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Well, it's not entirely unlike a general American accent. First of all, it's rhotic. Then, some of the vowels sound more American than their contemporary English / British counterparts.

Apart from a few dropped h's, which could be attributed to London, where Shakespeare spent much of his life, it's not unlikely that colonists in North America sounded pretty much like this. It's been more than 400 years since then and languages change over time, sometimes drastically so.

One way to research accents is by examining language in poems, (if these exist for the time and language), rhymes in particular. Another is by analogy and extrapolation. Writing systems and their development over time can help, too, if there's some sort of phoneme-grapheme mapping in the language at hand.

I believe that there is a well documented dynamic for geographically spread languages where the periphery changes slower then the core.

It's true of Québec French compared to the mainland pronunciation.

We still speak an offshoot of 18th century French. [1]

[1] In fact contemporary commenters in the 18th century used to say how indistinguishable Canadian French was compared to the French spoken in France.

> We still speak an offshoot of 18th century French.

Obviously, but so do the people in France.

Ok, but the rate of change since the 18th century has been slower than in France especially in Paris.

As measured how?

You want an explanation? Here is one.

First in 1759 the French lost the war against the English in North America.[0] Canada, then known as 'New France,' came under English rule, and all the French elites that had the means to leave went back to France.[1]

The connection to France was severed. Thirty years later in France society would be upended by the revolution.

Now in the 18th century Paris there were two 'usages' or accents in current use. The 'bel usage' and the 'grand usage.'

The 'bel usage' was spoken by the monarchy down to the common people. The 'grand usage' was used for public speeches and by priests and politicians etc.

The bel usage was more familiar, more a relaxed pronunciation, with many elisions («leux valets», «sus la table») while the 'grand usage' was more 'pointu', that is to say more precisely pronounced, picking out each syllable more individually, with fewer elision and dipthongs.

The linguist Jean-Denis Gendron, in his book 'D’où vient l’accent des Québécois? Et celui des Parisiens ?'[2][3] argues that after the third estate won the revolution, they purposefully adopted the 'grand usage,' perhaps as a means to distinguish themselves from the old order.

Ironically, people in Québec now speak a derivative of the 'bel usage', which has evolved over time, but more slowly because Québec culture was very conservative even up to the 1950s.

It is said that when the king famously said: 'la loi c'est moi', it probably came out like: 'la loé, c'est moé' sounding like a Québecois.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Plains_of_Abraha...

[1] This is the so called 'social decapitation' of New France. Only the priests and local school teachers were left to educate the people.

[2] https://www.pulaval.com/produit/d-ou-vient-l-accent-des-queb...

[3] https://www.immigrer.com/faq-dou-vient-laccent-quebecois/

You've repeated the claim that Quebecois has changed "more slowly" or "less" than French has, but for all your historical discussion, you've provided absolutely no evidence or even a metric for similarity.

I do not believe any such evidence or metric exists. A language is a point in a space with many dimensions; while on any particular dimension it is easy to evaluate whether more or less change has occurred, this is not possible overall.

Last time I heard people from Québec I was astonished by one of them speaking with such a strong accent that it seemed a foreigner language if I didn't make conscious effort to listen to her. I wonder when will the two variants will diverge enough to be considered different languages.

Do you have have a source for [1]? I want to know from were the commenters where from.

They aren't different languages, they are both French, just with different accents.

There are some expressions (locutions) that differ in France and in Québec, but I don't believe this makes the two mutually incomprehensible.

It's not as if France has one single pure accent that everyone can understand. How about the St Denis accent for example? To say nothing of all these accents.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egrfsn2CU8E.

I lived in Brussels for almost eight years. I know that when I traveled to France on occasion, they would usually look at me like I was a total moron, and I never understood why.

I'm sure part of it was that I was a classic "dumb American" in Paris, but Belgian natives also explained to me that they speak French much more quickly down there, and anyone who speaks it more slowly (as is done in Brussels and virtually all other Francophone places in the world, including most of the rest of France), likewise get treated like they are morons.

So, the Belgians certainly noticed that French has changed over time and it has changed more quickly in Paris over the other parts of the world, and they were helpful enough to share this information with me.

In addition, while I lived in Brussels, I did some volunteer work with the English-speaking theatrical groups (American Theater Company, English Comedy Club, and Irish Theatre Group), who had all gotten together and purchased an old beer factory for set production and rehearsal space, as well as a small stage location across the courtyard.

For one particular production, the volunteer lighting designer was also a professional lighting designer for Francophone theater, and was with the touring version of the French Language "Lion King" production. He explained to me that he was volunteering with our group because he wanted an opportunity to practice his English.

I got drafted in to be his assistant [0], and we talked a bit about what the world is like for professional theater company members in the French-language world.

One striking thing he told me was that there was a rule that regardless of how different places in the world might speak French on the street or elsewhere in their lives, when it came to how French was spoken on the stage, they insisted that it must be the official Parisian style as regulated by Le Académie française.

So, here was a Belgian, who spoke French in the Bruxellois style, but he was also able to speak it in the Parisian style, and he knew and understood the difference and why there was a difference. And he could explain it to me, a "dumb American in Brussels".

[0] Turned out that he was due to travel to Canada shortly for the opening of the "Lion King" there, and wouldn't be in town for the actual production. So, I got to learn how to operate a simple analog lighting board.

I don't guarantee that it's talking about Canadian French specifically, but Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GUBIJ8/ ) has some discussion of the relationship between new world French and France French, including a contemporary source remarking on how "good" (= upper class Parisian) new world French was at the time.

When I think accents stuck in time in American English I think of the outer banks around the Carolinas, or tidewater like Tangier island, rather than say Cape Cod.

There was a documentary produced back in the 1980's called, "The Story of English" and it explored the origins and evolution of the language. Episodes 2 and 3 focus on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the arrival of Raleigh in America. Cool stuff :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7D...

I mean, most of what we think of as "the English accent" is pretty much a contrived accent to begin with. Received Pronunciation (or BBC English) is just that. You learn it.

Kind of like the Mid-Atlantic accent you hear in old movies.

It is kind of weird, there are several accents basically created to give the illusion of class.

It's not only about class, though, these accents tend to be easier to understand-- a particularly useful trait for audio recordings.

Yeah, there's the Tangier Island in Virginia where people have an accent that some claim is closer to the English accent spoken in pre-colonial times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16320595

I've been to Tangier and the accent there is truly strange. It has a very archaic sound, for sure. And it's not just the accent, there are grammatical differences as well. One branch of my family is from the Great Smoky Mountains region of Appalachia. The accents and speech there also have archaic features due to isolation and influences from Scottish, Irish, and Welsh settlers.

Some years ago, I read Ben's father David Crystal's book "Pronouncing Shakespeare" and it has a whole chapter on how they reconstructed the original pronunciation. In Shakespeare's time, they did, in fact, write about elocution quite a bit, and some clues come from there. And, as others have noted, you see rhymes and puns show up when you revert to the old pronunciations. As I recall, Crystal claimed that he thinks they got it at least 80% right.

> It has a very archaic sound, for sure.

How can you tell the difference between a strange archaic accent and a strange innovative accent?

On Americans with (fossilised) British accents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxVOIj7mvWI

>It's not like it shows up in writing, after all.

In fact, that's one of the ways Shakespeare's English was reconstructed: by finding rhymes or probable puns in his and contemporary texts that would make sense with one pronunciation but not another.

> Something about how the accents of colonies tend to become fixed in time

It's about isolation. Colonies tend to be far away and difficult to travel to and from. So the american colonies only had what they brought with them, and a relatively thin trickle of trans-atlantic traffic, while England remained knee deep in European culture and the linguistic influences that come with it. A few hundred years of that leaves a deep mark.

> It's about isolation.

Not necessarily. An innovative center and conservative periphery is commonly observed even in language families where the center is far from trade routes, while on the periphery the languages are spoken in territories along major trade routes.

I feel the similarity of the American and older English accents is played up - it's mainly similar due to rhotic vs non-rhotic.

Also, of course, you then have to ask what American accents anyhow - Georgia vs Texas vs Vermont vs.. etc.

To my (admittedly English) ear the linked speech sounds like broad English but with the rhotic/non-rhotic change reversed.