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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.

Really? Because that surprises the hell out of me. Americans were an ocean away from Britain for maybe a century before 1776, and the accents still hadn't diverged?

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I do not think it is that surprising. Being part of the same political entity, there should have been a decent amount of intermingling and cross-travel in both directions. There was a NYTimes op-ed today about colonists from Massachusetts who returned to England to fight in the English Civil War in the mid-17th century: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04tinniswood.html

On the other hand, transatlantic travel was far more time-consuming, unpleasant, expensive, and difficult then than now. If you couldn't afford it outright, one-time passage was worth years of indentured servitude even if you were from a rich country. While the odd rich American aristocrat like Jefferson or Franklin could travel to France for a few years serving as a diplomat, and a group of Puritans could commission a ship to take them across for their latest religious crusade, transatlantic travel can't have been that common.

Most of the population growth was fed by immigration, and most Americans traded regularly with British merchants even after 1776.

Immigration from lots of different countries, though I'm not sure how many immigrants standardized on English at the time. And while contact with British merchants may have been a factor in port cities where trade happened, there were a lot of farmers far away from that influence as well.

But as mentioned elsewhere, there was (and is) no one "British" accent - so the immigrants would have had quite a mix of accents.

I don't know much about how the American accent arose. But from what I know about the Australian accent, it apparently arose in the first generation of children born in the country.

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