
When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents? - Jagat
http://mentalfloss.com/article/29761/when-did-americans-lose-their-british-accents
======
petercooper
Slightly related to this.. much study has been done into the pronunciation at
the time when Shakespeare's plays were originally performed (in the 1600s)
principally so that the effect can be recreated.

You can check out what it sounded like at
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s> and various other videos. (Jump
to 2m50s for the actual speech.)

The odd thing about this to my English ear is that the 1600s English
pronunciation has a lot of similarities to that of the South West of England
today, but perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising given this map of
rhoticism in modern British English:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RhoticEngland2.png>

~~~
benihana
Just for future reference, if you right click on a video on youtube, you can
click copy link at current time to lazy link to 2m50s so you don't have to say
"jump to this time."

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gPlpphT7n9s#t=178s)

~~~
jpwagner
you can also just add &t=2m50s to the query string

~~~
grimgrin
You can also just right click on the marker and click "Copy video URL at
current time."

------
aston
The fascinating tl;dr: The British lost their English accents around the turn
of the 19th century. As far as rhotic r's go, Americans still mostly speak the
way Brits and Americans did in the 18th century.

~~~
laumars
A Brit' here, most British dialects are heavy on the R's. Whether that's the
rural accents ranging from the Cornish (south west) to Norfolk (south east).
Then you have the harsher sounding dialects of the north east - who also seem
quite rhotic (or at least, the thicker accents are). Then you have the Welsh
and -as mentioned in the article- the Scottish and Irish who all also
emphasise their R's (it's quite amusing when I hang out with some of my
Scottish friends as they can't pronounce "Karl", so every time they call his
name, my other friend "Carol" answers!)

The ironic thing is, the way the English are perceived to speak isn't the way
how 99% of English (let alone British) people speak. Even in London and it's
overspills (the neighbouring counties), which is where our dialects are the
least rhotic, most people don't pronounce themselves in the same way as they
do in American TV. But I can understand why the stereotyped accent is used;
it's a slower and more clearly spoken - which is ideal for broadcasting where
the actor needs to be heard and understood by the audience. Many of the
northern accents are spoken with such speed that it can be difficult for an
untrained ear; even for some of us English! It's also a sexier dialect (few
sane people would fall in love with a Geordie accent, Brummie or even Cockney,
if they weren't already brought up in that area.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to find youtube videos for some of the
more distinct dialects.

[edit]

Just been chatting to my wife about this. She's from the north east of
England, I'm from the south. It seems I've overstated the amount of emphasis
the north east places on their R's.

I'm not sure if I'm alone about this, but the funny thing about pronunciation
is the moment you're asked to think about the way you pronounce a word, you've
instantly forgotten how you normally talk!

~~~
lostlogin
Something that fascinated me while in the UK - subtitling accents. I mainly
saw this (heard this?) with the Scottish, but other strong accents had this
done also. It was the BBC I noticed this with.

~~~
justincormack
This is very rare, I cannot recall seeing it in the last few years.
Occasionally on news programmes. Most of the Scottish programmes are only
shown there is BBC output is quite regional. You can get them online though
now.

Welsh is subtitled but that's a different language...

~~~
lostlogin
It was 2000 a 2001 that I saw this, so things may well have changed in that
time frame.

------
dsrguru
Informative article, but slightly inaccurate. General American is not
"considered generally confined to a small section of the Midwest." This is a
myth that I've heard a lot of Midwesterners propagate. Prior to the Northern
Cities Vowel Shift, the most identifiable broadcaster accent was probably the
Inland North dialect, which is spoken mostly in western New York, northern
Ohio, Michigan, northern Illinois, and Wisconsin. That's presumably the source
of the myth. But today, that accent sounds very different from most other
dialects of American English (for example, their short 'o' as in "block"
sounds almost like most American's short 'a' in "black" and their short 'a'
sounds like the non-rhotic diphthong that speakers of RP use for "air"). I've
heard Iowans claim that their accent is the most standard, but that couldn't
be further from the truth, as most Iowans have backed 'o's and 'u's a la
Minnesota, in addition to subscribing to the cot/caught merger, etc. The
reality is that there are seven or so dialect regions in the U.S. with lots of
variation from place to place within those regions. Some metropolitan areas
have their own distinct accents. In my experience, broadcasters tend to use
features from their native accent as long as they aren't from the South or a
region heavily affected by the aforementioned Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

One other inaccuracy is the article's claim that the British elite had much
less influence in manufacturing hubs in the Mid Atlantic where Scots-Irish
immigrants and nothern English speakers of rhotic dialects predominated. One
specific example they give is New York. In reality, New York English was non-
rhotic up until recently, and even now, a sizeable number of speakers either
have a non-rhotic accent or drop their 'r's in certain environments. I don't
know the history of the New York dialect or whether it become non-rhotic at
the same time the Boston dialect did, but I'm assuming New York English was
influenced more by Dutch, Italian, and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants than by
Scots-Irish and northern English immigrants, which would explain why it didn't
follow the rhotic trend of the other Mid Atlantic cities that the article
talks about.

~~~
bitwize
I'm to understand that the accent used in the area around Omaha, Nebraska is
most likely to be perceived as "accentless" by most Americans, so the standard
broadcast English accent for American TV is closest to Nebraskan.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Most of the people in California speak in this "newscaster" version also. I
don't think of it as a midwest accent at all, unless by "midwest" you include
the entire West Coast.

As a great portion of entertainment and news is made on this side of the
country I'd say it is the dominant accent wherever there isn't already a
strong regional accent, i.e. the older cities in the east.

~~~
rwhitman
I think Southern California has a distinctive accent. I'm not a linguist and
can't place exactly what it is, but I can definitely hear it very clearly. I
think there's a hard "a" and dragging out syllables at the end of a sentence
like a question - "surfer dude", "valley girl" etc are definitely a thing.

But you're right that so much broadcast comes from socal that nobody would
notice it, as its definitely become broadcast standard for anything that's not
the news (reality TV etc)...

------
vor_
I didn't know that the British originally spoke with an rhotic accent. The
General American accent is supposedly how the British used to sound. Perhaps
the title should be "When did the British lose their original accents?" as the
Americans are the ones who (apparently) retained their original British
accents.

~~~
jinushaun
The whole notion is nebulous because _both nations_ lost their original
accents. Just watch videos of Americans speaking from a few decades ago and
you'll see how much "General American" has changed in such a short period.

Secondly, given the abundance of regional accents in the UK, I doubt there was
even a dominant accent in the American colonies at the time unless you're only
counting the upper class.

~~~
mc32
If you are referring to TV and movies, those were adopted 'TransAtlantic'
accents. It was never an organic accent, rather a made up one which would seem
acceptable to everyone for TV, Movies, reportage, etc. It was cultivated via
the Ivy league and such. In other words, that accent wasn't representative of
any particular locale. It was adopted by the speaker.

If you watch really old interviews of ball players from the early part of the
20th C. They pretty much sound like today's vernacular English (ball players
being from lower strate would not be exposed to the accent in boarding
schools/college/uni). They don't sund like Gore Vidal or Cary Grant.

It was seen as 'cultured' as well.

~~~
robotresearcher
Cary Grant was born British and lived in England until he was 16.

~~~
mc32
That very well may be, but he did not sound 'British' either. But we can
reference FDR, if you like.

Here is a recording (performance) from 1908
[http://www.authentichistory.com/1898-1913/3-consume-
leisure/...](http://www.authentichistory.com/1898-1913/3-consume-
leisure/5-Baseball/19080000_Uncle_Josh_at_a_Ball_Game.html)

Ty Cobb interview 1930 <http://archive.org/details/Coca-Cola_Top_Notchers> (go
to 11:20 mark)

More ball player clips from '40s or so.
<http://archive.org/details/FiveOldMajorLeaguers>

Sounds a bit country, but not very unlike what one might hear in the country
today.

------
keyboardP
A bit OT but hopefully interesting nevertheless. This is apparently the
original pronunciation for the works of Shakespeare
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s> The entire video has some nice
information but if you want to skip to an example of the original
pronunciation, you can jump to 2:50.

------
redwood
I've always thought this kind of analysis doesn't look closely enough at the
impact of non-English-native speakers on the dominant accent of American
English.

In other words, the vast majority of Americans are not from English-speaking
countries, and the immigrants learned English when they arrived.

Thus the English spoken in the key port/immigrant destinations, plus the
impact of all those immigrants' accents, should massively impact modern
American English.

One theory I've come to is based on the fact that modern Dutch-speakers of
English tend to have a very American (rather than Britsh) style accent. I
propose that early New York, being Dutch and the most important immigrant
gateway later on, probably had a bizarre Duthified English which had a scaled
impact on generations of immigrants who came through New York.

Similar stories are probably found elsewhere.

~~~
sswezey
The number of Dutch in early New York was pretty much insignificant for
influencing the pronunciation of English, especially since there are many
similar phonemes.

In regards to Dutch sounded more American, this a noticeable trend in a lot of
younger Europeans (from my personal experience). Most Europeans learn British
grammar and spelling, but get most of their audio from American movies,
television, and songs. Therefore they end up having a 'Canadian' accent -
speak similar to American English while spelling closer to British English.

------
mixmastamyk
Interesting subject. As an avid traveler (from California) I've run into a few
Brits and Aussies who (jokingly) looked down their noses at American
pronunciation and spelling.

I didn't know much about it at the time. The more I've read however, it turns
out that most of these "Americanisms" came from Britain, and are in most cases
were dominant before the split. It was (mostly) the British who changed
(though some regions still do it the "old" way).

The subject is a lot more complicated, and in a few cases the people I met
were wrong. For example:

* -ize (Greek, Oxford), -ise French!

* Rhotic (R) pronunciation (Southwest Br., American, Irish, Scottish English, etc.)

* RP took hold in the 19th century. (see the Shakespeare in OP video link on this page.)

------
wololo
it's a common question on r/linguistics and r/askhistorians:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k8t7s/when_did_am...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k8t7s/when_did_americans_lose_their_british_accent/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/l1z1b/did_the_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/l1z1b/did_the_founding_fathers_have_american_accents/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/vr14o/can_someo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/vr14o/can_someone_from_rlinguistic_form_a_comprehensive/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rlv3j/would_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rlv3j/would_americans_at_the_time_of_the_revolution)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t9frm/differe...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t9frm/differences_in_american_and_british_english)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/d82bv/did_americans...](http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/d82bv/did_americans_in_1776_have_british_accents/)

although how is this hacker news?

------
mikeash
I'm always fascinated by the general obliviousness displayed by questions like
these. I realize the headline is just a simplified way to introduce the topic,
but there really are a lot of people out there who think that we all spoke
like the Brits at some point before, and Americans "lost" the accent. The
number of people who don't realize that there's no such thing as "no accent"
always astounds me.

------
digitalWestie
Surprises me when I've seen this question that nobody brings up the topic of
non-native English speakers.

The Scandinavian, German, Italian, Polish, Gaelic, etc eventually stopped
speaking their own language and took up English. Presumably there was a result
from this inheritance?

~~~
taejo
Also Irish people, who mostly spoke English but obviously with an Irish
accent.

------
HistoryInAction
In West Virginia, they really didn't. If you want to know how high-class
Englishmen sounded during the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s, go to
backcountry WV.

Varmint is the corruption of the upper-class pronunciation of vermin, as one
example.

The so-called mid-atlantic accent of modern Brits is a different phenomenon
that is more often discussed, and its downfall can be traced to the collapse
of the three broadcast networks. Individuals adopted the accent to come across
as more trustworthy, similar to the Baskerville font trustworthiness:
[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/hear-all-
ye-...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/hear-all-ye-people-
hearken-o-earth/)

------
kjackson2012
I have a friend from Hong Kong, and she has an English accent, having being
educated in British schools.

For fun, I asked her to talk in an American accent, and what fascinated me, is
that she talked with an almost exactly Southern accent. So maybe the Southern
accent is a vestigial accent leftover from the transition from British to
American accent.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Did you enquire further about it. I can probably, with effort, muster 3
distinct USA accents that I'd label Southern, New York and West-Coast - but
they'd be based on mass media.

I'd say people can often do several USA accents because they're used to
hearing a lot en_US speakers from Hollywood movies.

What always freaks me out a little is when you visit some out of the way
place, Gambia say, and they talk in USA accents because they've learnt English
either from films or Voice of America.

~~~
notahacker
Non-native English speakers _attempting_ a general American accent they've
picked up from media or US teachers is the rule rather than the exception. You
know Britain has left behind a strong colonial legacy when they don't. What
freaked _me_ out was a Burmese English teacher speaking with the sort of
Cockney accent that's only ever heard in low budget British gangster films.

------
dirktheman
On the same note, I find it equally intriguing how Dutch and South African
languages are similar. Afrikaans is a lot like 17th century Dutch, which is a
lot different than modern Dutch. Unlike English, which changed to a much
lesser extend. But I don't have to try hard to follow Afrikaans.

~~~
joe5150
Afrikaans is basically 17-century Dutch, though.

~~~
dirktheman
Parts of it are, but there's a good portion of loan words from other
'occupying countries' such as Portuguese, but also Malay (from the Dutch slave
trade era) and some native African languages such as Khoisan.

------
Zenst
We had a girl at school whos family left for america when she was in the 2nd
year at high school, she returned for a visit 2 years later and had a american
accent. Two factors I believe that influence accents:

1) Climate - humidity mostly influencial - Manchester having a more nasal
accent and also more rain than most parts of the UK being one important
factor.

2) What we hear - more so younger age and I would say upto the age of 25 you
are still influenced, maybe later or maybe younger for some people. But
certianly what you hear when growing up, upto a point has a influence upon
you. Call it the memeaccenting if you like, younger you are the more
influenced you are.

So even if they all had the same accents, the enviroment would be a factor and
over time and influences external (America is not just legacy British people,
germanic and others I'm sure above and beyond natives at the start).

So can see over time it more a factor than anything for the changes, but in a
World which has reduced travel from years, to months to weeks to days and
hours, we have a more blured line ahead of us when it comes to accents in the
not too distant future.

Beyond spelling though, how would you define the differences between an
American and a British accent as in some parts of America the difference is
not that much in comparision to some parts of Britian.

But I'm sure somebody will just say it is all down to dental care and as a
British person I too will laugh at that one :).

------
duck
Related thread from a couple years ago: Did Americans in 1776 have British
accents? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486017>

And the follow-up: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489723>

------
louhong
This might be an interesting video
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E>) - its a video of Tangier, VA
where they still speak English from when the town was settled in 1600s.

~~~
cjensen
The notion that some areas still speak the original language was debunked in
the linked article.

~~~
droithomme
The original article doesn't debunk it, it states without giving a single
citation that "claims about the accents of the Appalachian Mountains, the
Outer Banks, the Tidewater region and Virginia's Tangier Island sounding like
an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by
linguists."

Most likely his source is a single linguist, Dr. Michael Montgomery, who is
from Knoxville and has written several articles on "Appalachian English", but
which articles actually pertain only to East Tennessee rural english, and not
other parts of the Appalachians.

Here are all his articles on the topic:

<http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/articles.html>

He does a good summary of the language of that region and can be reasonably
considered an expert. He makes a convincing argument that much of the novel
vocabulary is Scotch-Irish vocabulary from the early settlers of the area. He
makes a less convincing argument that since the mountain people of the region
are not familiar with idioms of Shakespeare, their speech is not related in
any way to Elizabethan English. Elizabethan era people did not speak exactly
the way Shakespeare wrote though. Pilgrims so desperate from religious
oppression by the Church of England at the time to would not necessarily be
experts in Shakespearean idioms.

Dr. Montgomery's articles are certainly worth a read and make many reasonable
arguments about the dialects he is familiar with. The notion that the idea
that any archaic language dialects have influenced certain dialect pockets
that have survived to the present has been debunked, and such an opinion is
held by all linguists is not established, cited or proven by the article.

------
phogster
I don't mind it so much when British English speakers take out the 'r' in
words. What bugs the hell out of me is when they add the 'r' in places where
it doesn't belong. Why they do this, I have no idear.

~~~
omaranto
Americans do that too, if you count New Englanders. :) I find it funny that
Bostonians pronounce "Korea" and "career" close to swapped from the way I do.

------
greggman
There's an 8 hour BBC documentary about the History of English if you're
interested

<http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/story-of-english/>

I found it pretty fascinating like spelling use to be all over the place but
in the UK the most successful publisher of the King James Bible is basically
what became the standard way. In the USA it was a textbook that was used in
pretty much all schools for most if its history.

------
mikestew
What amazes me is that in a couple of generations the accents of all the
regions change (including England itself with the hard _r_ , apparently). In
the case of the US I'm curious if accents stay the same once geographically
stable. Once we became more mobile in the early-mid 20th century, are accents
changing faster with the influx of diversity as folks move around?

~~~
Hemospectrum
Mobility is something of a linguistic equalizer, especially at a young age. If
children travel around the country (or the world) being exposed to many
different accents, the dialect features start to blend together.

See also: Radio and television.

------
kyllo
This sort of thing is much easier to understand if you think of languages as
living, changing organisms rather than as static constructs. They actually
change rather quickly, from generation to generation. Large human migrations
tend to homogenize in the sense that they result in a single dialect
propagating over a large land mass. But then they continue to diverge
regionally over time in rather random ways, to the point where every city in a
given country, or even every neighborhood in every city in the country, will
develop its own distinct dialect. London is a good example--it's a city that's
been inhabited mostly by the same ethnic group for many centuries, and their
language tree has branched to the point where people of different districts
and social classes there use very different-sounding pronunciation.

------
mynameisasecret
A quick visit to Harkers Island, NC would have shown the author that not ALL
Americans have lost their British accents. There's a perfectly thick
Elizabethan British twang applied to American language by most of the
inhabitants there.

------
jebblue
We used to do boomer patrols out of Holy Loch, we were there for a two week
turnover period. By the end of the two weeks, half the crew had at least a
slightly noticeable Scottish accent. Every time.

------
jonmc12
This article discusses Dialects of America English in terms of relation to
British migration between (1607-1775):
[http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/Amer...](http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/AmericanDialects.htm)

Interesting that drawl in South of US came from drawl in South England. Also,
interesting that Britain has more dialects than any US, Canada, Australia,
combined. But I guess their dialect had more time to evolve before mass
communication

------
willf
This is like asking when humans stopped being monkeys.

~~~
drcube
Not quite, because people are still monkeys. :) I'd say we lost our British
accent when we stopped being British.

------
jeremyswank
when british english was transplanted to north america, a separate geographic
context was created for one and the same language. a relative isolation was
imposed by an ocean between them, and each continued to change over time.
british and american english descend from a common ancestor.

------
stretchwithme
I've noticed that the Aborigines in Australia sound a lot like other
Australians.

No doubt these groups influenced each other. And that probably happened in the
US too. And now they are being shaped by asian and Mexican immigrants too.

