When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

Slightly related to this.. much study has been done into the pronunciation at the time when Shakespeare's plays were originally performed (in the 1600s) principally so that the effect can be recreated.

You can check out what it sounded like at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s and various other videos. (Jump to 2m50s for the actual speech.)

The odd thing about this to my English ear is that the 1600s English pronunciation has a lot of similarities to that of the South West of England today, but perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising given this map of rhoticism in modern British English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RhoticEngland2.png

The fascinating tl;dr: The British lost their English accents around the turn of the 19th century. As far as rhotic r's go, Americans still mostly speak the way Brits and Americans did in the 18th century.

Informative article, but slightly inaccurate. General American is not "considered generally confined to a small section of the Midwest." This is a myth that I've heard a lot of Midwesterners propagate. Prior to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, the most identifiable broadcaster accent was probably the Inland North dialect, which is spoken mostly in western New York, northern Ohio, Michigan, northern Illinois, and Wisconsin. That's presumably the source of the myth. But today, that accent sounds very different from most other dialects of American English (for example, their short 'o' as in "block" sounds almost like most American's short 'a' in "black" and their short 'a' sounds like the non-rhotic diphthong that speakers of RP use for "air"). I've heard Iowans claim that their accent is the most standard, but that couldn't be further from the truth, as most Iowans have backed 'o's and 'u's a la Minnesota, in addition to subscribing to the cot/caught merger, etc. The reality is that there are seven or so dialect regions in the U.S. with lots of variation from place to place within those regions. Some metropolitan areas have their own distinct accents. In my experience, broadcasters tend to use features from their native accent as long as they aren't from the South or a region heavily affected by the aforementioned Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

One other inaccuracy is the article's claim that the British elite had much less influence in manufacturing hubs in the Mid Atlantic where Scots-Irish immigrants and nothern English speakers of rhotic dialects predominated. One specific example they give is New York. In reality, New York English was non-rhotic up until recently, and even now, a sizeable number of speakers either have a non-rhotic accent or drop their 'r's in certain environments. I don't know the history of the New York dialect or whether it become non-rhotic at the same time the Boston dialect did, but I'm assuming New York English was influenced more by Dutch, Italian, and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants than by Scots-Irish and northern English immigrants, which would explain why it didn't follow the rhotic trend of the other Mid Atlantic cities that the article talks about.

I didn't know that the British originally spoke with an rhotic accent. The General American accent is supposedly how the British used to sound. Perhaps the title should be "When did the British lose their original accents?" as the Americans are the ones who (apparently) retained their original British accents.

A bit OT but hopefully interesting nevertheless. This is apparently the original pronunciation for the works of Shakespeare http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s The entire video has some nice information but if you want to skip to an example of the original pronunciation, you can jump to 2:50.

I've always thought this kind of analysis doesn't look closely enough at the impact of non-English-native speakers on the dominant accent of American English.

In other words, the vast majority of Americans are not from English-speaking countries, and the immigrants learned English when they arrived.

Thus the English spoken in the key port/immigrant destinations, plus the impact of all those immigrants' accents, should massively impact modern American English.

One theory I've come to is based on the fact that modern Dutch-speakers of English tend to have a very American (rather than Britsh) style accent. I propose that early New York, being Dutch and the most important immigrant gateway later on, probably had a bizarre Duthified English which had a scaled impact on generations of immigrants who came through New York.

Similar stories are probably found elsewhere.

Interesting subject. As an avid traveler (from California) I've run into a few Brits and Aussies who (jokingly) looked down their noses at American pronunciation and spelling.

I didn't know much about it at the time. The more I've read however, it turns out that most of these "Americanisms" came from Britain, and are in most cases were dominant before the split. It was (mostly) the British who changed (though some regions still do it the "old" way).

The subject is a lot more complicated, and in a few cases the people I met were wrong. For example:

* -ize (Greek, Oxford), -ise French!

* Rhotic (R) pronunciation (Southwest Br., American, Irish, Scottish English, etc.)

* RP took hold in the 19th century. (see the Shakespeare in OP video link on this page.)

it's a common question on r/linguistics and r/askhistorians:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k8t7s/when_did_am...

http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/l1z1b/did_the_f...

http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/vr14o/can_someo...

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rlv3j/would_a...

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t9frm/differe...

http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/d82bv/did_americans...

although how is this hacker news?

I'm always fascinated by the general obliviousness displayed by questions like these. I realize the headline is just a simplified way to introduce the topic, but there really are a lot of people out there who think that we all spoke like the Brits at some point before, and Americans "lost" the accent. The number of people who don't realize that there's no such thing as "no accent" always astounds me.

Surprises me when I've seen this question that nobody brings up the topic of non-native English speakers.

The Scandinavian, German, Italian, Polish, Gaelic, etc eventually stopped speaking their own language and took up English. Presumably there was a result from this inheritance?

In West Virginia, they really didn't. If you want to know how high-class Englishmen sounded during the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s, go to backcountry WV.

Varmint is the corruption of the upper-class pronunciation of vermin, as one example.

The so-called mid-atlantic accent of modern Brits is a different phenomenon that is more often discussed, and its downfall can be traced to the collapse of the three broadcast networks. Individuals adopted the accent to come across as more trustworthy, similar to the Baskerville font trustworthiness: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/hear-all-ye-...

I have a friend from Hong Kong, and she has an English accent, having being educated in British schools.

For fun, I asked her to talk in an American accent, and what fascinated me, is that she talked with an almost exactly Southern accent. So maybe the Southern accent is a vestigial accent leftover from the transition from British to American accent.

On the same note, I find it equally intriguing how Dutch and South African languages are similar. Afrikaans is a lot like 17th century Dutch, which is a lot different than modern Dutch. Unlike English, which changed to a much lesser extend. But I don't have to try hard to follow Afrikaans.

We had a girl at school whos family left for america when she was in the 2nd year at high school, she returned for a visit 2 years later and had a american accent. Two factors I believe that influence accents:

1) Climate - humidity mostly influencial - Manchester having a more nasal accent and also more rain than most parts of the UK being one important factor.

2) What we hear - more so younger age and I would say upto the age of 25 you are still influenced, maybe later or maybe younger for some people. But certianly what you hear when growing up, upto a point has a influence upon you. Call it the memeaccenting if you like, younger you are the more influenced you are.

So even if they all had the same accents, the enviroment would be a factor and over time and influences external (America is not just legacy British people, germanic and others I'm sure above and beyond natives at the start).

So can see over time it more a factor than anything for the changes, but in a World which has reduced travel from years, to months to weeks to days and hours, we have a more blured line ahead of us when it comes to accents in the not too distant future.

Beyond spelling though, how would you define the differences between an American and a British accent as in some parts of America the difference is not that much in comparision to some parts of Britian.

But I'm sure somebody will just say it is all down to dental care and as a British person I too will laugh at that one :).

Related thread from a couple years ago: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486017

And the follow-up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489723

This might be an interesting video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E) - its a video of Tangier, VA where they still speak English from when the town was settled in 1600s.

I don't mind it so much when British English speakers take out the 'r' in words. What bugs the hell out of me is when they add the 'r' in places where it doesn't belong. Why they do this, I have no idear.

There's an 8 hour BBC documentary about the History of English if you're interested

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/story-of-english/

I found it pretty fascinating like spelling use to be all over the place but in the UK the most successful publisher of the King James Bible is basically what became the standard way. In the USA it was a textbook that was used in pretty much all schools for most if its history.

What amazes me is that in a couple of generations the accents of all the regions change (including England itself with the hard r, apparently). In the case of the US I'm curious if accents stay the same once geographically stable. Once we became more mobile in the early-mid 20th century, are accents changing faster with the influx of diversity as folks move around?

This sort of thing is much easier to understand if you think of languages as living, changing organisms rather than as static constructs. They actually change rather quickly, from generation to generation. Large human migrations tend to homogenize in the sense that they result in a single dialect propagating over a large land mass. But then they continue to diverge regionally over time in rather random ways, to the point where every city in a given country, or even every neighborhood in every city in the country, will develop its own distinct dialect. London is a good example--it's a city that's been inhabited mostly by the same ethnic group for many centuries, and their language tree has branched to the point where people of different districts and social classes there use very different-sounding pronunciation.

A quick visit to Harkers Island, NC would have shown the author that not ALL Americans have lost their British accents. There's a perfectly thick Elizabethan British twang applied to American language by most of the inhabitants there.

We used to do boomer patrols out of Holy Loch, we were there for a two week turnover period. By the end of the two weeks, half the crew had at least a slightly noticeable Scottish accent. Every time.

This article discusses Dialects of America English in terms of relation to British migration between (1607-1775): http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/Amer...

Interesting that drawl in South of US came from drawl in South England. Also, interesting that Britain has more dialects than any US, Canada, Australia, combined. But I guess their dialect had more time to evolve before mass communication

This is like asking when humans stopped being monkeys.

when british english was transplanted to north america, a separate geographic context was created for one and the same language. a relative isolation was imposed by an ocean between them, and each continued to change over time. british and american english descend from a common ancestor.

I've noticed that the Aborigines in Australia sound a lot like other Australians.

No doubt these groups influenced each other. And that probably happened in the US too. And now they are being shaped by asian and Mexican immigrants too.