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They're a bit like Newfoundland accents up in Canada, too.
Yes.
The woman in the first video at 1:42 to 1:48 is the only one who sounds "Australian" to these Aussie ears. A soft Boston accent is pretty close to an urban Australian accent.
Last edited by Bakery Hill; 02-05-2016 at 05:54 PM..
Spot on Bay, The West Country ( Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset) are like a different country to the South East of England and London. Dorset is a gem, ( for any tourist)
The woman in the first video at 1:42 to 1:48 is the only one who sounds "Australian" to these Aussie ears. A soft Boston accent is pretty close to an urban Australian accent.
The American accents of any variety all have multiple British origins. The reason no existing US accent sounds like one Brit accent is because they got mixed up through settlers.
No Anglo accent is replicated anywhere in the world. They are all unique because they evolved through their own circumstances.
And it is inaccurate to believe that Americans don't maintain British Isles pronunciation. We absolutely do in both long vowels, short vowels, and consonants. What we don't have is an equivalent of Received Pronunciation because RP is a contrived accent.
Anywhere in the US you find tons of British Isles influence. Most of the US keeps English short vowels. American accents just happen to have a few uniquely American features such as nasal tensing of the short A.
However I will say American English is more Irish and Scottish influenced in modernity than English. Especially the further West you go. And of course some uniquely American continental pronunciations evolved such as the Canadian Vowel Shift (where milk sounds like malk) but those aren't super spread out to where they are significant enough to be called universal. But if you want to find someone American sounding in the British Isles, you're more likely to find it in Scotland or Ireland than in England. The closest thing to a British standard accent in the US is found in the South. Boston accents are too uniquely isolated to North and East England pronunciation phonology that they can't count as "more British" plus Boston accents contain nasal short A tensing which is VERY American and doesn't exist in England.
Heck, Canadian Raising has Scottish and South African equivalents.
Last edited by EddieOlSkool; 01-06-2017 at 10:57 AM..
The American accents of any variety all have multiple British origins. The reason no existing US accent sounds like one Brit accent is because they got mixed up through settlers.
No Anglo accent is replicated anywhere in the world. They are all unique because they evolved through their own circumstances.
And it is inaccurate to believe that Americans don't maintain British Isles pronunciation. We absolutely do in both long vowels, short vowels, and consonants. What we don't have is an equivalent of Received Pronunciation because RP is a contrived accent.
Anywhere in the US you find tons of British Isles influence. Most of the US keeps English short vowels. American accents just happen to have a few uniquely American features such as nasal tensing of the short A.
However I will say American English is more Irish and Scottish influenced in modernity than English. Especially the further West you go. And of course some uniquely American continental pronunciations evolved such as the Canadian Vowel Shift (where milk sounds like malk) but those aren't super spread out to where they are significant enough to be called universal. But if you want to find someone American sounding in the British Isles, you're more likely to find it in Scotland or Ireland than in England. The closest thing to a British standard accent in the US is found in the South. Boston accents are too uniquely isolated to North and East England pronunciation phonology that they can't count as "more British" plus Boston accents contain nasal short A tensing which is VERY American and doesn't exist in England.
Heck, Canadian Raising has Scottish and South African equivalents.
+1. Don't recognise much of an English influence on American accents personally.
+1. Don't recognise much of an English influence on American accents personally.
Yeah I have heard that the heavy Scottish and Irish immigration waves changed the American accent to a less English sound. After all we have more Scottish and Irish phonology than English.
Some accents that "sound" English in the US like Boston Brahmin aren't even organic. They were contrived simply for sounding partially American and partially English. The Boston Brahmin accent is known as Transatlantic English and was spoken in a lot of older movies. It's the "old timey " accent that Americans mistakenly believe was actually widely spoken when in reality it was mostly actors and upper crust New England people.
Never underestimate the intentional upper crust language deviations. Many high society types will intentionally speak in ways they find sound "more educated" and many times they do so for no actual necessary reason other than to portray a certain image.
In modernity this is seen in actors. In the US, actors all develop a contrived Midwest accent. Some who grew up in the Deep South sound like they're from central Indiana simply because to their own ears it sounds better.
I will say that from accent clips of old English people (I don't mean "Old English " I meant elderly) , the Sussex accent around the late 1800s and early 1900s sounds a lot like General American today. Same with a lot of West Country old folk dialects and Ulster Scots, Northern Irish accents.
Heck, the reason I think the English are so good at sounding like fake Americans is because all you really need to do is take a RP accent, make it rhotic, and say your t's like d's. It really doesn't need much else to sound American.
On the other hand, for an American to learn RP, they have to learn proper vowel transitional rhoticity, coda position non-rhoticity, and learn new consonant sounds they are not even used to. Also we have to rid ourselves of distinctly American features (nasal short A being one of them) whereas Brits can maintain much RP pronunciations and people wouldn't bat an eyelash because in any given part of the US, standard English features exist, anyway. Whereas there is no part of England where man sounds like "meean" (like it does in Boston and the Midwest).
sounds Aussie to me, nothing like the westcountry accent and I know people who speak with a broad Devon accent.= and that is nothing like it.
I've never heard a Westcountry accent like that either!
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