There wasn’t a “royal court” or “public school” or “Oxbridge” or comparable non-regional accent in the 1700s?
Pretty sure they still speak differently, apart from those that grew up elsewhere.
There is almost always a “prestige” dialect, one which is linguistically equal but socially superior. For a variety of reasons, the speech of upper-class Englishmen from the area roughly between London, Cambridge, and Oxford has been that dialect for English for a long, long time. Then as now, there are other prestige dialects within reduced contexts. I’m no expert, but I’d strongly suspect there was a similar triangle based on the upper-class speech between Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.
It isn’t a matter of consciously studying speech in the media, but of more or less subconsciously imitating the speech of those you want to accept you—local peers or wealthy patrons or university professors or what have you. Most people can manage to modulate their accent when moving between different speech communities (e.g. not talking posh at home on the farm, not saying “pigshit” too often in front of the queen).
Don’t you think the larger distances between your latter triangle would have made the analogy not a good one? Especially since travel in England was a whole lot easier than travel in the colonies.
Though we can glean a lot from written records, it’s still all very speculative. Things like misspellings, etc., as well as rhyming in poetry, were much more susceptible to inconsistency, lack of education, regionalism, etc. than they are now.
You can never get a complete and true sense of a language through writing alone. Language is just too complex for print.
I was taught that rhymes such as prove and love were visual rhymes, in that since they were spelled similarly, you could “rhyme” them even if they weren’t pronounced the same.
And I was an English major. Now I’m questioning some of those professors…
Maybe not that specific set, and it doesn’t have to be a triangle, but the point is that there would also have been a prestige dialect among Americans, as well as within specific regions, etc.
Not to nit pick this to death, but I would suspect there were a number of prestige dialects, since there were a number of different power centers in the colonies. Virginia and Massachusetts being the prime centers, with other places like NY and PA as secondary.
I understood that publication of the King James Bible brought a measure of uniformity to English regional and class dialects, at least to written forms?
Well, by definition dialects are for all practical purposes a spoken phenomenon, so that’s kind of like mixing apples and oranges. Moreover, at the time of that publication most people in rural populations couldn’t read anyway. But I bet that for those who could read, such a publication at least helped to standard spelling, though I guess it’s hard to tell how much.
Any written form of a language comprises a dialect of that language.
I have read a piece from a linguist stating that colonists accents (in general) tend to diverge strongly from the mother tongue in the very first generation, and that the first generation born in the colony sets the tone for the new accent. I will try to track that down.
Ah, here we go. It came up earlier in this thread: When did the American accent develop?
My memory of the linguist’s take was not perfect, but here it is:
Nitpick: Scotch is a drink, Scottish refers to things from Scotland. (And the people are Scots.)
An identifiable Southern accent was established fairly early and wouldn’t seem that out of place even today in some areas. There is a phenomenon that I like to call “generation jumping” that lets people go back through several centuries through second or third hand accounts alone which can happen under the right circumstances. John Tyler, the 10th President of the U.S, still has two living grandsons for example and his family can say for certain that one type of Virginia accent was fairly stable from his birth in 1790 until today. My great-great grandfather was one of the last surviving Civil War vets (Confederate) and my grandfather who is still living and doing quite well mentally knew him until his death in 1949. I asked my grandfather about this an there was no big difference between his current Texas/Oklahoma accent and that of a Civil War vet from the same area.
There are also some very early recordings from the late 1800’s of very old people at the time that let you listen to people that learned to speak much earlier in the 19th century. For Southern accents, it is perfectly understandable and identifiable even today. That isn’t to say that there aren’t any differences. The vocabulary is different but the base accent is roughly the same. Other American accents have changed at different rates due to lots of influences.
I left out an important part of the linguist’s take:
And this isn’t something you see only in centuries old poetry, or in later work that emulates it. IIRC even popular musicians in more recent times, e.g. the Beatles, have used visual rhymes like “again” and “pain”.
“Again” and “pain” are aural rhymes (or close enough to it) in many northern varieties of English including, I think, that spoken in Liverpool.
Yes, but anything in written form is replicated through different channels.
How is that different from spoken language and how does it relate to your assertion that dialects exist only in spoken language?