Heard this other day (or read it), that the American accent is actually the English 1700’s dialect. Reason being is that when the first English went over to set up America they naturally got isolated from the rest of the population, hence they preserved their accent, whereas back in Britain the dialect and the language continued to evolve. So when you yanks now say Ye Olde English, it is you who are speaking the older English, not us!
Well, there’s some truth here, but of course accent and language continued to evolve in America too.
No, if you went back to the 1700’s, you’d find people in Boston spoke rather rifferently from you. And there isn’t even one accent in America, doofus (meant in a lovingly correcting manner).
How many distinct accents can you find in New York alone? Now compare the NE, South, MidW, and West.
Its a little foolish to think that we would, for no apparent reason, and despite having huge influzes of immigrants from far more countries than England, retain a 1700’s English accent (meant in a lovingly correcting manner).
The American accent may have evolved from the a 1700’s English dialect, but I think it’s safe to say it’s not the same. I recall hearing about people in the barrier islands (or some similar largely isolated American locale) who spoke with essentially an Elizabethan accent. That is probably very near to what came over the ocean centuries ago, uncorrupted by all the other influences in America.
There is an Appalachian accent (the best example was Earl Hamner’s narration during Waltons episodes) that is fairly true to the Virginia accent of the 1700s – the softness of the vowel sounds and “musicality” of the inflection. However, I have no idea how close a Virginia accent was to a Massachusettes accent, or how close either was to an Elizabethan accent. Remember, English settlers had been coming over in a more or less steady stream since the early 1600s, giving plenty of time for regional accents to develop.
Bear with me for a second. When I was in high school, my English teacher brought in taped lectures that her college English professor had given to her class. The following info is taken from those lectures, filtered through my poor memory (so the details are probably off).
The professor said that the English accent as we know it today was deliberately created the Duchess of York in the late 18th century, who really didn’t like the sound of the the letter R or the flat/short A. She was good friends with a man involved in the education system, and she persuaded him to persuade all headmasters to teach all school children to speak with her new R and A pronunciations. That gave rise to the English accent as we know it today. The professor stated that if you listen to an Irish accent or English accents from the less educated classes, you’ll hear a hard R sound.
Then, American Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, etc. (i.e. cities with sea-ports) accents have touches of English pronunciations in them because of the English sailors who would frequent the sea-ports in the 18th-19th centuries. This is why, for example, the Boston accent has soft Rs.
Now, was this professor talking out of his hat when he said this, or is there evidence to support his two claims?
Oops, forgot to mention that the professor claimed the American accent (I guess, really the Northern accent) was what the English accent sounded like before the late 18th century.
Here is a great site on American Dialects.
They say:
In talking about Elizabethan dialect used in Appalachia they say this is a myth and link to the sci.lang FAQ to debunk it:
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Fergus
Hmm… I’m disagreeing a bit with that site, fergusj. No offence to you or anything, but I’m in Detroit, and the Upper Midwestern area seems far too large. Considering that someone from the Upper Peninsula sounds vastly different than I do (not just in accent, but even vocabulary occasionally as well), and other areas of the Midwest sound different as well.
And according to that site, I should call jelly doughnuts Bismarks. I’ve never even heard of that term for doughnuts before.
Regarding the dialect mentioned by “Gary T” in the remote “barrier islands”, you may be thinking of the “Outer Banks” off the coast of North Carolina.
The dialect on this island has been studied extensively by linguists. See this article on the North Carolina Tourism dept. website.
NC State even has a set of RealAudio recordings of native speakers up on their site.
Fergus
I would be extremely skeptical of this claim. The fact is that almost all interesting little stories about language are not true.
In at least one point of detail, the story is untrue. There was no Duchess of York at any time in the eighteenth century.
**smiling bandit: ** I never said that the American accent didn’t evolve either did I? (doofus)
But it is true that your accents resemble the British 1700’s ones more so than ours. Although I somewhat prefer the American accent to some of the horrific English ones…ever heard a scouser get angry? 
Yes, fergusj, it was the Outer Banks I was thinking of. Thanks for correcting my fuzzy memory.
gallows fodder, I’m sorry to say this, but your teacher was talking complete, unscholarly crap. I can’t believe any linguist would posit that an accent could be imposed on a population. The hard ‘r’ is present in a few English dialects, but it’s a regional variation, not to do with class. For example, East London is as working-class a region as you can find, yet they also have the flat a and elided r.
Prithee, Sire, how mayest thou know what an British accent sounded like in the 1700’s?
What is ‘the American accent’?
Do you mean an educated Scouser? :rolleyes:
Unless someone has a tape of Shakespeare, I don’t believe any of this. Except the last post.
Fact: the smaller the language group, the slower it changes (generally speaking). A friend of mine from MN told me that once some Danish linguists came to study a Danish community there because it was felt they were speaking a language much closer to 19th C. Danish than what is spoken in DK. And Icelandic is closer to 10th C. Norse than is modern Norwegian. This is the opposite of what was expected. People thought that larger communities would be more conservative since innovations would get lost in the mass. But in fact, more innovators mean more innovations.
I can see differences between my speech and my children’s. Obviously in vocabulary (I never said, “No way” and dozens of other locutions), but also in pronunciation.