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I can see the connection to New Zealand and Australia, but how did it descend in to something so far from similar in the Americas? How could it have changed that much in a mere couple hundreds of years? I know it has obviously changed within the UK over that time too, but it just seems so far removed.
I can see the connection to New Zealand and Australia, but how did it descend in to something so far from similar in the Americas? How could it have changed that much in a mere couple hundreds of years? I know it has obviously changed within the UK over that time too, but it just seems so far removed.
The US was settled quite a bit earlier than NZ and AU by English speakers. The language has also been influenced by a lot more immigrants over a longer period of time. Also, as you mentioned, the language in the UK as changed as well and a lot of American English retains some things no longer in British English. The English language is continuing to change to this day. I can't speak for the other countries but in the US, new accents are still developing. Two examples of this are the California Vowel Shift and the quite unique North Cities Vowels shifts which involves vowels that have not changed in the last 1000 years elsewhere in English.
North American English is the more conservative of the English dialects. It is British English that has undergone the most change over the centuries. Since Australian and New Zealand were settled later, those changes were brought to those countries. Certain later developments in British English, such as non-Rhoticism, did cross the Atlantic to parts of America.
The US was settled quite a bit earlier than NZ and AU by English speakers. The language has also been influenced by a lot more immigrants over a longer period of time. Also, as you mentioned, the language in the UK as changed as well and a lot of American English retains some things no longer in British English. The English language is continuing to change to this day. I can't speak for the other countries but in the US, new accents are still developing. Two examples of this are the California Vowel Shift and the quite unique North Cities Vowels shifts which involves vowels that have not changed in the last 1000 years elsewhere in English.
I too think that it is the influence of the large amount of immigrants to the USA that changed the American accent to differ more from the British one.
I think, due the same reason of what happened with Portuguese in Brazil and other former colonies of Portugal such as Angola and East Timor. The colonisation in both USA and Brazil happened much earlier, thus retaining features no longer in use in the former metropolises. Moreover, the contact with native tribes and inmigrants may perform a huge influence in the language. As for Brazil, the saying "bom dia" ("good morning") as "bon gee-ah", instead of "bon dee-ah", like in Portugal, is a direct influence of the kiMbundu language, spoken by former slaves coming from the area which nowadays is Angola.
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