Except that accents change over time. Even today, I don’t speak with the same accent I did when growing up in California. I say different words, especially those with divergence in the Mid-West, and I have a broader, flatter tone than growing up. I notice it myself, and my family notices it every time I return to California to say hello.
So if the audio recordings came from the 1880s, just as an example, they are not necessarily indicative of the actual patterns in the 1850s. Any changes over time would have been picked up as they happened.
I think you need a further step in your calculus, something that supports the concept that speech patterns and accents don’t change very much over time, without some added external influence. For example, the influx of Spanish-speaking people into the Southwest of the United States may well have an influence on the accents of English-speaking people there. But in the absence of an external influence, how much change in accent would you expect over the course of 200 years. I know you have a citation in your original posting, but does that source really assert that language patterns don’t change with time? That the flavor of Cockney we hear today was unchanged from when??
If you can answer this, I think you will go a long way toward removing the doubt Indistinguishable has.
Well, I have some old 78s from the 1920s featuring the string band Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers (natives of the north Georgia mountains). These fellows played old-time mountain music, interspersed with comedy skits. The comedy skits are delivered in the same Southern accent you’ll find in north Georgia today. So there are at least 80 years without significant change. (I’ve tried to no avail to find some clips on YouTube, so you’ll have to take my word for it.)
And I disagree that the accents of individuals necessarily change over time. I think that for most people (not all), their speech patterns are set in their youth. When’s the last time Bill Clinton lived in Arkansas? His Southern accent is still obvious. And that’s someone who moved away and was exposed to a lot of outside influences.
Why would Southern accents have changed significantly over time since the Revolution? What would have driven such change?
On this page, you can find sound clips from Champ Clark, a onetime Speaker of the House of Representatives who was born in Kentucky in 1850 and moved to Missouri in his 20s. His Southern accent is evident.
Wow. I can’t detect any notable deviation in accent from his accents from some exiting Southern accents at all. He sounds more Alabama or Georgia to me but I can’t see how he would be a significant deviation from any Southern accent today. I don’t think anyone would notice if he time travelled today anywhere in the South. Time shifting is fascinatiing because you can jump generations and see how their parents spoke approximately and, in this case, it is extremely close to some Southern accents today.
Random drift; possibly, but not necessarily, explainable in part by movement of people. What drove the changes in British accents since then? What’s driving the Northern Cities Vowel Shift right now?
Though, to be fair, my first post came on with a strong assertion “Almost certainly, every accent which was in existence in George Washington’s time differed significantly from every accent in existence today.” Until such time as I may be able to bring better evidence for it than “I’ve never heard of an accent which remained unchanged for anywhere near a quarter-millenium”, I suppose I must retract the assertive flavor of the opining and stick to just expressing it as strong doubt, instead.
Fair enough. But that’s speculation, and I can’t find any evidence to suggest a drift in Southern accents.
Well, let me amend that. The one thing I have noticed among old recordings is that it seems to have been more common in Southern accents of yore that “work” almost becomes “woik”. (Same in any word with the “or” sound in the middle.) You don’t hear that quirk much any more, except maybe in parts of Mississippi and Louisiana.
I"ve always associated the “woik” with Strom Thurmond and pretty much the older generation of Blacks and Whites from South Carolina. I haven’t gone looking for the connection, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s there.
If anything, Washington would have had a stronger accent than Lee, because he lived in Virginia for most of his life, while Lee lived all over the place. But, as is mentioned in the other thread, Lee is identified with the south, while Washington is thought of as a national figure.
I’m far from an expert on this subject, but I would imagine that Washington’s social class would have also affected his accent. To cite a modern, although anecdotal, example, my grandmother and Katherine Hepburn were born about a mile from each other 6 years apart. Despite this, my grandmother, a police-man’s daughter, had an old-time New England accent (warsh for wash). Which was nothing like Hepburn’s patrician accent. I would think that in a time where social divisions were much more pronounced than early 1900’s Hartford, that the difference between working man and aristocrat was probably even more divided. If I had to guess, I’d think that average Joe Southerner probably talked with a recognizable Southern accent, whereas it was probably much less pronounced in someone like Washington.
Except that what you are probably thinking of as “no accent” is actually a Standard Midwestern accent (or “General American”). The geographic home of that accent is Iowa (and environs). That is not “accent-free” English. It is just a particular accent. There’s no reason at all to believe Washington would have had anything resembling or approaching that accent.
It’s true that there are differences in accent according to class. That is true in the South today. There are Southern accents which would be recognized by the locals as upper class, and also accents which would be recognized as lower class. But they are all Southern accents.
Washington’s elder brothers had been educated in England. It seems to me that schoolmates have the biggest influence on the development of a person’s accent. If his brothers’ accents were heavily influenced by English boarding school accents then Washington, whose principal influence would probably have been from members of his household, might also have been influenced by English accents.
Washinton’s brothers were considerably older (one brother was 12 years older, the other 14 years older) – not really his peers.
For much of Washington’s youth, his brother Lawrence was away, fighting for the British against Spain in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, Washington attended school locally, in Virginia, and his peers would have been local boys.
At 17, he went into the western frontier as part of a surveying party, and spent much of his youth in that pursuit (in the backwoods of Appalachia).
It depends a lot on what aspects of the Southern accent you’re talking about and what particular region you’re talking about. For instance, the Appalachian dialects have retained a lot of older features and thus seem to have not changed in a long time. However, what most people think of as the Southern accent is undergoing a lot of change and a lot of the more characteristic (phonological) variables are rather new. For instance, the monophthongization of /aI/ (which makes ‘bye’ sounds like ‘baa’) and the parallel weakening of /oI/ as in ‘boy’, as well as the up and back gliding of the vowel in ‘caught’ (called ‘open o,’ often merged with ‘cot’ in other American English dialects), came about in the late 19th century (Citation: Walt Wolfram & Erik R. Thomas, The Development of African American English). Further, like the Northern Cities Shift, there is a Southern Shift in progress today. So, we can see that there is a major problem in supposing that the Southern Accent of Washington’s time was much like that of today’s. There are most likely some retained features, but I would hazard to guess that there are vast differences between now and then. But you are right in supposing that there were differences between the North and the South in Washington’s time, based on settlement patterns alone; people from Northern England tended to settle the Southern US, and vice versa.
That’s an interesting idea, but it seems an extraordinary claim. What evidence do Wolfram and Thomas cite to support their assertions (given the lack of voice recordings)? Listening to the sound clip from Champ Clark, which I linked above, I notice that the “monophthongization of /aI/” (to use linguistic parlance) is apparent in his speech. He was born in 1850. (That doesn’t necessarily conflict with what you’re saying, I realize. But then why does it seem that Southern speech patterns haven’t changed much since he gave his speech in 1916? Have they stopped changing?)
I’ve noticed that some South African accents also feature the “the monophthongization of /aI/”. I suppose that is an African influence, and if so, it would have come to the US with the slaves. But if that’s the case, seems like it would have happened early on – in the first generation or two, as suggested by the linguist I linked upthread.
I do not have their book on me, but I hazard to guess that this assertion was made on the basis of linguistic atlas data, since dialectologists have been interested in Southern accents since long before the invention of the tape recording.
As far as the claim being extraordinary, it’s really not. I think there are two big misconceptions being bandied about in this thread, and I think are in need of correction. 1) Language change happens a lot faster than one would think, and older people can pick up features that were not around in their youth. 2) Not all language change has a “reason.” Yes, sometimes a feature is introduced to a language through an influx of people from a different region or words are introduced through an advance in technology, but a whole heck of a lot of change occurs for no good (social) reason. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift is a great example of that; from what we can tell, some people in Buffalo, NY, started shifting their vowels, and this was picked up in other large, urban centers in the Midwest, and is now trickling down into the suburbs and rural areas. But the shift did not occur because people from Timbuktu moved to Buffalo or for any reason like that.
Language change is always happening and often for no good reason. So, to say Washington would have spoken something that closely resembles today’s “Southern accent” (which, again, is not one thing but many different dialects spanning a large region) is simply naive.