Okay so we’re all familiar with the southern accent, as well as the Texas accent, as well as the northeastern accents, including New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, as well as the varied northeastern accent in the Boston area. So here’s my question: If immigrants from other countries came here with their own accents learning English (French, Hispanic, German, Dutch, you name it) then how did any of those accents morph into the obviously American accents I named at the beginning of this post? Even though the British accent was very common here during the founding of this country, I somehow don’t hear Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin or Hancock saying “Y’ALL” “Youes guys” and “You people.” I am sure Cecil could answer this definitively, but if any of Y’ALL, Youes Guys and You People here on the Straight Dope Message Board could enlighten me, then I would be very grateful. I eagerly await any responses.
Why not?
The first successful English colony here was established at Jamestown in 1607. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonists had been here over 160 years. Plenty of time to develop distinctly “American” accents.
and the “english etc” accents are pretty wide and varied and have changed in the last 400 years or so…
You would be surprised about how assimilated groups can pick up on the accent of their new homeland. Accents aren’t stagnant but they also don’t change as rapidly in some circumstances as you might think even through repeated waves of immigration.
Southern accents in particular go back to the founding of the country if not well before. We have had some good and informative threads on that over the years. Washington and Jefferson almost certainly had a variation of a Southern accent that would be identified as such even today.
I can look up those old threads for you but the proof to me was listening to some very early recording of Southerners who were very old when early recording technology was invented. They were from people who were born in the early 1800’s and sounded exactly like the older people I knew growing up except for a few odd word choices. They wouldn’t sound very out of place even today in the rural South. That isn’t very far removed Washington and Jefferson at all and accents didn’t change quickly back then because Southern groups were mostly agrarian and geographically constrained.
Linguists can also tell a lot about old pronunciations through writing, especially those written by the semi-literate. We are pretty sure that Daniel Boone for example had a Southern Appalachian accent because he wrote phonetically. The same was true for many Civil War soldiers who kept detailed diaries.
Correct. Oddly enough, the ‘standard’ English accent shifted after the early colonists had already settled the U.S. east coast. Much of that was caused by the intentional popularization of ‘received pronunciation’ which is what most people think of as the standard English accent. The typical English accent shifted more than the major American accents after colonization. I have read that Shakespeare’s accent was probably closer to an American one than a modern English accent but I do not know if that is true or not.
The phonetic spellings in the journals of Lewis and Clark strongly suggest that Clark’s speech was sprinkled with Southernisms.
Some previous threads on the topic: