When did Americans lose their British accents? (war, influences, Britain)
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As explained in the following article, Americans didn't lose their 18th century British accents. When the two accents diverged can only be estimated in the absence of voice recordings, but why the two accents diverged apparently is well understood.
Reading the following article is when I discovered that the first known recording of a human voice was made by a Frenchman in 1860, and not by Thomas Edison in 1877.
Here's the explanation about the divergence of the British and American accents.
<<English colonists established their first permanent settlement in the New World at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, sounding very much like their countrymen back home. By the time we had recordings of both Americans and Brits some three centuries later (the first audio recording of a human voice was made in 1860), the sounds of English as spoken in the Old World and New World were very different. We're looking at a silent gap of some 300 years, so we can't say exactly when Americans first started to sound noticeably different from the British.
As for the "why," though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents is rhotacism. The General American accent is rhotic and speakers pronounce the r in words such as hard. The BBC-type British accent is non-rhotic, and speakers don't pronounce the r, leaving hard sounding more like hahd. Before and during the American Revolution, the English, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent.>>
Snobbery apparently explains how the two accents began to diverge:
<<Around the turn of the 18th 19th century, not long after the revolution, non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper and upper-middle classes. It was a signifier of class and status. This posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably. Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally "neutral" and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.>>
The article explains how this new British Received Pronunciation influenced accents in Boston and the South, but not among the western pioneers who settled the Northwest Territory, which included the Great Lakes states west of NY and PA.
<<After industrialization and the Civil War and well into the 20th century, political and economic power largely passed from the port cities and cotton regions to the manufacturing hubs of the Mid Atlantic and Midwest — New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, etc. The British elite had much less cultural and linguistic influence in these places, which were mostly populated by the Scots-Irish and other settlers from Northern Britain, and rhotic English was still spoken there. As industrialists in these cities became the self-made economic and political elites of the Industrial Era, Received Pronunciation lost its status and fizzled out in the U.S. The prevalent accent in the Rust Belt, though, got dubbed General American and spread across the states just as RP had in Britain. >>
Essentially, Americans never lost their British accents. The British deliberately changed their accents.
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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.
First, as to the 'why', when people who once spoke a common tongue are isolated, their respective linguistic evolutions will inevitably diverge. Different pressures in the different places will cause different directions for each dialect.
Second, those coming to North America were not a representative sampling of Britain. Certain parts of the mother country were more represented, and of course there were elements not from Britain - both indigenous and immigrant. This pushed the common American tongue in a different direction.
Third, historical phonology can be teased out by such things as examining contemporary rhymes or puns, as well as simple spelling - for example, that wasp used to be spelled waps tells us that metathesis changed the pronunciation and that the spelling eventually followed.
Fourth, yes, both North American and British pronunciations have changed. It's not just a one-way street.
Having grown up in New England and and having worked for a British company as an adult I came to realize that the Boston accent that everyone loves to make fun of still has it's roots in the Queen's English.
While I would describe the Boston accent dropping the "r" as harsh, I would say if you listen you can hear some similarities.
That's not to say that I think they sound identical, I'm saying there are some words that have their pronunciation based on the old English pronunciation
Having grown up in New England and and having worked for a British company as an adult I came to realize that the Boston accent that everyone loves to make fun of still has it's roots in the Queen's English.
While I would describe the Boston accent dropping the "r" as harsh, I would say if you listen you can hear some similarities.
That's not to say that I think they sound identical, I'm saying there are some words that have their pronunciation based on the old English pronunciation
If the article in post 1 is correct, the British influence on the Boston accent is not from "old English," but from the "Received Pronunciation" which took hold early in the 19th century among the upper levels of British society, and among officialdom.
<<Across the pond, many former colonists also adopted and imitated Received Pronunciation to show off their status. This happened especially in the port cities that still had close trading ties with England — Boston, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. From the Southeastern coast, the RP sound spread through much of the South along with plantation culture and wealth.>>
<<Boston shares these distinctions with both New York and Received Pronunciation, but the Midwest, for instance, has lost them entirely [or never had them if the above linked article suggests]....
The traditional Boston accent is non-rhotic, particularly in the early 1900s. Recent studies have shown that younger speakers use more of a rhotic accent than older speakers from the Boston region.>>
If the article in post 1 is correct, the British influence on the Boston accent is not from "old English," but from the "Received Pronunciation" which took hold early in the 19th century among the upper levels of British society, and among officialdom.
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.
There was a thread about this earlier in the year I think, lots of info. I think that's the one quoted but for some reason I think there was another.
Indeed the conclusion was that the british lost there original accent - primarily the pronounciation of the "r"'s ("hard" became "haad"), starting in the 15th and 16th century, while the new world immigrants kept the natural british accent in which the "r" stayed. All dealing with the transformation from Rhoticity to non-rhotic. The Americans in the large port cities - Boston and New York - more in touch with the "old country" adapted the new non-rhotic accent for a time. But the influence of TV changed these old world holdouts to American Standard rhotic, or the current New Yorker and Bostonian mix.
So yeah, in the middle ages the British sounded American (of course, using different terms).
If I had to guess, the accent of the folks that sailed on the Mayflower or to Jamestown probably didn't resemble a current English accent (either lower class or upper class) any more than a current accent from Virginia or Massachusetts does.
I've heard that the High Tiders accent (Hoi Toid) of the Outer Banks was thought to be as close of an example to what was here 300 years ago as anything else. Not sure if that's true though.
If you have travelled on the Eastern Shore in Delmarva (Delaware, Maryland and Virginia) far away from any cities, in the rural places that still exist untouched you will hear the accents of England. My UPS driver 25 years ago pronounced things so deep in his throat you had to know street he was saying or be completely bewildered.
Tangier Island in the Chesapeake has been widely studied for their speech. Appalachian people who spend their lives away from influences like out of state teachers in grade school speak English of a century ago or more.
When I moved, age 5, from Delaware to Florida I changed the way I talked because my classmates made fun of the way I said "wooder" meaning water. I can tell you are from Delmarva if you also say wooder instead of wadder. I've been doing genealogy and my fathers mothers line goes back to Jamestown and I can tell you that 90% of them never moved more than 50 miles per generation.
I like the way they talk, sounds like home. And speaking of "home" I have a Delmarva friend who says "hame" not home and heard that same "hame" pronunciation on the BBC a few nights ago and said to my hubby "that's sounds like Ginny."
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.
Something of an aside, but when a slightly dimwitted cousin from Weymouth (translation: South South Boston) visited us in California, she listened to a family conversation with her jaw hanging, then burst out, "Yoo peep'l awl tahk funny!" That we could barely understand her provided a second punchline.
Anyway, I have heard it said that the distinctive US Southern accent, particularly the aristocratic dialect, is actually quite close to Colonial American English and thus some good parallel to UK-English of the era.
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