I would say that American speech patterns were influenced to some extent by American Indian speech. To be plainspoken, less fancy, less ornate. The further west you go in the United States, the more plainspoken the language. English speech has wider pitch variation than American. The eastern seabord has the strongest European influence, and further west the American Indians held on longer. This at any rate was the thesis of J. McIver Weatherford in * Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America* and Robert M. Pirsig in Lila. William James Sidis, the subject of a Cecil column, was the first to propose this idea.
I can now tell the difference between the two, thanks to so much time spent in the UK and so many hundreds of hours talking to Fierra. An Australian accent is like an English one, with lots more “Oi” 's, correct? 
(waiting for Fierra to start beating me…)
Hey, that’s what I’ve got. If it helps any, the class was graduate level, and the text supported the prof.
Tranquilis, did the prof mention that there wasn’t a uniform English accent in Victorian times?
Just a quick note - I think it’s a bit of a misnomer to say that the English accent was “more American” in the past. It was a 100% English accent that, it so happens to have turned out, is the one from which the Amercian accent evolved (alongside it’s multitude of other influences).The sound of the accent to our ears may sound American now, but back then that’s what an English accent was.
Or at least, a regional strain of the English accent. In times past, regional accents were much more defined (cf Prof Henry Higgins and his claim to be able to tell on which side of the street a person was born ;)). While one regional accent may well have sounded, to us, more like an American accent, the next town along may have sounded completely different. It’s impossible to make a sweeping claim about “the English accent” because of the number of factors that went into, and still do go into, producing an accent - location, class, fashion, etc.
Fran
IIRC, she said it was more working-class urban, with a strong mix of Scots-Irish in some locals. There was a brief discusion of general regional English accents and the efforts by various literacy groups to standardize English, but only as much as it bore on the development of American dialects. There were some papers on the the potato famine, and it’s effect on American dialects, especially New York and PA. Mind you, the class is fairly far in my past, and I didn’t pay all that much attention in the first place.
Playing catch-up here since my ISP’s been crippled the past couple days …
Would be interested to see the exact quote from the text, and who the author was and what references (if any) were cited. I’m not disputing that there are pockets of the US where certain words tend to be pronounced as they were in earlier English eras, but I find it quite difficult to believe that any (respectable) linguist would claim that the actual accent survives anywhere to this day.
I agree with L_C that there are some similarities between London and Australia. I wouldn’t say a Northern English accent sounds anything like Australian, though. As far as Ireland goes, Leinster (east-central and southeastern Ireland) accents sound to me to be much closer to American than to English accents, working-class Dublin shares features with Noo Yawk and Bahston, and the twang of Donegal (northwest Ireland) reminds me a lot of the Carolinas. These are just subjective observations, though I will note the following (from linguist Loreto Todd’s Green English: Ireland’s Influence on the English Language):
- BBC English has 22 vowel sounds, standard American and Irish 16
- BBC English has 24 consonants, American 25 and Irish 26;
- BBC English is non-rhotic (that is, “r” is usually dropped), American and Irish English are rhotic.
I can’t recommend this book without qualifications - I think she tends to overstate the influence a bit and occasionally grasp at straws to prove a point - but there is a lot of very interesting material in it. Much more about the influence on vocabulary (and to a lesser extent grammar) than on accent, though.
Lemme dig into the pile 'o books in the back room, and see if I can dredge it up. May take a bit, as I’ve not unpacked some 3400lbs of books since I left the Nav and moved north.
A couple of non-scientific observations I have made, with hypotheses (which I expect to be promptly shot down):
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I very nearly embarrassed myself in London, assuming that some Londoners were Australians. My aunt (who lived in London for many years) corrected me and told me in an ironic sort of tone that they had an “East End” accent. I gather that this is sort of a low-class accent for Londoners. The original European Australians were not, let’s face it, very high class, and the connection seems obvious.
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While in Ireland, I was startled at how similar the Irish accent was to a standard American accent. Most notably, both Irish and Americans (and Canadians) pronounce "r"s that the English and Australians leave as silent. My guess was that this is due to the influence of the huge Irish migration to the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century. It doesn’t seem impossible to me that such a large influx of immigrants could have influenced the accent.
It’s a total fallacy to talk of an “English accent”. There’s a world of difference between Geordie, Scouse, Brummie and Cockney.
To get close to the question, I have a strong West Country accent (comes from growing up in Cornwall and Somerset). It features a lot of hard and extended vowel sounds, and tends to drawl. People from other parts of the UK often ask me if I’m Irish or American. I’m told it has similarities to the accents of New England, which makes sense seeing as the original English-speaking migrants to New England were predominantly from the West Country of England.
So some of you US types still have something that bears a similarity to my own “English accent”. It’s nothing like what you’ll hear in a Hollywood movie or on the BBC, however.
Although the Pilgrim Fathers stopped in Plymouth, none were IIRC from the West Country. Of immigrants to New England between 1621 and 1643, 60% came from Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Bedford and Kent.
Granted, in those times there was a more widespread ‘country’ accent that covered much of England that may be similar to what is now confined to the West Country and East Anglia.
If the New England accent was based on anything, it was probably based on rural southern English. This does not mean that the current New England accents are anything like current west country speech.
An oddity of the Cornish accent is that it is more metropolitan (Londonish) than Devon, Dorset and Somerset. This is because Cornish was the common language through to the beginning of the seventeenth century, and English learnt later in Cornwall tended to be equally accented by Cornish, London and West Country. If you listen to a Cornishman and a Devonian side by side, you here more London accents in the Cornish than in the Devon.
The Pilgrims originated in East Anglia, the opposite end from Cornwall. I’m not sure how much similarity could be found between East Anglia and New England accents of the present day; both must have changed over the years.
Walter Ralegh came from Devon, and it was through his influence that the Tidewater region was settled. The accents of islands in the Chesapeake Bay have been documented as preserving certain features of Devon speech. The Devon-Chesapeake connection is probably the strongest linguistic link between England and America.
Aren’t you sure you don’t mean Elizabethan era? It was once supposed that the voice of Shakespeare could be found in the “hollers” of the Appalachians. There are numerous threads (and maybe a Cecil collumn?) on whether Americans speak Elizabethan English or not.
The Elizabethan accent thing has been debunked somewhat by Cecils column and by others in various threads.
Umm… you’re from Virginia, right? I hope you know that the settlers of Virginia are not who your fellow Americans mean by the Pilgrims! If I recall correctly (from Robert Macneil’s <i>The Story of English</i>, and it has been a while) Virginia and the American South were heavily settled by East Anglians, while Massachusetts was settled by the so-called Pilgrims–from <i>south</i> England.
And let me add that in the Midwestern US, English does seem to have been slightly altered by Irish & German settlers who perhaps didn’t have all the English vowels in their ancestral dialects. Or perhaps those missing vowels are a result of–well, I guess it’s not exactly creolisation, but the need for whole communities to learn a language unfamiliar to their ancestors.
East Anglia was the area that spawned the Puritan rebellion against King Charles. From there the Pilgrims set sail from England. During the Cromwell period, Virginia remained more or less loyal to the Stuarts, which is why it was nicknamed “the Old Dominion.” According to The Cousins’ Wars by Kevin P. Phillips, the New England revolutionaries like John Adams hated the memory of the Stuarts as representative of what was wrong with the British monarchy, so they identified with the Roundheads on some level.
It was New England that had the Puritans, not the South. Virginia was mainly Anglican.
I didn’t mean to imply that all of Virginia was settled from Devon, but that the Tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland, especially the islands of the Chesapeake Bay, had the Devon influence. The Roanoke Colony was started at the initiative of Walter Ralegh in 1585, which is how the Devon influence got started in that region.
Looking further, I found how mixed up the actual settlement pattern was. East Anglians went to both Massachusetts and Virginia, while some of the first settlers in Massachusetts came from Devon and some Pilgrims came from the West Country.
Walter Raleigh being from Devon does not explain accents. Although he was from Devon, most of the settled gentry over the first fifty years came from all over southern England. The workers were mainly from an area centered on Bristol of about one hunded miles radius. (Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer)
I am interested in the suggestion that some of the Pilgrim fathers had origins in Devon- I believed that none of them did; that stopping at Plymouth was for supplies only.