Does anyone know how and when we United States people (and most Canadians I’ve met) lost anything resembling a British accent?
While there is a difference between an English and an Australian accent, you can still tell the two are related, so it can’t just be the geographical separation factor. And I doubt interaction with the Native Americans had much of an effect, because in pretty much every other aspect of life we Borg – er, <i>Americans</i> tended to try to assimilate and/or eradicate them.
I’d be willing to bet the influx of immigrants in the mid-late 1800s would have had a greater effect. So my guess would be that in any Revolutionary War movie, the Americans <i>should</i> be speaking with English accents, though I’m sure that would be confusing.
Corroborations? Refutations? Good laughs at my expense?
One of the good things about living in the UK is that you can use the search feature on this site (in the mornings, anyway) without it being a strain on ones social conscience:
FWIW, I’m not sure when the Italian, Spanish and German immigrants lost their English accent and I’m almost as confused by Katherine Zeta Jones’s ‘new American’ voice as I am with Madonna’s English accent.
I suggest we all move to Canada and be done with it.
Your reason for thinking this may be slightly skewed. As an American, to you Australian and English accents may sound similar, but IMHO this is simply because they’re both (relatively) unfamiliar accents. To me they’re as different as chalk and cheese and an Australian accent varies as much from an English one as an American one. Equally, I often get a South African and a New Zealand accent confused - not because they’re alike but because they’re both relatively unfamiliar to me.
Aside from the name itself (from Zetland, IIRC), I think you’re going to surprise the Historians, the Scots, Maori’s and one or two SDMB posters with that observation.
Think about some American regional accents. A Boston accent is very different from a Pittsburgh one, a Brooklyn one is different from a Midwestern, and so on.
It is also fairly easy (once you have heard them a bit) to go further and distinguish between the Scottish, Irish, and British accents (did not get to hear any Welsh accents sorry). After spending time over there (granted only a couple weeks) it is easy to spot the fake accents as well (never realized how bad they were)
If you want Enlish accents from the Victorian era, visit West Virginia, southwestern PA, or near-by areas of Ohio. Some areas near Pittsburgh still have a strong old-highland accent, too.
Languages generally mutate faster in urban areas than in rural areas. Extrapolating backwards, it’s likely that the current US accent is closer to the 1700s English accent than is the current English one. (admittedly there were dialects then, too…) Having actors in a revolutionary war movie speak in contemporary US accents is probably closer than speaking in contemporary English accents.
As Tranquilis referred to, there are linguistically isolated pockets in the US with accents thought to be particularly anachronistic.
First of all: D’oh! Sorry about the repeated question.
Second of all: I’m not entirely sure it is because they are unfamiliar to me (though I’m not refuting that entirely)…an Irish accent sounds more different (to me) from an English accent than an Australian accent does.
What (Tim) says is correct–British speech used to be more American. A lot of people seem to think that British speech must have stayed the same while colonial accents changed, but in fact everybody’s speech is changing all the time. Actually, the title quote is a good example of the fallacy. Robin Hood, if he existed, not only wouldn’t have had a modern British accent, he would have spoken a language totally unintelligible to people on both sides of the pond today.
When two peoples speaking the same language are geographically separated, their accents evolve in different directions over time. Australia hasn’t been settled by English speakers for as long as America has, so maybe that’s why the accent sounds more similar to you.
There are plenty of recordings around of English speech from the Victorian era so it shouldn’t be too difficult to compare them with the suggested areas of the US.
Of course, what they sound like will vary tremendously according to the speaker’s geographical origins and social class.
ENGL 483 American English (3)
Prerequisite: ENGL 280 or LING 200 or permission of department.
Origins and development of the various dialects of English spoken in the United States.
There must be an argument for American English having been heavily affected by the migration of Scots, Scots-Irish and Irish in various waves from 1690 to 1850. IIRC more people in the US claim descent from these groups than from the English, altough this may be affected by petty romanticism.)
Having had the dubious distinction of having possessed both an American accent when young, and an English accent in adulthood, I have maintained an interest in the nicities of difference of accent. I am usually quite successful with placing British accents to within a few tens of miles- at least with older people, and am able to pick out more regional variations in US English than most Americans. However, I am sometimes thrown by softer and rarer Irish and Scots accents which share some of the characteristics of US speech- harder ts, shorter flatter vowels etc… Then I find myself listening and flip-flopping back and forth between identifying it as Irish, Scots or US. This happens a lot with call centers, many of which are based in Ireland, where it may take a few seconds to decide whether you are speaking to US or Irish staff.
However, this does not explain the Aussie accent which doesn’t have this Gaelic air, although their Irish and Scots emigration ws also high in the nineteenth century. Listening to Aussie TV programs, I feel that I can hear a gradual Americanization of the Aussie accent amongst the younger people. That is probably also happening in Britain as well. Certainly over the past thirty years since I have lived in England, I have noticed a drift in word usage and general attitude that is recognizably American. Bill Bryson in his book ‘Made in America’ shows how much of the English language (much that would be claimed as English English by the English) is in fact of American origin.
Anglophone Canadians, for the most part, never had an English accent to begin with. The greatest proportion of the British Isles descent in Canada is Irish and Scottish.
It’s always been my speculative and uninformed judgement – in other words, no cite :eek: - that the Aussie accent is, in sizable measure, related to the London twang. It’s obviously gone its own way but I think I hear a distant cousin in there somewhere.
The only non-linguistic evidence I can come up with is the fact that a high proportion of the early settlers were the product of London prisons and that rhyming slang became ingrained in Aussie culture very early on (and remains so) to an extent not seen elsewhere.
'Course, that doesn’t explain that ‘up’ thing at the end of Aussie pronunciation but, damn, that’s catchy so perhaps it just emerged of it’s own accord.
I’ve always assumed the regional variations in ‘American’ relate to the areas where immigrants from individual countries tended to collect – the children, perhaps, developing their English with the linguistic influence of their parents (German, Scandie, Irish, Italian, etc) mother tongue.
As a Brit, I’d disagree, although again it depends what flavour of accent we’re talking about, and indeed if there’s any way at all of objectively quantifying differences between one accent and another.
For example, I’d say that Australian is no more similar to English than American, however, I’d say that a (UK)Newcastle accent and a (U)Oxford accent also differ by a huge amount.
Another thing that might have skewed this perception somewhat is the large number of American actors who try to put on am English accent, but come out with something that sounds like a mangled UK/Oz hybrid. It’s painful and embarrassing to listen to (Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins for example).
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Does it work the other way around? does (for example) Lee Evans in the film Mousehunt sound awful to American ears?
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