# Did America's "Founding Fathers" Have English Accents? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 13, 2003, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-americas-founding-fathers-have-english-accents/154826 "2003-02-13T14:18:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Will\_Repair](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/a698b9/32.png) [@Will\_Repair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Will_Repair)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2003, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-americas-founding-fathers-have-english-accents/154826/21 "2003-02-14T03:12:00Z")
[http://www.bartleby.com/61/5d.html](http://www.bartleby.com/61/5d.html) was found after a two minute search on Google for “colonies speech american dialect” (The weird word order was to narrow the search down to only about 3,000 hits. A more planned search should do better.) BTW, [http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/uc06330.jpg](http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/uc06330.jpg) , an image of the Dec of Indepen should yield clues to spelling thus pronounciation. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2003, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-americas-founding-fathers-have-english-accents/154826/22 "2003-02-14T22:12:56Z")
**tsunamisurfer** , I think you are underestimating (or omitting) the influence of African speech patterns, _and_ the interaction (and not infrequent intermarriages) between English settlers and Indians. Both of those influences (particularly given the relative isolation of plantation or farm life in the South), could have caused a rapid acceleration in the divergence between American English and the British variety. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-americas-founding-fathers-have-english-accents/154826.md?page=1)