The early United States was presumably populated almost entirely by people who had immigrated from England (and their American-born descendants). At what point did the American accent begin to noticeably deviate from the English accent? Presumably there are written documents/letters in archives somewhere that record when English folks first noticed “Hey, those Americans talk funny.”
myth…the English colonies had HUGE numbers of Dutch, Swedush/Finish, German, and French speakers from before the revolution. That would seem like enough data to explain various language barries. Not to mention the welsh and scottish speakers.
Plus, the English in America did not settle only with people from their own home village. The various accents from England recombined in the New World. I imagine that the first generation born in the New World is what started it, when children picked up the accents of their peers as well as their parents. I don’t know how much time children on 17th century New England or Virginia farms spent with their peers, but I imagine more than none.
Bear in mind that modern English accents are no closer to 17th Century English accents than modern American accents are.
Or are they? How well do we know what people sounded like back then, with no recordings existing to compare against?
I read somewhere that some linguists theorized that the Founding Fathers would have all talked like they were from modern day Oklahoma or someplace like that.
By writing, mainly. People often wouldn’t know or care that much about correct spelling, and instead write phonetically - which can teach us a lot about how they pronounced things. In addition, contemporary poetry is helpful in seeing what word they thought rhymed with each other.
Though there are no recordings, there are many ways of figuiring it out to a greater or lesser degree.
· People write about pronunciation: foreigners’ attempts to learn English, “kids these days,” how to spell the words in the dictionaries that are just being invented, etc.
· English poetry of the period rhymes, and by examining the changes in rhymes we can see shifts in the pronunciation of vowels; we also have a lot of dialect poetry.
· Misspellings are clues to contemporary pronunciations. You don’t misspell “water” as “hogthorpe,” you misspell it as “wata” or “wadder.”
· The combination of modern dialectology and historical linguistics helps firm the picture. If the Londoners say “wata” and the New Yorkers say “wadda” and the Los Angelenos say “waddur,” chances are the reconstructed proto-form in Early Modern English is *waTVr (T=stop, V=vowel). A professional linguist could convey this better, and will probably be along to correct my errors, but given that the hypothetical reconstruction matches contemporary spelling, it’s a good bet that “water” was pronounced exactly as spelled.
People do argue about it: was Shakespeare’s knee prounouned k-nee (probably not), h-nee (maybe), or nee (probably)? In general, though, it’s pretty well known.
Interesting, thank you for taking the time to write that out. Various things I hadn’t thought of.
For the record (and I know you didn’t say it), I wasn’t saying we do speak the same. Just I wasn’t sure how we’d know. Now I’ve had that explained to me.
And also, poetry that one would expect to rhyme can indicate that the writer or intended performers would have pronounced them to rhyme.
For example, in Walter Scott’s “Marmion”, he attempts to rhyme “heath” with “death”, and makes it so that if I want to recite it, I either have to break out of my native accent and alter one or either word to make them rhyme, or else pronounce them without the rhyme.
Poets sometimes cheat: Shakespeare’s “prove” and “love” didn’t rhyme in London English, but they did rhyme in dialects that would have been familiar to Londoners. (My source for everything in this thread is the book Early Modern English by Charles Barber.)
I was watching a show on linguistics a while ago, and one of the guys said that several US southern accents are actually still rather close to certain regional ‘English’ accents. I don’t remember which southern accents specifically, but several of them, especially the backwoods accents, are fairly close to what this guy claimed was the accent of central and southern English aristocracy. Some are, of course, Scotch or Welsh (or Irish) in origin (IIRC, various groups in Appalachia are mixtures of Scotch and Irish accents).
So, I guess the answer to the OP depends on where in the US you are looking…and also, an acknowledgment of what the first two posters in this thread were saying, namely that there were a lot of folks in the area who weren’t ‘English’ (including native America tribes that the various colonists were in contact with) and even those who were nominally ‘English’ came from vastly different (linguistically as well as culturally) parts of England (various regional dialects, as well as dialectic differences between rural and city, between different classes, etc), Wales, Scotland and Ireland (who also have a lot of regional linguistic differences, class differences, city vs rural differences, etc).
-XT
Arrrrgh. Don’t take this personally, XT, but someone always comes into these types of threads with that meme, and it’s simply wrong. There are some American accents that retain a few anachronistic elements that resemble their older, English forms, but none that could be called “close” to them.
shrug I’m no expert, just repeating what this guy was saying. He was backing it up using some sort of linguistic program that showed the formation of vowels and consonants, but it was mostly gibberish to me. It SOUNDED plausible though. 
-XT
Hey, at least you didn’t quote that Bill Bryson book and instead referenced someone that may actually know something about linguistics!
But David Fischer argues similarly in Albion’s Seed, through spelling analyses. He is quite exact about matching local spelling variants in different areas of 17th century Britain to modern US accents. Some of these accents are extinct in their original geographical areas. If this has been discredited, I’d like to know by whom.
His argument is that regional English cultures shaped regional American cultures, including language. That’s not the same as suggesting that rural dialects are somehow immune to the changes that occur in other areas. A conservative dialect is not the same as an unchanging dialect, and all dialects have both conservative and innovative features.
Can you give us the quote from his book or papers that supports that statement? Before we talk about something being “discredited”, let’s see exactly how it is credited.
Like I said, there are anachronistic aspects to certain American accents, but that doesn’t make them, as a whole, “close” to 17th century British speech.
Aggghhh! My bete noir! Curse you, Bill Bryson, you popular propagator of misinformation! Curse you! (I need a grimacing and shaking of the fist smiley!)
I always though that everyone spoke with regional accents back in the 18th century. It was before there was any national media to provide a standard model for how to talk. So people in England spoke differently than people in America. But people in Philadelphia spoke differently than people in Manhattan and people in London spoke differently than people in Sheffield.