I am curious if anyone has any information out there regarding when the English Colonies developed accents distinct from the mother county? Have both accents evolved over time, having once been the same? And at what point was there a seperate Southern accent? Specifically, I am curious about the spoken words and accent of the colonists at the time of the American Revolution.
We’ve done this before!
The people who take care of the exhibits of George Washington’s home and posessions say they have so far been unable to exactly determine George’s accent and say it was half Brittish and half Southern.
Be that as it may, the Brittish and Bostonians were far enough in accent that certain special words were chosen as passwords IIRC the example I was given was Harbough; the last name on one neighbor that another neighbor (a speach therapist) said I never pronounced correctly. Naturally, I am from Massachusetts but do not at all have a Boston accent. No, not at all.
Have you seen “The Patriot”? Surely you can just rely on the veracity of the accents used in this Hollywood tale.
Is that the one where the Aussie…
You know, I have raised this topic before, particularly with regard to southern accents. My contention is that Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other southern leaders of the Revolution should have already been well along the way to developing southern accents, though they are never depicted with such accents on TV or in films.
The southern colonists had been around since the founding of Jamestown in the first decade of the 1600’s. In other words, they had been in the New World for nearly 200 years at the time of the Revolution. All the elements for development of the southern accent had been in place for a long time: influence of African slaves, isolation on farms, etc.
We also know, from phonetic spellings in letters written by Confederate soldiers, that the southern accent seemed to be fully developed by the time of the Civil War, four score and seven years (87 years) after the Revolution. (This was pointed out by another SDMB member. My apologies for not remembering who that was.)
So my question is: Which is more likely; that the Southern accent developed in the 170 some-odd years between colonization and the Revolution, or that it sprang up in the 80 some-odd years between the Revolution and the Civil War?
I was happy, for the sake of historical accuracy, to hear some southern accents in The Patriot (though the historical accuracy of that film pretty much ended with the accents).
Here’s a link to the earlier discussion:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=10779
Nick Nolte did play Jefferson with a Southun accent in Jefferson in Paris. It was matched by Gwyneth Paltrow’s efforts at same.
Robert Pirsig’s theory in his book Lila is that the laconic speech patterns of American Indians were taken over by white men, especially western frontiersmen, and that this made the definitive break between American speech and British speech. This dawned on him during a peyote ceremony in a tipi in Montana. He developed a whole theory of how our distinctly American characteristics, that differentiate our national character from Europe, were taken from the American Indians. He observed that in the West, society is more egalitarian, and the further you go toward the East Coast, down the Hudson to New York City, the more European social patterns of stratification and privilege prevail.
Later he discovered that William James Sidis had advanced a similar theory about American Indians decades before and was ridiculed for it.
Stephen Vincent Benét wrote a poem, something about how Englishmen came here and ate parched corn (i.e. Indian food)–and from that moment, though they didn’t realize it at them time, “they would never be Englishmen again.”
I think the important thing to remember is the southern colonies were settled by the British people much more exclusively than the northern one.
If you ask an English person to attempt to speak American it comes out as a southern accent. This, for some odd reason, is even more pronounced when Aussies or New Zealanders try to do this. It comes out very southern.
The north had the English but also the Germans, Dutch, Scandanavians and Irish. This helped prevent the southern accent from taking over.
Check out “Albion’s Seed” as well as “The Story of English” and maybe “The Mother Tongue”.
What an “American accent” is depends on where you happen to be. In the South, it’s reckoned that most Yankees can’t speak the King’s English worth a damn; at least so poorly that they can scarcely be understood. That’s pretty common knowledge; what most Americans aren’t aware of is the wide variety of regional British accents. It’s these regional British accents that give the regional American accents their origins, according to “Albion’s Seed”: the “dispossessed caviliers” of the English Civil War (began 1640) are said to be the origin of the Virginia accent that later was the source of a lot of the gentry population of the rest of the South. The people of Dorset and the areas near by (SW England) are said to be where Maryland gets its accent --except for Baltimore; they might be from Mars. Actually, they’re Yankees in a thin disguise. They are pretty close to Jersey in speech, and supposedly the New England accent comes from the North of England. “Albion’s Seed” also makes the case that the culture and values of these various parts of England strongly influenced those of their respective American regional counterparts.
I believe it was in “The Mother Tongue” that the statement was made that Lord North (Secretary for the N. American Colonies) and Geo. Washington would have had pretty much the same accent. The British accent as we know it today (“RP” – Recieved Pronounciation) I understand to be some kind of “drift” in one direction from the pronounciation of those times, and our (Northern) closed-mouth pronounciation a drift in another. God knows why exactly these things happen, but they do.
It does seem to me that in the time of George III and the Revolution, the upper classes of the Mutha country and its colony here were speaking pretty much the same language. The writing and especially the odd spellings seem to bear this out. But the upper classes —especially here— were pretty small. Remember that England often found it more expiedient to export its criminals and troublemakers overseas, so it could be argued that today’s American accent is a fusion of the accents of the undesirables 17th to mid-18th Century England. For that matter, it could be said the Australian accent is similar in origin, but of a slightly later period in time.
Maybe the “drift” in accent is a function of the speech patterns of the dominant groups in society. We, lacking a King and court, tended to level out more and be less class concious of the origins of the sound of our speech. The Brits, with an overseas empire firming up at the same time, tended to be more class-concious.
Yet another thread about accents: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=26851
I seem to recall from reading The Story of English that American accents descend mainly from the accent of East Anglia, in England. Apparently, the East Anglia accent is (or was) somewhere between what we think of as the American and British accents. According to the same source, the southern American accent owes much to the accent of black slaves.
How many Southern accents are there in the South?
Not only does the accent vary from state to state but from area to area within the states as well.
Same is true for the Northern accents - there are “thousands” of them, more than just one for every state.
There is no simple one-liner type answer, our accents are and were mosaic.
Jois