I was at a party over the holidays and a woman from the U.K. told me that she was under the impression that at the time of the Revolution, British accents closely resembled American accents and then evolved into what they are today. Is this accurate?
Not to mention the fact that there is no one American accent, either. A New Yorker will sound very different from someone from Dallas, who will sound very different from someone from Wisconsin, etc.
There has been a persistent myth - usually told about the islands of the Outer Banks or various pockets of rural Appalachia - that Elizabethan English is still spoken among certain isolated American populations.
There was a TV show recently on the CMT(?) cable channel about the American South. One topic concerned the various Southern accents. The expert was a New England university professor/linguist who said much of the “Southern accent” actually derives from English aristocracy, with different off-shoots depending upon the immigration patterns at the time.
I remember watching a show on History where a supposed language expert said that several ‘southern’ accents in the US were corrupted versions of aristocratic British accents (presumably London upper class accents, since the UK has a huge variety of accents) from the time of the revolution…especially (and ironically) the heavy accents of the lower classes in the South. Gods know how accurate this is (I got shot down on this board for bringing it up before), but when this guy was imitating the various accents, especially key words, it sounded to ME like he was onto something.
That said, there is a huge variety of accents in the US, and they have been influenced by a truly bewildering variety of immigrant accents from all over the world.
I think (yeah I know, ‘think’ doesn’t work here, sorry but I want to add this!) anyways, I feel like a lot of the accents really sound a like to each other. Think of it this way, Irish, Scottish, English(England), American, Austrian, and even German all have the same sound.
True many of them are harder or softer than each other, but they have many of the same things to each other.
There’s been so many times someone will be at the register and have an accent and I ask: 'are you from England?" and get ‘No, I’m from Scotland’.
Or a ‘proper’ speaker may sound like a high class Englishwoman. Or a southerner here sounds like a southerner in England (been mentioned).
That’s probably close to being true, although there were many other influences, post-Revolution, on American accents that did not come from Britain. All accents change over time, and the farther back you go back in American history, the closer our accents will resemble certain British accents at the time. Until, that is, you get to a time before 1609…
Speaking as a southern Englishman, the accent that sounds to me to be closest to the generally American one is that of South West England.
i.e. Devon and Cornwall.
To a non American there seems to be a lot less variation in the various American accents then there are between different British, or even English accents.
I’ve opined this before, but I’m pretty much convinced this is largely perceptual. To me, there’s almost no similarity between, say, Dorset and Merseyside accents, but to Johnny Foreigner, they’re just ‘British’.
Whilst Johnny F. may well understand R.P. , or South Eastern English easily, good luck to them if they encounter a Geordie or a Glasweigan !
Also I think that Brum and Scouse are sufficiently different different from some other forms of British English to be recognised even by non Brits.
The Americans showed this when Liverpudlian was all the rage, by including Scouse speakers, as opposed to the normal bland slightly southern/R.P. accent that all Brits are supposed to speak, on their t.v programmes of the time.
Yet when you look in other accent-related threads (and there have been many), it’s not at all unusual to find people who have a great deal of trouble perceiving the breadth of variation in British accents that a Brit perceives (and this isn’t because of lack of exposure to the different accents) - sometimes to the extent of reluctance to stop referring to ‘the British accent’ as if it’s just one thing.
And I expect the same is true in reverse - that American people perceive a broad spectrum of different American accents, seemingly broader than exists in other English-speaking nations.