When did Americans lose their British accents?
mentalfloss.com
mentalfloss.com
First time I see Germany classified as “a corner of England”, lol.
(To be fair, before the current crop, the English aristocracy spoke mainly French, and I guess France could be classed as “a corner of England” by people still a bit hung-up on the loss of Brittany...)
RP English is heavily influenced by French and Germanic tones. Local dialects are very different. I still find it hard to compare British languages with what developed in North America, where the influence of non-English-speakers was clearly massive. Isn’t it more interesting to look at Australia and South Africa, where direct links with English natives are way more recent, and still the language departed markedly...?
Normandy, not Brittany. Brittany was never part of the English crown, and it was independent from the French crown for a long time as well (de jure not until the French Revolution, although it was de facto part of France for about 250 years prior).
Fair point. In my head the two tend to merge into an unicuum, but that's not the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dua...
Hence… 'A' is for aardvaark.
It's true to the extent that, as the article notes, the dominant British accent used to be rhotic (probounced-r) like General American, but became non-rhotic as a result of upper class fashion (which was copied in some parts of the US, producing the modern Boston accent, among others.)
But both sets of accents have evolved considerably otherwise, so it's not really true broadly, as best I understand.
This was because Bristol in particular was a major sea hub in colonial-era England, much moreso than London. As an interesting side note, Americans know the West Country accent as the "pirate accent" thanks to the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island, where Robert Newton played Long John Silver and managed to convince the director to let him use his native Dorset accent because he thought it would be more historically accurate than the RP accent the director originally wanted him to do, and his portrayal was so iconic that pretty much every pirate story since has used some variation on Newton's accent.
As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works.
It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist, and manages to make some obtuse concepts relatable, without getting bogged down in technicalities. Similar to what Michael Crichton could do with cutting edge sciences. (Granted, he kept mostly to fiction.)
Whereas the most basic begginer's article written by a linguist is still indecipherable to me. And linguists seem to be ok, or even happy, about that.
Linguists writing about a linguistic Lockheed A-12 would be aghast that anyone could ever mistake it for an SR-71, let alone be willing to explain the differences to the casual observer, or even make the mental effort to see how someone might mistake the two.
So as an engineer that hates the casual misuse of technical terms, I get you. But like the model of the atom, sometimes teaching the simplified but wrong model has its benefits for a certain crowd, until they're ready to go deeper.
Bryson gets many, many details about the history of English wrong as well.
> As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist.
No, Bryson is a hack writer and does more harm than good. You make it sound as if the only alternative to Bryson is eggheaded scholarly publications. In fact, there is a wide selection of popular-science treatments of the history of English and other languages that are both reliable and friendly and accessible for ordinary readers (for example, Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English does right what Bryson set out to do).
It is like with archaeology: if an ordinary person wants to learn about the Pyramids, there is no need for someone to recommend Graham Hancock to them as if otherwise they would have to read obtuse archeological-dig reports and disputes among scholars.
† Which made English less-Germanic sounding, at least to my ears.
†† In my humble opinion modern British English sounds marginally more Germanic than American English.
This should be one of the first things that gets hammered home when learning the first foreign language.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...
Same with Canadian French.
Wouldn't you then expect a small isolated town in England to still have an "American" accent?
But you definitely find, for example, places in England where "r"s at the ends of words or before consonants are pronounced, like in America but unlike in RP.
Specifically in the west country of England. This accent was borrowed by Hollywood to create what we know today as the "pirate" accent.
This is mass broadcast media playing to Americans' biases around the eliteness of English accents. This effect is at least as old as cross Atlantic broadcast media, heard until a few decades ago in the artificial Mid-Atlantic accents of the east coast elites.
On the other hand, to many in the UK, when watching a show like Game of Thrones, the Northmen sound like modern blokes from Yorkshire, not some kind of medieval people.
The article says basically the same thing (in its discussion of rhotic vs. non-rhotic accents). So the article's title is misleading: it should really be "When Did the British Gain Their British Accents?"
"Various claims about the accents of the Appalachian Mountains, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region and Virginia's Tangier Island sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists. "
By the way, the term "Old English" strictly speaking refers to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English. No-one is claiming that Americans speak this language.
IOW, Parisian French also retains some primitive features that have largely disappeared from one Canadian region or another. But we don't talk about those as much. I'm guessing because doing so wouldn't jive well with certain stereotypes about Québec being a backwards hinterland.
This is simply nonsense.
That the current accent is driven by a particular fad aimed at highlighting upper class status doesn't imply that class distinctions are novel, just the particular effort to demarcate them (which wasn't durable, obviously, as RP isn't exclusive to the upper classes.)
No one, AFAICT, did that. The reference to “modern British English” is not, as I read it, a reference to “the current diversity of British accents”, but rather “the current dominant British accent”.
Fair point - I would also agree that the idea of a "dominant" British accent seems a bit odd - certainly not in terms of what people actually sound like (rather than the broadcast media).
In a highly class-conscious society where the vast majority of people spoke English as their first language, it seems fairly unlikely that accent would have had no connotation of social status.
It thus seems hard to believe that the development of the modern diversity of English dialects would have been spurred by some sudden need to mark class distinctions.
Believe it or not, there is an entire field called linguistics that studies human language and how it evolves.
In terms of lexicon, much of the archaic flavour is actually the result of 19th-century language reformers trying to restore old words. In the meantime, Icelandic had borrowed heavily from Danish.
Indeed, there is the field of linguistics, and scholarly treatments of Icelandic (as opposed to pop-sci presentations of the language as a time capsule like yours) point out that Icelandic has undergone a great deal of innovation like any other North Germanic language.
It also makes some suspect statements. I live in New England and saying that it is hard to find someone who does not have an accent that links them to some New England locale is just silly. Then there is the claim that the “general American” accent heard on TV and radio is confined to a small region in the Midwest. That just sounds weird on its face. I imagine NPR must recruit reporters exclusively from this region because it would be difficult to find the accent anywhere else, according to the article. Having lived in the Deep South, far West, rural Midwest and urban East coast I have found that regional accents are largely overblown by articles like this.
My accent has faded in the ~two decades I've been away from Minnesota. But if you spoke to me in person you could identify where I'm originally from inside 3 seconds unless I was very careful in my word choices.
I suspect you're deaf to New England accents. I used to think people back home in the Twin Cities didn't have an accent. To me they sounded like the people on TV. It seemed like only the older folks or folks from rural areas had the Minnesotan accent. When I travel back to Minneapolis, I hear the accent. It's not "Fargo" level (although I've known people who talk like that), but it's clear and unambiguous.
Hopefully a linguist will come along with better treatments of the subject, but Google turned up a couple of articles with more links:
https://curiosity.com/topics/the-american-accent-is-older-th...
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-pres...
And, of course, there's Wikipedia:
People can learn other accents. In the UK, there is (was?) a "BBC accent" which presumably didn't imply that every BBC personality was hired from a particular region.
Not to mention the idea of BBC Scotland all talking in RP is quite amusing...
In most areas there's the homogenized, suburban communities with corporate folks who are from wherever and sound like they are from anywhere, and then the people who are from that place. In that group, you could get knocked on the head somewhere near Boston and wake up in some subdivision near Charlotte and have no idea where you are.
There are exceptions, but if you're a reporter seeking out regional dialects, you won't be hanging out in suburbia, and you'll find plenty of them, particularly in older or coastal places like New England and New York where they are everywhere!
Also, as someone who moved from a small town in the Deep South 20+ years ago to a metropolitan area still in the south, I spent some time working on my accent.
I thought it was better but some of my coworkers working in India that I have gotten to know asked me was English my first language (it is) because they couldn’t understand me as clearly as other native speakers.
I still have work to do - especially as I move more into consulting and leading teams who may be offshore.
Not to mention that I use phrases and references out of habit that are well understood by native speakers but not by non native or especially people in foreign countries.
To my ear as an English person, it sounds like a Westcountry accent, an example of an English accent which is still rhotic today. But other people might perceive it as being slightly American or Irish sounding.
https://youtu.be/8ErWLOD_udY?t=2429
(Crystal, of course, being the linguist who worked on the reconstruction of Shakespeare's pronunciation, and consulted The Globe on it)
Take William Blake's The Tyger:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Professional students of linguistics will say that the terminal -y was pronounced as "eye" in the time of Shakespeare; but by the time of Blake such pronunciation has already become obsolete. However, this doesn't help us distinguish between two possibilities:
- Blake's -y rhyme is purely visual and is no more than a nod to the tradition; it is not intended to be pronounced as /ai/, or
- Poems of that time used to be delivered in an archaic pronunciation, in which case "symmetry" actually rhymed with "eye".
I don't think linguists have an answer that would convincingly point to either of the two possible pronunciations.
The GenAm is way more prevalent than just a small section of the Midwest. It's all over the West coast and generally every large metro area regardless of region. Even in regions of heavily divergent accents, like New England or the Southeast the GenAm is quite prevalent in the cities. Atlanta for instance isn't made up of people who all sound like Scarlett O'Hara and Houston isn't made up of people who all sound like Boomhauer from King of the Hill.
GenAm is the most common accent (probably 50-65% of speakers), and was originally (1900-1930s) associated with the migration path through Pennsylvania/Western Mass/Upstate NY as far west as the Upper Midwest.
That pattern has changed though, and there are some shifts in these regions.
https://theprodigaltongue.com/
The author has a blog that is no longer as active as it once was:
Look back at old films even as late the end of 60s and you wil hear it.
After the War of Independence, a large number of other Europeans left traces of their languages in the regional American accents. English are not the largest ethnic group.
Or of course, both probably have changed.
After reading the article -- yup, in that vein.
But I think this is an important conceptual shift for us in even what questions we ask. We are inclined to think things are much more stable than they are, especially within geographic bounds. We assume British accents must be more stable in the British geography, and it must be American accents that changed. When in fact there's no reason to have this assumption, because that's not how things work, the right question in the first place, even before you know anything, is "Why have American and British accents diverged", without assuming one was stable but not the other.
Now, the trick is realizing this applies to culture in general, not just accents or even languages. Consider how this applies to those genetic tests telling people they "are" 35% German or something and what people think this means about the stability of the category of "German" over generations...