

Follow-up to: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? - joshkaufman

True story: my wife majored in Musical Theatre in college, and had the privilege of studying with Rocco Dal Vera (http://www.ccm.uc.edu/faculty/facultyProfile.aspx?facultyid=32/), a world-renowned dialect expert.<p>To put in context how freaking awesome this guy is: name a country in the world, and he can perform every dialect in the region <i>flawlessly</i>, as well as tell you how it originated and developed over time.<p>Awesomeness indicator #2: Rocco did the dialect work on the "Indiana Jones" movies. 'Nuff said.<p>Yesterday, my wife e-mailed the "Did Americans in 1776 have British Accents" post (http://www.nicholasjohnpatrick.com/post/767354896/did-americans-in-1776-have-british-accents) to Rocco. Here's his reply, posted here with his permission:<p>====================<p>That is very cool, and I found most of the post accurate, except at the end when he speculates on why New York and New England may be non-rhotic.<p>There's a small contradiction: if their connections were British and British was itself rhotic, then that doesn’t explain how they lost their Rs. (Except that it could have happened 100 years after the Revolutionary War.)<p>England’s journey toward a non-rhotic prestige accent followed the Revolutionary War, a time when we were pretty cut off from them. We were in a state of almost continual war with them through the war of 1812 and even through the Civil War when they supported the South more than the North.<p>Much later, in Victorian times, wealthy residents of Boston, Philadelphia and New York sent their children to England to be educated and their prestige accents became reflective of those schools’ emphasis on RP. That persisted well through the 1950s (and shows up in accents we call Boston Brahmin, Philadelphia Mainline and New York 400). It may well be that until then New York wasn’t terribly non-rhotic, but I would love to read a real study on this.<p>Immigration also had a huge effect on New York and New England speech. How much that accounts for the rhoticity question is hard to say. But is has to be a factor. Still, the result is surprising because notice how Boston, famously the center of Irish immigration (a heavily rhotic accent, then and today) somehow ended up with a non-rhotic accent in a country that is mostly rhotic.<p>Incidentally, the author doesn’t comment on US Southern prestige accents that were non-rhotic almost from the start. The reason for that? They were raised by their black nannies and African languages are non-rhotic. Southerners hate to hear this, but their prestige non-rhotic plantation accents are the product of slave speech! A lovely topic for the 4th of July as we contemplate liberty...
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jackfoxy
If I recall correctly, Kevin Phillips attributed the American southern dialect
to old East-Anglian dialect. At any rate most of the original white settlers
in the south, Georgia especially, were subjects of "transportation" and
subject to seven years of indentured servitude, or were Scotts-Irish recruited
to be frontier settlers. Only a relative handful of ruling-class whites could
afford nannies. And those families, the Washingtons and Lees for instance,
were descended from landed aristocracy back in England who were on the losing
side of the English Civil War. Take away the minority plantation owning
families and the average white household at best could afford one, maybe two
slaves as full-time field hands. Still, west African dialects probably did
make their mark on southern dialects.

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seandougall
Actually, that makes a sort of sense. Those ruling-class whites who could
afford nannies would be more exposed to non-rhotic speech -- therefore non-
rhotic speech becomes associated with the prestige of their class.

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nl
Related, the "Which American accent do you have?" quiz. apparently I have a
"Northeastern" accent. I'm from Australia, so I can't say that is particularly
accurate as to the location, but it did pick up a number of features in my
speech. It is interesting doing the quiz to see what words sound the same to
some people.

[http://www.youthink.com/quiz.cfm?action=go_detail&sub_ac...](http://www.youthink.com/quiz.cfm?action=go_detail&sub_action=take&obj_id=9827)

~~~
phaedrus
Wow that really works: I got "neutral", and it said: "Your national identity
is more important than your local identity, because you don`t really have a
local identity." So true! Also: "Or maybe you just moved around a lot growing
up." I did!

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huherto
I also got neutral. But I am not a native speaker, so probably I didn't get
some of the subtle differences. It was pretty neat.

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pqs
You say that: "To put in context how freaking awesome this guy is: name a
country in the world, and he can perform every dialect in the region
flawlessly, as well as tell you how it originated and developed over time."

I'm sorry, but this can not be true. Does he speak every single language of
the world including each dialect of each language?! This is plainly
impossible. Maybe you think that the whole world speaks English, or maybe for
you "world" only refers to English speaking countries. Even in this case, I
doubt this guy "performs flawlessly" every English dialect.

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WorkerBee
_name a country in the world, and he can perform every dialect in the region
flawlessly_

I'd believe that when I hear that - I'd be flabbergasted if he can convince me
in more than one of the three main accents of Cape Town, South Africa.

Hollywood actors have tried and failed to do a convincing South African
accent. the only one who came close enough was, surprisingly, Leonardo
Dicaprio

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joshkaufman
Then you'd be flabbergasted. :-)

Can't find any recording of him online, unfortunately - he's the kind of guy
who _teaches_ actors because he's one of the few who really knows how to do
it.

You're right, though - accents from South Africa are notoriously difficult.

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timthorn
It should be noted that dialect and accent are different aspects of speech;
accent refers to the sound, and dialect to the vocabulary.

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alextingle
It's entirely possible that various English dialects have undergone parallel
evolution.

The changes that all languages undergo tends to follow predictable patterns.
Vowels can shift together, not at random:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift>

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hugh3
_Incidentally, the author doesn’t comment on US Southern prestige accents that
were non-rhotic almost from the start. The reason for that? They were raised
by their black nannies and African languages are non-rhotic. Southerners hate
to hear this, but their prestige non-rhotic plantation accents are the product
of slave speech!_

Are you sure about that? Does "rhotic" vs "non-rhotic" even have any meaning
outside the context of English?

Frinstance a non-rhotic accent isn't about not being about to say "er". A non-
rhotic speaker will say, frinstance "her father" with an "err" sound on "her"
and an "a" sound on "father".

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hetman
I know it occurs in German between southern and northern accents where the r
at the end of words is silenced in the north. I'm sure it occurs in other
languages too.

I think you're confusing vowel shifts with rhotacism. A non-rhotic speaker
will not pronounce the r in either "her" or "father". It's quite possible the
vowel shift at the end of father happened in response to the disappearance of
the rhotic r, but it is a separate effect.

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hugh3
Actually I think you're right. I don't actually pronounce an "r" sound at the
end of "her", I just use a different non-r vowel from the one I use for
"father". Never mind, I take it back.

I'm still skeptical about rhoticity in African languages.

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dkuchar
as my friend Mitch Lillie says, geographic isolation leads to linguistic
conservatism. Iceland is another great example of this - I believe Icelandic
is derived from middle-ages era Viking languages?

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JimmyL
Icelandic is, I believe, a Germanic language dating back to the 1200s or so.

What I think you're getting at - and one of the cool things about Iceland - is
that the language hasn't changed all that much since it was introduced back
then. This means that modern Icelanders can read the Sagas (written in the
10th and 11th centuries) with relative ease. The majority of people will read
them in the same way we read Shakespeare or Dickens (with modern spelling and
some footnotes), but with some effort they can be read by most well-educated
Icelanders in their initial forms.

While isolation had a great deal to do with this initially, nowadays it's
mostly because of the work of the Icelandic Language Institute, which
religiously updates the language to add new words for concepts that didn't
previously exist. They also work with the Icelandic Naming Committee, to
maintain the list of acceptable first names that Icelandic children can be
given - if the name you want to give your child isn't on the list of
previously-used names, you have to submit it to the Committee to make sure
that it is appropriate (i.e. can be spelled in the Icelandic alphabet and fits
into Icelandic grammar).

~~~
gwern
> While isolation had a great deal to do with this initially, nowadays it's
> mostly because of the work of the Icelandic Language Institute, which
> religiously updates the language to add new words for concepts that didn't
> previously exist.

That sounds a lot like the French Academy; but so far as I know, French has
precipitously changed quite as incomprehensibly as English, and has not
remained stable (save for an expanded vocabulary) as you say Icelandic has.
Why do you think the Institute succeeded and the Academy failed?

~~~
carnevalem
Perhaps number of speakers? Icelandic only has 320,000 speakers. I suspect it
would be easier to control the direction of a language with that many speakers
compared to French's 200,000,000.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language>

~~~
mseebach
I would guess the relative isolation of Iceland for a very long time is also a
factor. While the French constantly mixed with pretty much all European
peoples during medieval times, receiving an influx of things and concepts in
need for a word, the number of people crossing the borders of Iceland was
_very_ limited, for practical reasons.

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dennisgorelik
Did British in 1776 have modern British accents?

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AndrewO
Here's the post this one is follow-up to, which has a little more background:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486017>

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sgt
Great follow-up!

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mthreat
I wish there were recordings of people talking all through time, I'd love to
hear the evolution of language.

~~~
aperiodic
The British Library has an awesome map of regional dialects of the UK
(<http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html>), though the timespan
is rather limited (only about 100 years in terms of birth dates of speakers).
It's pretty extensive, with each dialect getting a 5-10 minute recording and a
few paragraphs on its notable linguistic characteristics. Great time waster!

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whatwhatwhat
well this guy really loves to employ stereotypes to make his points. i suppose
to some extent he has to

other than that, though, i didnt get much from this

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joshkaufman
Not sure what you consider stereotypical: he's mostly referring to the names
and locales of dialects, which is proper usage...

