I controlled for reference groups as well as I could. Washington and Lee were of the same class - Lee even married one of Martha Washington’s great-grandchildren. His own family was very prominent in Virginia history and politics.
Why do we suppose that these two men would have completely different accents? I would guess that they didn’t, and that Washington’s accent was far closer to colloquial Southern diction than that of a British parliamentarian.
Robert E Lee born 1807
George Washington born 1732
Washington’s Grandparents:
Lawrence Washington b1659
Mildred Warner 1670
Joseph Ball 1649
Mary Bennett 16??
Would all have had English accents - The Washingtons came from Essex and Northampton, The Warners from Norfolk, Lancashire and Hampshire and the Balls from Lancaster.
Their Accents were English, their childrens’s accents may have changed somewhat but would still be affected by their parents and parent’s friends. George Washington’s accent may have been a little more changed, but his refeerence group would still have been of English speakers of the Southern upper classes- with regular new input from english gentry and bourgeois classes more than from the Irish and Scots working class and tradesmen who entered Virginia’s back country during Washington’s childhood- these would have been seen as lower class by Washington’s social class, and so unlikely to affect his speech.
By the time Robert E Lee was developing his accent, English and Scots/Irish and Irish would have been fully integrated into normal Virginia Speech.
I think that it is very likely that George Washington’s accent was more like seventeenth/eighteenth century received English pronunciation and that Robert E Lee was more like that of today’s white Virginians.
If Washington’s ancestors came from Sussex, it’s likely he would have sounded a lot like today’s Virginians. The deep southern accent came straight from the south and southwest of England.
You’re supposing that Washington would have had a similar accent to that of his grandparents, which is fair enough. But you reject the possiblity that Robert E. Lee’s accent would have been similar to that of his own grandparents. That is confusing me a bit.
It is to do with reference group- throughout Washington’s life the reference group would have been people who spoke colloquial received English- the language of the court and middle classes in England and the Colonies. A further two generations on their would have been a considerable influx from about 1690 od Scots/Irish, Scots and Welsh, who initially would have been much of an underclass, but whose speech patterns would have become more commonplace by the time that Rober E Lee was learning his accent (c. 1810) - four generations of immigrants further on from Washington’s parents.
Additionally, after the War of Independence, there was an increased interest in being ‘American’ which would have resulted in a move away from the manners, mores and accents of the old country and a high value being placed on doing and saying things in an ‘American’ way. Histories of the time support this- I have cites if needed.
I maintain that my assertion that George Washington’s accent had more to do with received English pronunciation of the 17th and 18th century, and Robert E Lee’s with modern Virginian is at least a good guess as to the reality of the situation.
What I’ve always wondered about was when colour become color, honour became honor, etc. How and why did one group of anglophones suddenly change the spelling of these words?
It is worth noting that only his paternal grandparents were born in the colonies; his maternal grandparents were born in England. His paternal grandmother was sufficiently linked to England to have returned there to live after the death of her husband and remained in England until her death.
There is a current thread on this very subject:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=320961&highlight=american+spelling
Perhaps the entire American nation just decided to start putting on funny voices of all kinds, and see which one caught on.
I have to say I’m a bit disappointed on the one they settled on. Hardly what you’d call a funny voice at all and lacking in imagination. Rather boring really.
I think the influence of other languages is being underrated. I know that what we think of as a “Brooklyn” accent is largely from the influence of Dutch.
My grandparents were English and Swedish speaking. I don’t speak swedish, but I did grow up hearing them speak both. Some of the accents in the upper mid-west of the US definately contain some of the cadence and tone of Swedish.
Prithee Sire, methinks there hast been many a change in English spelling and accent since yon Mayflower left. Dost thou naysay me?
Cite?
How many ‘Dutch’ remained after New Amsterdam became New York? How many Dutch moved to New York after this?
I agree that there may be some influence on word order and usage of words, but I am not convinced that this either continues or that it generalizes across populations. There is evidence that German word order and methods of expression entered American Parlance, and the same may be said for Swedish, but it is difficult to find any widely spread examples of German or Swedish ‘Accent’ in Modern American English- only word usage and order. This is because accent is usually very conservative with a continual regression to a norm, whereas word usage and idiom is additive and likely to be very open to new additions.
[nitpicky hijack]
losing, not loosing
[/nitpicky hijack]
I just want to second that observation — you hear a lot of sing-songy cadences in Minnesota and western Wisconsin that are the lingering effects of Scandinavian accents. You can also hear the effects of Plattdeutsch in Milwaukee, although the period of German immigration is a century and a half in the past.
I don’t know of any stats, but I did see that there were 10,000 people in New Netherland by 1664. I don’t know where the Dutch people - who’d been in NY for 50 years by the time the British took over - would have gone. Since there’s plenty of Dutch influence on the architecture and place names of NYC, I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s right.
There’s a website (I wish I had a link to it) that someone linked to here on the boards some time ago that had recordings of people from all over the world saying the same phrase in English. The pupose of the website was to explore the differences in accents around the world. It was amazing how American some of the Irish people sounded to my ears.
“Do you have a cite for this please?” would have been a little friendlier since this isn’t exactly a heated debate but:
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/AmericanDialects.htm
**New York English, as a special variety of general New England speech, developed after the British took possession of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Amsterdam in 1664, leading to the rapid conversion of Dutch speakers to English. Dutch left a strong phonetic substrate, however, which sets Brooklyn speech apart from other northern dialects.
Features shared with New England speech:
–final [r] is dropped: beer = bee-ah
–caught, bought are pronounced with [O] rather than [A]
Main features deriving from the Dutch influence:
–interdentals become t,d. For instance, them, these, that become: dem, dese, dat (since Dutch has no interdentals)
–er => [schwa + y] thirty purple birds, thirty third street = uh in final position were =wuh
– [oi] => [er] oil, oyster (a later compensatory development)
–I want you to (do something)-> I want you should (do something)
**
You probably mean this: