One important point regarding the OP’s question that (I don’t think) has been addressed yet:
One of the major differences–perhaps THE major difference–between most modern American English accents and UK English accents is the predominance of rhotic pronunciation in the Americas. There is a tendency to think that American rhotism is the more recent evolution–ie, that Shakespearean English, for example, was non-rhotic, and it was the American colonists who first started saying -r- at the end of syllables.
But as Robert Trask points out in Why Do Languages Change?, this simply isn’t the case. UK English non-rhotism wasn’t born until the earl 19th-century, and for a while it was considered a non-standard, working-class sort of accent. Ironic, given that it’s now integral to Received Pronunciation.
Just to point out that while “Scots” or “Scottish” is the proper/preferred usage now, that wasn’t always the case. Robert Burns himself used “Scotch” at times.
Here’s some numbers. In 1775 those of English ancestry are estimated as 48.7% of the population, Africans 20%, Scots and Ulster Scots 14.4%, Germans 6.9%, with Dutch, French, Swedish, 1 to 2% and others 5%.
By this time the American accent would have been long formed and given the fact that the English and Scots percentages would have been even higher a century earlier it’s pretty safe to say that the influence of other European languages on the accent would have been negligible (at the time that accent was forming).
The OP is about “accent,” something which is part of spoken dialect, so any effect on that by the publication of the King James Bible on the accents as they would arise in America is probably minimal. Written “dialects,” in as much they’re referred to as such, work for the most part very differently from the concern of this thread. That’s all.
I can’t find the cite right now (since I’m in Afghanistan and what not), but in my large amount of reading on the Revolution era I remember coming across a couple of times that while Ben Franklin was in London as the colonial representative his accent was noted as quite the novelty. So his accent (grew up in Boston, moved to Philly as a teenager) was distinct enough in the cosmopolitan Imperial capital. Of course, that doesn’t say how it was different.
I have a couple of books that devote many pages to explaining their documentation and/or theories on the matter. I will give you the APA reference citations, if you care to look them up:
Crystal, D. (1995). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. London: Cambridge University Press.
McCrum, R., Cran, W., & MacNeil, R. (1986). The story of English. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc.
The latter gives a lot of credit for the “standardization” of the American speech to Noah Webster (p. 241), putting it at the late 1700’s to early 1800’s.
One interesting phenomenon you can observe for yourself: watch movies made in the black & white era. Many of the American actors have accents that sound rather similar to British English. Received knowledge is that changed after the World Wars.
I’m pretty sure that’s balderdash. The accents you hear in the flicker-shows has nothing to do with those people’s native speech patterns, and everything to do with their studio mandated training to mould them into ACT-ahs.
It seems to me if certain southern American accents are more conservative than the British accents, then we can ask When the British Engish Accent Deviate from American English. May be we should ask which modern accent a 18th century Londoner would find easier to understand?
The English themselves had, and still have, a variety of accents. With the advent of radio and television, the differences have become less pronounced.
If you put a person from Northumbria and a person from Bristol together in a new land, along with people who have other accents, and then you cut them off from verbal communications from their motherlands, their children are probably going to speak a combination of their accents. And so pronounciation begins to wander.
From what I’ve read, many of the people from England, Wales and Scotland from the same county would end up migrating to the same area in the United States, so the accents might not end up as being as well mixed as you might think. Different States and even different areas of states would end up with distinct accents. It seems just natural for people to migrate to areas where they already had family and friends and people with similar ways of speaking.
Even at that, the English Colonies were probably better off than the French. As I recall there were actually distinct languages in parts of France. There are regional languages that have official recognition in France today.
Sounded more like “you know he’s not that wrong” to me. Whereas he was, in fact, very wrong. As is the idea that Burns is some kind of authority on correct term to use to describe a Scotsman. Next we’ll be running it by Rab C Nesbitt.
Katharine Hepburn was reared to speak that way, retained her speech pattern all her life. I know there are others, but I’m only on my first cup of coffee.
That’s called “affectation,” and it doesn’t reflect the way real people actually spoke “back then,” which was not that long ago anyway. We have tons of field recordings of natural American speech from ever since sound recording technology was invented, and it doesn’t sound anything like the way actors “emoted” on the screen prior to WWII. That was all just the stylistics of the time in Hollywood. Essentially, people like Hepburn were hamming it up–often even when they weren’t on a sound stage.
Even if that kind of speech were Hepburn’s actual idiolect, we certainly shouldn’t use how people speak in movies to characterize American speech of that time. Even now, for that matter.
Waitaminit. While there were definitely stage accents used in the movies, I always thought that Hepburn’s accent was more or less a real New England accent, not something affected.
I worked with a New Englander who enunciated a lot like Katherine Hepburn, though he was about 20 years younger. I never thought about he was putting on any kind of affectation. Try as we might, we couldn’t get him to slur his words like a midwesterner - but he did learn to do a pretty good “Fargo” style lilt at the end of his sentences.
While you may subjectively judge the Hepburn speech pattern as “affectation,” she learned it from her family, not from Hollywood. And I can’t think of anything nice to say in response to the notion that she was a “ham” actor, so I’ll try to ignore that.
I only threw out the movie thing as an easy and available example, not as exhaustive “proof” of anything. Audio recordings of politicians would be another that comes to mind, and they were not copying the stylistics of Hollywood, were they?