As an English speaker my question is mostly concerned with that language but others feel free to jump in.
Today we have all sorts of usually instantly recognisable accents all over the world whether its Scouse,American Deep South,Australian,Irish whatever but would these accents sound the same to people from the same backgrounds a hundred,several hundred years ago?
There has been much made that Shakespeare should really be performed in an American accent because that is closer to the English accent of Shakespeares time.
English has changed pretty drastically over the centuries as a language,this I know as when I was at school I had to study the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Chaucerian English was pretty much a foreign language.
So have accents changed and for that matter is there anyway that we could actually know if they have?
UPenn has a Language Change Across Lifetime project (Google the term for more) that studies just such changes by people during their own lives. The link is for a French Canadian study but I’ve read about one they did for Philadelphia over many decades.
There was also a study highlighted in “The Story of English” PBS series done in England. They had recorded the stuffy language of upper class college students and showed it constantly shifted in pronunciation. One issue that the UCTotY candidates have is that others start imitating them so they have to keep shifting in order to have a distinguishing accent in a class conscious society. (This series also visited Tangier Island which has a well preserved old accent.)
In short, people’s accents change quite a bit within their own lifetimes. But there are amazing exceptions.
Language is always changing. Accents are part of language, so they are always changing. The various English-language accents have changed a lot over the past four hundred years. It’s not true that Shakespeare’s accent would have sounded closer to a modern American accent than any other. It would have understandable to a current English speaker but rather different from any modern accent. There would be things in it that sounded like various modern accents, but it wouldn’t be closer to any one modern accent than any other.
Really? It’s different, I’ll grant you, but it’s far from a foreign language. It’s mostly the same as Modern English, with only a few really different words and nonstandard spelling. (The spelling tends to make it look more foreign than it is.) Beowulf was written in a foreign language (usually called Old English, but calling it Anglo-Saxon is probably more logical) and a modern English speaker can make sense of short sentences, much like that person can make sense of some simple Dutch, and for all the same reasons.
I remember reading an article recently that commented that Prince William and Prince Harry have different accents than Her Majesty - still sound upper class, but not as precisely articulated and as formal as their grandmother.
Well, the Brooklyn “toidy toid and toid” accent is almost non-existent now, morphing into a variant of the New York accent.
The regional accent spoken in upstate New York has become much stronger and more distinct from generic “newscaster English” in the past 20 or so years, especially in Buffalo, thanks to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
I guess it’s in the eye of a beholder. A friend recently told me the story of someone who asked if he was interested in a set of books that couldn’t be understood because they were in “old English.”
He excitedly showed up to look at these treasures. Turned out they were Dickens.
Well, I don’t think you need to be in the field to answer this one: if you look at a population where far in the past some people emigrated, and you see in the present that the geographically separate populations have different accents, then it is clear that at a minimum one of these groups experienced a shift. So we know that accents change.
As to the reasons why, and for piecing together clues about how they have changed and what they may have sounded like in the pase, I am very interested in hearing what people have to say about that!
I would thing accesnts have changed over time. People tend to lose and gain accents as they move from place to place, especially if they stay in one place for a long time. I have lived in Atlanta for the vast majority of my life; my parents were born and raised in New York. The friends I grew up with say I sound more like a yankee, when I visit relatives up north, they say I sound like a redneck. I guess my accent is a nice mix of the two.
It’s not easy to explain how and why languages change and how we reconstruct older versions of languages. Basically, you need to take a course on historical linguistics to learn about that. A book that’s aimed at a casual reader is The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutsch.
Another way of estimating what accents sounded like in the past is to look at rhyming poetry, the metre of that poetry, plays on words, spellings (since standardised spellings weren’t common for a long time).
Having been born there (Bay Ridge), I miss that. Last person i heard doing the real thing was Buddy Hackett.
Toity poiple boids was a-sitting the the coib,
A-choipen and a-boipen and eatin’ doity woims.
When Goit and Boit seen da’ toity poiple boids,
Gee, they was poiterbed.
I can attest to this several times over. When I’ve talked to people over the phone I haven’t talked to for years it’s something that has frequently been commented on… how they sound different. Not only in pitch and timbre, but of course phrases etc.
If the show Deadwood is in any way accurate with the old style way of talking, I’d say we’ve change a LOT.
I was born and raised here in NE Ohio, then lived in NYC for 25 years. When I returned here I noticed a definite “twang” that hadn’t existed before. It slowly creeps up from the southern parts of the state, where there had been a large influx of people from W. Virginia and Kentucky. The speech I’m hearing in northern Ohio is similar to the speech in Columbus a generation ago.
London accents have certainly changed over time if Dickens is anything to go by. His Cockneys seem incapable of pronouncing the letter “v”. Dickensian willains have wery wicious woices. Today’s Londoners don’t speak that way.
At the other end of the social spectrum, just listen to the incredible accents in British films from the 1940’s. War films are particularly good at this sort of thing - where the characters are forever talking about “Jerry planes”, “hush-hush projects”, and “I know it’s all a load of rot, old chap, but…”. Apparently the short a was pronounced as an e. “A terrible eccident hes heppened!” Not even the Queen speaks like that these days.
Not really. The spelling makes it easier to understand than the spoken form, since many words were pronounced quite differently than they are today, but the spelling is the same, or similar. However, I suspect that it wouldn’t take long for a modern speaker to get used to the accent if he were exposed to it regularly.
I was absurdly disappointed when I found out that all the swears in Deadwood were anachronistic. I kind of wish the old west really had sounded like that.