountains where the older folks are said to speak a variant of English that goes back to the days when the first white settlers came to the region.
Last edited by Formerly Known As Twenty; 10-13-2020 at 04:44 PM..
The thing is despite decades of Hollywood portraying the English accent as some kind of foppish upper class twang (which only a very small percentage of English people actually have) there never has been 'A' British accent, my guess is the early British settlers in the USA probably had a multitude of very different accents in the first place!?
Ive never known Hollywood have an English character in its films with an accent like this for example:-
Yet there are plenty of English people that have that accent.
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Solly says — Be nice!
