Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?

Also, IIRC, the colonies tended to have a commonality in heritage of the colonists, too. E.g. at one time, Australia had a "large number" of criminals, there are quite a lot of Dutch in NZ -- there are large parts of NZ with very strong Scots heritage -- New York is famous for Irish heritage, other parts of USA are famous for German, etc. The UK hasn't really had the same homogenisation outside the big cities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suVxmPpyR9s

Edit: My experience (and that of other Aussies traveling to America) seems to be that you have to slightly Americanise the way you speak to be understood easily.

We pick up the dialect of the people that we are exposed to as we learn speech, so likely back then family was more influential then now, especially if you lived in the country.

And, of course, how we speak was influenced by the native population. I grew up near the Onondaga Reservation in New York and probably speak a bit like the people who live there.

Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent

In this case I wonder which Brazilian accent? I guess it would be Rio accent or some Northeastern accent.

In case anyone is curious the hear the differences, this page contains recordings of a Portuguese sentence spoken by people of several different areas:

http://www.learningportuguese.co.uk/audio/compare-accents.ht...

Nowadays, the pronunciation of Lisbon (center-south) actually loses information (deemphasizing and even omitting some vowels and losing other distinctions like -om/-am into ão) wrt others, so it's hard to imagine evolution to have happened the other way.

Hahahahahaha. Oh, good one.

Spoken like someone who has never been here. There are a ton of different accents: northeastern, midwestern, southern, californian, northwestern are the broad top level ones and the distill even further depending on where you are in those areas. For example, people from Minnesota and people from Indiana clearly sound different (Indiana having a slight twang or drawl, while Minnesota sounding mildly Norwegian). It's a big contrast with the likes of Strong Island in New York. Or with Texas.

"Standard" French was once just the local dialect of Isle-de-France, a small region including Paris, but "French", even in France today, is but a loose collection of mutually-comprehensible dialects. Canadian French has its own little quirks, though, in that it had to create its own vocabulary not only for the uniquely North American flora, fauna and landscape, but also for new items of technology that emerged while we were almost without communication with France. F'rinstance, to the French ear, a French Canadian would seem to indicate that he had just created a park (in the public gardens sense) out of his tank (armoured and armed military vehicle) rather than that he'd just parked his car.

It may very well be that Time reported that, as I have read that statement in various places, but I have also read disagreements with that statement.

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/886/

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=380983

http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodica...

http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C&pg=PA126&#...

It's actually rather unlikely that any current dialect of American English has any strict correspondence to the various dialects that were spoken in America at the time of the Revolution.

The difference is probably about as pronounced (if not moreso) as the difference between a middle class non-regional East Coast American versus the same on the West Coast.

It's true, though, it wasn't until I lived overseas that I could start to pick up the differences. And as for the city/country difference, I would say it is more a function of education level than geography.

That said, I think there will be no more divergence in Australian accents because of high population mobility and nationalised TV broadcasting.

- the gas/pass divide: in many British accents pass is pronounced like 'pahs', but gas retains the same vowel as in American accents. gas and pass will basically always rhyme in America, but in Britain it'll depend on where you are. In RP they won't rhyme. In the 18th century, it was the same sound everywhere, the one Americans retained.

- the long o, in words like go, home, etc. changed in many British accents from [ou] to [eu]. If you can imagine a very "British", RP pronunciation of home, that's the difference you hear.

For example, there was a time when the K in words like "knee" and "knight" became silent. We can pinpoint this time by looking for Ks in front of words, that never used to start with K. The writer doesn't pronounce the K in "kn" any longer, but remembers that proper spelling has a K for some words. Since pronunciation doesn't help, she has to rote learn those words. And occasionally will make a mistake.

Another one, especially in fairly recent times, is too look for prescriptive texts, that lament this or that development in the language.

New England was settled by a different group of English than various parts of the South. Therefore the dialects were already different before they came here.

Caribbean English accents also remind me of Scottish.

I wonder if there were certain areas of the British Empire that had disproportionate Scottish influence.

Free vs Three has been a constant battle for me. I found these extremely difficult to differentiate aurally and three very hard to make orally. This was a constant source of me being corrected throughout school.

British people can certainly tell the difference and I've learnt it well enough to make the difference in pronunciation and to hear it enough to teach it to my son and correct him - he doesn't appear to have my problem with it (he's in infant school).

Chav English and other dialects ignore the difference.

That being said, one shouldn't be deceived into thinking that there is a single Canadian English dialect or accent -- we have a number of regional variants. The upper crust of both Ontario and Quebec (the former Upper and Lower Canada) both spoke with an essentially North American vocabulary and a "mid-Atlantic" accent (the sort of halfway meeting between RP and mid-American that, say, Deutche Welle would use for its English-language world news service). The lower classes in the same provinces were, like the American south, far more heavily influenced by Cornish, Kentish, Geordie, Scots and Scottish and Irish gaelic -- but without the black feedback loop. Nova Scotia has several accents, ranging from the heavily Gaelic Cape Breton to the German Lunenberg. Newfoundland "English" is a language of its own -- the accent is a Gaelic-heavy mix, but the grammar is very much Irish Gaelic. British Columbia speaks an odd mix of SoCal and Pacific Northwest with a tiny tinge of RP in the mix. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are essentially indistinguishable from rural Pennsylvania, but for an odd metre that leaked in from the local aboriginal languages. And, well, Alberta is a State at heart -- I don't think an American would have any difficulty picking out the new economic immigrants to that province from the natives in a sentence or two. There is a lot of overlap between political borders, of course, but there are several distinct regional dialects.