And yet we have a 1916 sound clip, linked above, in which a man is speaking in a Southern accent identical to some accents heard today. Why haven’t we drifted away from that accent in 92 years? And if we can hold the accent essentially unchanged for 92 years, then why would 220 years be so much more extraordinary?
As for the “Southern accent” being many dialects, well yes, BUT… There are certain markers which are common to many different Southern accents, such that it is not hard to hear the common thread. The average person can hear an accent and identify it as a “Southern accent” even if they can’t identify exactly where the speaker is from, no?
The average listener is not a trained linguist; hell, it’s not that uncommon to see an Australian accent identified by the layman as British, or that sort of thing. Put the speech sample above to the rigorous phonetic transcription and comparison test, rather than the “Does this make me think of a Southern person test?”, and I think the changes in accents over time will become clear.
I’m not a trained linguist either, but to me the clip sounds strange, not like what I would expect from a modern Southern speaker, though definitely Southern-sounding all the same. But, of course, I am coming into it with preconceptions, which color my perception. That is why I say we have to put it to more objective study.
(I lost the edit window, but I wanted to add to the first sentence above: How many people would even notice the plain distinctions between, say, a typical suburban New Jersey accent, a typical suburban Michigan accent, a typical suburban California accent, different accents within New Jersey, different accents within California, instead of thinking of them all as “unaccented” or “plain American”? How many people notice the difference between speakers with the “cot-caught” or “Mary-marry-merry” mergers and speakers without? Perhaps some people notice these things naturally, but many don’t. It’s easy to think two markedly different accents are the same, if you aren’t used to listening for the differences)
Washington did consider himself more of a national figure (he described himself at the beginning of his last will and testament as “a citizen of the United States, and formerly President of the same,” IIRC, saying nothing about Virginia), and spent no less than 16 years of his adulthood mostly away from Virginia, as the top Continental general and then as President. He was keenly aware of the need to maintain his dignified public persona and his role as a figure of national unity. I’ve read a lot about him, but have never seen any description of his accent, leading me to think it was not especially or stereotypically Southern. He probably had a more mid-Atlantic ring to his voice.
I understand your point, but if someone from, say England, heard any of those accents, they’d be able to identify them generally as an American accent.
Similarly, a Southern accent is identifiable in a general way, even if the casual listener may not be able to pinpoint the precise geographic point of origin of the speaker.
I’m quite confident that, given Washington’s place of origin, his early adulthood spent in backwoods Virginia, and the majority of his life spent in and around Virginia, a listener would be able to identify his accent as, generally, “Southern.”
Why do you think a Southern accent would have been worthy of remark? He was a Southerner. Why would somebody who met him find it worth noting that a Southerner had a Southern accent? Did John Adams’ acquaintances remark on his accent?
First of all, I argue strongly against asserting that those recordings are exactly like today’s “Southern accent.” I hear some glide-weakening of /aI/, but it is not nearly as strong as today. He is r-ful in the section I listened to; his /o/ is not fronted. His /E/, as in ‘bet’ is not tripthongized; that is, it’s not pronounced like three separate vowels smooshed together. It is similar to today’s “Southern accent” in cadence and intonation, I’ll admit, along with some vowel stuff. So, I would say 92 years has made quite a difference, and 220 will make much more of a difference. And, further, I cringe at the thought of making any generalizations based on one person, particularly someone like a politician, who is most likely more educated than a typical speaker, giving a speech, which is a speech act that has much different norms than everyday speech.
And even if the 92 year old recording was exactly like today’s accent, that says absolutely nothing about what it was like 220 years ago. Language change does not happen at a constant rate; it has fits and spurts, somethings changing rapidly, while other aspects not at all.
Yes, there are certain markers that are more or less common to most of the dialects in the South. But they are fewer than I think most people realize, and we have not made clear what those aspects are.
I don’t feel that our debate about this minutia is at all helpful in answering this question. I don’t feel that I can confidently state what Washington sounded like because I do not know much about Colonial American English or British English from the same time period, nor do I know enough about Washington’s personal history. These are not my area of study or interest. I just wanted to state that saying Washington would have spoken like a modern day Southerner is naive. Saying he sounded “Southern,” whatever that would have meant for that time period, is probably true.
And, crap, I just realized I was signed in as my husband. This is liberty3701.
This is plausible enough to me; at any rate, I’m confident his accent was what would’ve been considered a Southern accent at the time, and it is not implausible that this would continue to “sound Southern” to some modern ears. Our only point of divergence, then, is in just how similar it actually would be to any modern accents.
I only hear that anymore in very old people. I do associate it particularly with inland South Carolina - my dad is from south Georgia and neither he nor none of his people say it.
My take on it is that he sounds exactly like my grandfather who was born in 1914 and lived in northern Mississippi. He pronounced his r’s fully, and he always pronounced the “-ing” suffix without clipping that final G, which always sounded suspiciously Yankee to my Atlanta ear. If not for certain nuances like “hunnerd”, “gloreh”, “gen’l”, and of course the “ah”-shaped “I”, I wouldn’t identify it as southern.
That being said, I know there are numerous ‘southern’ accents, well into the double digits I’m led to understand, and many do not reveal themseves except in careful listening by an attentive and trained ear.
He sounds to me like a Southerner speaking somewhat formally, and making a conscious effort not to drop his 'g’s. But the rest of the Southern markers are there. In other words, he sounds like a hundred Southern preachers I’ve heard over the years. I mean “hunnerd.”
And I agree that the “woik” thing is something you hear among old old-timers. You can still hear that in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi (doesn’t Harry Connick, Jr. do that?), and apparently, South Carolina. Come to think of it, the University of Georgia’s former football coach Vince Dooley sometimes displays that quirk, and he grew up in Mobile. (Maybe it’s a coastal thing?)
That’s what I always thought about my grandfather, until that I realized after hearing him speak like that for 30-something years, and hearing other relatives speak the same way, that it is unlikely they were making a 24/7 effort for 3 decades to speak formally in front of their grandson. Folks from his part of the world (northern Miss) really did speak like that.
I have never heard any living southerner say the “woik” thing, ever, except maybe in comic exaggeration, or in a movie once or twice. Not that I doubt it exists, just a comment on its rarity in my experience.
…But the thread’s only a year old and most of the participants are still around, so I figure it’s OK.
Nothing new to report on George Washington, but I did find some interesting tidbits in Jon Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson, American Lion.
Jackson was born in South Carolina before the Revolution, fought in the Revolution in the Carolinas as a teenager, and then migrated to Tennessee as an adult. His accent was noted in at least a couple of instances:
In referring to friendly newspaper editor Francis Preston Blair, Jackson was often heard to say (when he found himself in possession of letters or items that would make helpful propaganda), “Send it to Bla-ar!”
And then a passage on a letter by historian George Bancroft, who had passed an evening with Jackson at the White House and reported the event in a letter to his wife:
Jackson, it should be noted, was only 35 years younger than George Washington.
And at that time, ‘fiend’ was pronounced… oh, drat.
Assuming it’s the same as in modern times, this to my ear would be pure west Tennessee/northern Mississippi. People over there still talk exactly like that, i.e. “just use a peench of sugar”.
you might find some examples on the Smithsonian Folkways website, and also Library of Congress archival site. I know that Harry Smith archived a fair amount of early southern folk music and spoken routines.
