This just seems to be “Hur hur! You murkins sure do talk funny!” (say that with the overseas version of a Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel accent).
Not only that (see everything above), but have the Irish also changed proper grammar, or is “different from” still considered correct?
My English and Irish friends and I always enjoy taking the piss out of each other over words we pronounce differently, my favorite being “aluminum” as opposed to “aluminium”.
What I find interesting is that if you asked an American whether the Australian accent was closer to the British accent or the American accent we would almost universally say “British”. But if you asked an Englishman or woman they would invariably say it is more similar to American (or at least according to my friends).
In all of the United Kingdom, even with its devastatingly varied ways of pronunciation of the the ‘English’ language, there are only 60 million speakers.
The United States, with its remarkably unvarying accents (comparatively), has 290 million speakers of English.
We win. Stop trying to speak English like the English and speak it correctly like we Americans do. After all, the majority of Irish people have (considering the massive number of Irish immigrants to America).
Word up.
Peace.
A 3rd generation Irish American
English has been evolving for more than 1,000 years. Hardly any of you would understand “Old English.” There are so many dialects in America that you wouldnt believe its one country. Just to name a few, theres African American Vernacular English (ebonics if youd like), Chicano, and Chinese-English. Where i live, there is a huge Spanish influence so you will see many people speaking what isnt “correct” English with maybe a verb-subject switch or other grammatical switches. In other places like Louisiana, people speak “Creole” which is influenced by French. In other words, theres no such thing as a single “American English” since there are so many different types in America.
The reason for the initial change may have just been caused because a few people didnt want to speak queens english anymore since they werent associated with her anymore anyways. All it really takes is a few people to make a change. When you have a huge influence like ‘Mark Twain’ did, you can easily change the language.
The Queen’s English (or the King’s if appropriate) is simply the way the current monarch speaks the language. Even if the Monarch has a heavy German accent it can be considered the most Englishiest of the English lnaguages. This is though just about as silly as anything else to do with the monarchy.
Several years ago some linguist listened to all the Christmas addresses given by the Queen over the past fifty years. (The Queen always gives an address to the British public on radio/TV on Christmas day.) What he noticed was that over that fifty-year period, the Queen’s accent slowly shifted from something close to an old-fashioned Received Pronunciation/BBC English (in other words, what you probably think of as stereotypical upper-class British English) to something close to Estuary English. “Estuary English” is the term used for the dialect of most middle-class people of southern England of the present day. It’s a mixture of Received Pronunciation with some of the local dialects of southern England. In other words, the Queen no longer speaks the Queen’s English.
I don’t really know where Corry gets off implying that there’s something wrong with American English since I have a very hard time understanding her OP. The “to” in the title pretty much changes the whole meaning.
I had noticed that in a less formal manner, Wendell. You hear her in old newsreels and her accect is far flutier and posh than it is today.
Why do Irish say “tomatto” when English say “tomahto”?
Why do Irish say “tree” when English say “three”?
Why do Irish pronounce the letter R as “or” when English pronounce it “are”?
etc
What period of history are we talking about here?
Listen carefully to ordinary people being interviewed in very old newsreels made from the 1930’s onwards, which are now being digitalised for posterity.
I’ve listened to quite a few, from the USA, Britain and Australia, and the thing that stood out most sharply was the fact that nobody, absolutely nobody, speaks like that any more.
Come to think of it, even the speaking styles and accents of movie stars from the 1930’s have changed, but not quite as noticeably.
My impression is that there has been a slow convergence over the last 90 years in the style of speaking English, and a large loss of dialect words, possibly caused by radio and recordings from 1920 on, movies, from 1930 on, and TV from the 1950’s.
So, perhaps the past is a foreign country in more than just the way people conducted themselves.
Good lord, not even all the people in the US pronounce everything the same way!
Good, lord, listen to people from Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, California, Minnesota, and New Orleans and tell me they all have the same accent.
Jeezoman, yinz don’t talk right! Get outta tahn an’at!
Didja 'ear? Yer man 'erb’s in 'ospital with an ‘ernia, and it’s makin’ 'im right 'ostile, too, coz it 'urts like 'ell! Tat 'olistic herbal remedy 'erb’s wife gave 'im just made the 'ole ting worse! 'e’s just ‘avin’ an 'orrible time of it! I 'eard 'e’s supposed to get out in tree days, on Tursday.
Herb is short for Herbert.
The purest Brooklyn accent I ever heard was from a native of New Orleans.
I’ve read that the accent of mountain West Virginia, Kentucky, etc. is very close to the way so-called Standard English was spoken in England, and the Colonies, during much of our Colonial period.
**David **, I posited that recently here (about Maine, I think), and the claim was debunked. Can’t find the original thread.
And this site says the same thing as you when you scroll down to the explanations that go with the numbers on the map. As I remember, the source where I read this was not some off-the-wall guess, so I might have misquoted them. Thinking back, I think it said something like it is closer to that old English than others, and if I recall went on to also point out that the method of speaking all languages changes over time.
So, I’ll stop making such a claim since it is so overstated as to be just plain wrong.
Psst…Corry. Ever hear of an ideolect? EACH person in any speech community pronounces words slightly differently than the others and uses slightly different grammar than the others.