Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?

http://www.nicholasjohnpatrick.com/post/767354896/did-americans-in-1776-have-british-accents

by icey • 16 years ago

268 168 16 years ago

settrans• 16 years ago

> What is surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.

He claims that RP has diverged much more than American English, but only goes on to support this claim with the divergence of the (r) variable. Any other variables that characterize the innovations of RP since American and British English divergence?

rgrieselhuber• 16 years ago

I remember hearing that there was a concerted effort in England (initiated by some Queen) sometime after Shakespeare to modify the way that vowels were pronounced and that this was largely responsible for the divergence we hear today. I did a little searching but couldn't find anything. Any links would be appreciated.

chc• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of the Great Vowel Shift, but as far as we know that occurred naturally, not as a direct result of any royal dictate. At any rate, it was basically over by the time the American colonies got going. The oldest colonies might have been affected to some degree, but my (strictly amateurish) feeling is that it doesn't really fit as the main explanation (except in that the English accent was shown to be exceptionally malleable at the time).

anatoly2• 16 years ago

Yeah, there're many. Here're a few examples:

- the gas/pass divide: in many British accents pass is pronounced like 'pahs', but gas retains the same vowel as in American accents. gas and pass will basically always rhyme in America, but in Britain it'll depend on where you are. In RP they won't rhyme. In the 18th century, it was the same sound everywhere, the one Americans retained.

- the long o, in words like go, home, etc. changed in many British accents from [ou] to [eu]. If you can imagine a very "British", RP pronunciation of home, that's the difference you hear.

mahmud11• 16 years ago

Which explains why we can understand Aussies and Kiwis, but a random Nigel from the UK would have a speech that baffles. It boggles the mind how two people from different corners of London have different accents. Not to mention Manc vs Scouser vs the myriads of tongue-twisting nasal hiccups uttered all over them Shires.

It's like they almost take pride in differentiation. Throw an international party and the two UKians that show up will have a verbal civil war that puts us Somalis to shame. The shopkeepers maintain their peace with healthy and frequent exchange of muted disdain and murmured resentment. That's, when the other ethnic tonsils are not being inflamed (Scotts, Welsh, and the verile Manx; consciously absent are the clover-wielding gentlemen of the east, left out of the union for my own safety, and to keep membership of my drinking club.)

All good people though. Except the Chavs; a meta-culture of mediocrity that belongs on the next boat leaving for America, to plug the Gulf oil well.

[Edit:

Oh, this seems to have offended someone, most likely a fellow yank. No need to be a hero; piss-taking is a national past-time of the Isles, and its cultural debris scattered around the world, outside the U.S (we have escaped the wit shrapnels I guess) I have deliberately disclosed my own heritage within that rant above, expecting to be paid in kind ;-) When in doubt, stay out of it. It's a bonding experience]

wwortiz2• 16 years ago

Your typing comes off with a very thick accent, something you don't find often online.

detst6• 16 years ago

Right, but which one? He says "us Somalis", "...the U.S (we...", mentions in his profile that he lives in Northern Virginia but also calls Sydney home yet the diction (i.e. "shopkeepers", "Chavs", "piss-taking", etc.) of his post screams British to me.

mahmud11• 16 years ago

Oh, a funny American. Did you get that humor in a legal settlement?

Edit:

Let me add that what you're noticing is probably my staccato diction, filled with code-words and verbal winks to deliver mild amusement to an invisible audience of masochists who I love oh so very much.

Cultural and linguistic banter might not be appreciated in these "learned" circles; but to the objects of my affection, the working classes of the crown and its colonies, it's a delicacy best enjoyed over beer and a pool table (Warning: too much of it might lead to the real-world version of a downvote, a black eye.)

intellectronica3• 16 years ago

I don't think your comment is offensive, but it is neither funny nor relevant.

wildjim3• 16 years ago

I seem to remember a statistic where UK is reputed to have a greater number of dialects than any other country in the world, which probably has a lot to do with the difficulty people have with understanding some accents (tried Glaswegian, anyone?)

Also, IIRC, the colonies tended to have a commonality in heritage of the colonists, too. E.g. at one time, Australia had a "large number" of criminals, there are quite a lot of Dutch in NZ -- there are large parts of NZ with very strong Scots heritage -- New York is famous for Irish heritage, other parts of USA are famous for German, etc. The UK hasn't really had the same homogenisation outside the big cities.

barrkel3• 16 years ago

Ireland has a distinct accent for almost every county too. The fine differences can be subtle, but sampling Cork/Kerry sing-song, Northern Ireland ("Norn Iron"), northside / inner city Dublin and Dublin 4 / southside are all quite different range in the spectrum.

mahmud11• 16 years ago

The BBC has recordings of various dialects from the U.K. that you might find interesting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/

ErrantX5• 16 years ago

Try being a Brit without an accent. It's so bloody boring I have to fake the Queens English to get laid. ;)

mahmud11• 16 years ago

Bring that accent to America and you might land yourself an endorsement contract with a condom maker.

hugh34• 16 years ago

What does "no accent" mean? How can anyone not have an accent?

zalew2• 16 years ago

Enlighten me, what's the the British accent popular in movies like Football Factory, Human Traffic etc. which I find cool; while every Brit I've met in my life had this 'royal' accent I personally don't find understandable (sorry, no offence)? Actors of international-targetted movies use some other accent for a certain effect?

Also, once I've met a guy AFAIR south London or sth, he spoke that his wife told me even most of Brits don't get him (it was an accent, not just that he was mumbling).

torpor• 16 years ago

Australian here .. I've always had a bloody atrocious time in my travels, with my accent .. so I just standardized on "American-sounding" and I get along just fine with people understanding me, mostly, about 100% of the time .. except when I reveal I'm from Australia, and the whole thing unravels into a nationalism-filled diatribe about how I'm not a "true Aussie" since I don't speak A'Strine properly ..

I am a true Australian, since I don't actually live there, and consider anyone else living there, not an Aborigine, to be just a bunch of bloody tourist wankers, heh heh ..

hetman• 16 years ago

Funny you should say that. I saw someone post a link from an Aussie comedy show on another site. Apparently most of the Americans couldn't understand half of what he was saying, which surprised me because while distinctive, it's certainly not the thickest I've heard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suVxmPpyR9s

Edit: My experience (and that of other Aussies traveling to America) seems to be that you have to slightly Americanise the way you speak to be understood easily.

mahmud11• 16 years ago

Haaaa, Bana is a top bloke!

There is not exactly one Aussie accent; a posh office jockey from a major CBD will not sound the same as a country boy. Americans probably wont get Chopper (the comedian) but they should have no trouble with Carl Barron.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

As I recall from an article in Time a while back, the Southern American accent is the most authentic representative of the pre-revolutionary war accent. The Northern American accent has been changed more by waves of immigrants (especially those coming in the 1890-1920).

I've heard that the French-Canadian accent is closer to pre-Revolutionary French as well.

It seems that those areas with the least upheavals are where language stays the most constant.

astine• 16 years ago

I wouldn't describe the American South as having had few upheavals. It's actually had more than most places in the United States. Though, I would agree that it's had fewer lninguistic influences than other regions of the country.

ghostwunder• 16 years ago

show me the fuckin receipts. fewer linguistic influences? between the french, dutch, spanish, portuguese, central african, west african, native americans, and british there are very few places in the world that have such of an unique stew of languages. safire died but the knowledge of american language did not die with him. upheavels? thats another post. but lets refrain from throwing around ignorant barbs and passing them as facts.

stan_rogers2• 16 years ago

Canadian French is actually close to what is (or was, at least until shortly after WWII) spoken in Normandy. Our soldiers were better able to communicate with the locals on D-Day than even the Free French.

"Standard" French was once just the local dialect of Isle-de-France, a small region including Paris, but "French", even in France today, is but a loose collection of mutually-comprehensible dialects. Canadian French has its own little quirks, though, in that it had to create its own vocabulary not only for the uniquely North American flora, fauna and landscape, but also for new items of technology that emerged while we were almost without communication with France. F'rinstance, to the French ear, a French Canadian would seem to indicate that he had just created a park (in the public gardens sense) out of his tank (armoured and armed military vehicle) rather than that he'd just parked his car.

saint-loup• 16 years ago

>>> but "French", even in France today, is but a loose collection of mutually-comprehensible dialects.

That's simply not the case. A lot of effort has been made by the French Republic to spread the standard french language (mandatory school with class in french, even for kids speaking regional dialects). Nowadays, there are still local expressions and idioms, but the vocabulary is quite homogeneous.

tokenadult• 16 years ago

I recall from an article in Time a while back, the Southern American accent is the most authentic representative of the pre-revolutionary war accent.

It may very well be that Time reported that, as I have read that statement in various places, but I have also read disagreements with that statement.

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/886/

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=380983

http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodica...

http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C&pg=PA126&#...

It's actually rather unlikely that any current dialect of American English has any strict correspondence to the various dialects that were spoken in America at the time of the Revolution.

Rod4• 16 years ago

Interestingly, it's also hypothesized that Brazilian Portuguese is closer to Portuguese proper 500 years ago than Portuguese proper today. The fact that the Portuguese spoken in former Portuguese colonies in Africa sounds more Brazilian Portuguese than Portuguese proper suggests the hypothesis is right. Moreover, Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent, which further strengthens the hypothesis.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Same for Spanish, Spanish as spoken in Colombia is very crisp and precise, Spanish spoken in Spain much less so.

barredo3• 16 years ago

Also, like in UK, you can find like twenty different accents only in Spain. Even in Canary Islands, with 7 main islands, have huge difference between them.

Not to speak of Catalonia, Basque Country, Andalusia, Madrid, Zaragoza or Galicia (closer to Portuguese).

Spain has now 6 official and co-official languages: Castilian/Spanish, Catalan/Valencian (Catalonia, Balearic Islands, Valencia, South of France), Basque (Basque Country and Navarra —Pamplona—, South of France), Galician (Galician and nortwest Castille), and Asturian (Asturias/Leon) and then Occitan (North Aragon, North Catalonia, South of France).

Also, in Melilla and Ceuta (Spanish cities in North Africa) there are two "branches" of arab that are in the process of becoming co-official, "dariya" or "moroccan arab" in Ceuta and "tamazig", some sort of antique Bereber language in Melilla.

So, that's 8 languages, also Portuguese and a myriad different accents in a peninsula with less the area of Texas.

Edit: Bereber is older than arab, so it's not an 'arab branch'.

Edit2: Add English to the list, as official language spoken in Gibraltar (UK colony).

davidw3• 16 years ago

Spanish from Spain sounded really ... almost guttural to me the first time I heard it. Plus they do that lisp thing - thinco instead of sssinco. I think I prefer the new-world variety.

aristus• 16 years ago

Doubtless it's true. There are pockets of people in the Colorado and New Mexico who essentially speak 16th century Spanish. They just got pinched off from the mainstream for a long time.

stretchwithme• 16 years ago

Languages evolve too but much more quickly. The British who came to America spoke the same dialects of course, but this changes in one generation.

We pick up the dialect of the people that we are exposed to as we learn speech, so likely back then family was more influential then now, especially if you lived in the country.

And, of course, how we speak was influenced by the native population. I grew up near the Onondaga Reservation in New York and probably speak a bit like the people who live there.

nandemo• 16 years ago

For what is worth, African Portuguese sounds more like European Portuguese to us Brazilians.

Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent

In this case I wonder which Brazilian accent? I guess it would be Rio accent or some Northeastern accent.

In case anyone is curious the hear the differences, this page contains recordings of a Portuguese sentence spoken by people of several different areas:

http://www.learningportuguese.co.uk/audio/compare-accents.ht...

euccastro8• 16 years ago

For Galician (see [1] for the reason why this is relevant) speakers, Brazilian and African accents are easier to parse than "official" (not northern) Portuguese. Whatever the history there, it seems very clear to me that it's the central/southern Portuguese version that diverged the most from whatever was the original language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_language

euccastro8• 16 years ago

In support of that hypothesis, migration to Brazil came mainly from the north of Portugal, where the language was born. Also, Brazil was spared the strong French influence in the XIX century.

Nowadays, the pronunciation of Lisbon (center-south) actually loses information (deemphasizing and even omitting some vowels and losing other distinctions like -om/-am into ão) wrt others, so it's hard to imagine evolution to have happened the other way.

Gormo4• 16 years ago

Why is it that whenever I hear Brazilians speak, I think they are speaking Russian?

woodpanel• 16 years ago

Funny! Before I went on a trip to Lisbon, a lot of people 'warned' me about the sound of the language. Event Tourist-Guides for Lisbon tell you that when you hear portuguese, you'd confuse it with polish.

I think this is because of the combination of rothic-sounds (rothic R), and a whole lot of nasal- and smooth-sounds alltogether. (Feel free, to translate this sentence into linguistical-speak).

davidedicillo2• 16 years ago

I always been fascinated by accents and dialects, coming from a very young country like Italy, built on top of thousands of city-states, where it's enough to drive 30 minutes to encounter a completely different dialect and culture.

bocajuniors3• 16 years ago

I read somewhere that before 1960 less than 50% of italians spoke Italian.

Mark_Book5• 16 years ago

yessa de rest spoka de broken english

davidw3• 16 years ago

Here in the Veneto, the former Republic of Venice, the dialect is still very alive and well, and in many situations is more prevalent than Italian. And it really is quite different than Italian in many ways:

"She's a beautiful girl"

Italian: E` una bella ragazza.

Venetian Dialect (at least one version of it): Xe na bea tosa.

Lots of words change, and even the grammar a bit. Indeed, with many italian "dialects" it's quite likely that they evolved from Latin on their own, rather than there being some standard "Italian" that then diverged.

It's really amazing, too, how much it changes over short distances - I can't hear it myself, I don't speak it that well, but you can ride an hour by bicycle from here and people recognize that you're from over there...

Edit: another good bit of dialect would be appropriate for the comment by Mark_Book below, "xe un mona".

fbnt• 16 years ago

Probably much more than 50%. I've never heard my grandparents speaking any italian at all, but I guess they could understand it to some extents. Italian as a language started to spread among middle/lower classes only in the 60's when most of the people bought TV sets for their living room. I still use my regional language (a variation of venetian) everyday with family and friends.

russell• 16 years ago

I always thought that northern New England was the closest to the original English. Why else would we subject ourselves to such ridicule from the rest of the country?

btilly• 16 years ago

Several hundred years ago England had different dialects in different parts of the country.

New England was settled by a different group of English than various parts of the South. Therefore the dialects were already different before they came here.

motters• 16 years ago

It's an amusing thought that a couple of centuries ago we were all talking like Americans. It just goes to show that accents, like everything else, are subject to fashion.

sgt• 16 years ago

Here in SA we are very proud of how much better (and some may say more poetic) Afrikaans sounds than Dutch. But hey, that is a very subjective opinion indeed :-)

liedra3• 16 years ago

As a non-Dutch speaker living in Belgium, I find Flemish much nicer to listen to than "real" Dutch too. :-)

jrnkntl• 16 years ago

As a native Dutch-y I must upvote both of your comments. Afrikaans sounds more logical than the contemporary Dutch and Flemish sounds softer and 'more sweet' (to me :)

bvi• 16 years ago

Is there really that much of a difference between Flemish and Dutch?

pbz• 16 years ago

(I apologize for my ignorance, but) without audio recording how can we know what the accents were back then?

eru2• 16 years ago

Spelling gives some hints. One technique is to look for common spelling mistakes. An especially interesting mistake is hypercorrection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection).

For example, there was a time when the K in words like "knee" and "knight" became silent. We can pinpoint this time by looking for Ks in front of words, that never used to start with K. The writer doesn't pronounce the K in "kn" any longer, but remembers that proper spelling has a K for some words. Since pronunciation doesn't help, she has to rote learn those words. And occasionally will make a mistake.

Another one, especially in fairly recent times, is too look for prescriptive texts, that lament this or that development in the language.

barrkel3• 16 years ago

You can also pick up clues in rhyming, jokes, slang and puns that wouldn't otherwise make sense.

hcho• 16 years ago

So that means we'll never get to know well educated upper classes accents as they'll have far fewer errors in their pronunciation. No?

intellectronica3• 16 years ago

I can't say that this is entirely incorrect, but it's at least full of inaccuracies. RP has indeed been evolving as the accent of the English upper class, but it originated in the accent common in the English west midlands and as far as I know has been non-rhotic for quite a long time. Rhoticism in Germanic languages comes and goes, and since Britain always had many different regional and social accents, it's entirely possible that some of them were non-rhotic still before the stipulated "divergence" began. While in England, accents that are mostly non-rhotic were the most common, America had a large community of immigrants from Ireland, where the accent is rhotic, from southern Germany, where the accent is rhotic, and from many non-English speaking countries (learners of English as a foreign language often default to rhotic pronunciation since it's closer to the way the words are written). Most importantly, there isn't such a thing as a British accent, but there is (with only minor variation) such a thing as an American accent. Americans often don't realise how diverse the UK is simply because they're not used to this sort of diversity from their own country.

Locke1689• 16 years ago

Americans often don't realise how diverse the UK is simply because they're not used to this sort of diversity from their own country.

Hahahahahaha. Oh, good one.

jawngee• 16 years ago

> Americans often don't realise how diverse the UK is simply because they're not used to this sort of diversity from their own country.

Spoken like someone who has never been here. There are a ton of different accents: northeastern, midwestern, southern, californian, northwestern are the broad top level ones and the distill even further depending on where you are in those areas. For example, people from Minnesota and people from Indiana clearly sound different (Indiana having a slight twang or drawl, while Minnesota sounding mildly Norwegian). It's a big contrast with the likes of Strong Island in New York. Or with Texas.

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

This article's explanation is a little too curt. I think regional American accents at the time of the Revolution matched up better with certain regional British accents explains it a little better. For a more in depth study of not just accents, but the micro English speaking cultures that came to make up the United States I recommend "The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America" by Kevin Phillips. http://www.amazon.com/Cousins-Wars-Religion-Politics-Anglo-A...

thinker2• 16 years ago

I'd agree with the analysis that English is closer to how its spoken in the US today accent-wise. If you look at how people speak English in British colonies, the pronunciation isn't heavily accented to how its spoken in the UK today. For example, South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh).

intellectronica3• 16 years ago

I don't think this is relevant, since speakers in Asia rarely speak English as their mother tongue. Whatever accent they have is due to the sources they've been exposed to. Well educated speakers in India and Pakistan, for example, usually speak with an accent that is quite closed to RP. Other speakers often learn their pronunciation from American movies.

bbgm• 16 years ago

Agreed. Many of us who do speak English as a first language ( or are very fluent in it) are definitely closer to RP but for those who pick it up TV etc have a huge influence and that is getting more American

thinker2• 16 years ago

Valid points. I was thinking of people like my grandfather (born 1920) who speak English fluently without a british accent, and wasn't influenced by American tv.

Gormo4• 16 years ago

I've heard more than a few Indians speak in an accent that very close to Scottish.

Caribbean English accents also remind me of Scottish.

I wonder if there were certain areas of the British Empire that had disproportionate Scottish influence.

fgf• 16 years ago

Yes there is. Niall ferguson describes it as "the empires [Indian colonial administrations] distinctly celtic tinge" if memory serves me right.

pbhjpbhj4• 16 years ago

People attempting to do a Welsh accent often make a stereotypical Indian accent.

liedra3• 16 years ago

I think Australia will be an interesting country to watch accent-wise. At the moment there are very obvious "city" (closer to British non-rhotic) vs. "country" (Steve Irwin) accents, but it's much harder to tell which city and which part of the country any particular Aussie is from. Considering the distances needed to travel between towns and cities, it'll be interesting to see if, over time, these accents become more localised or if (due to easy transport, etc.) they remain fairly indistinguishable.

weeksie2• 16 years ago

Hrm. I never noticed a large difference until I left. Now that I'm in NY I can usually pick someone's state right away. Folks from Melbourne have the most pronounced accents, I reckon. Something about how the 'e' becomes all elongated when they Melbourne, it sounds like 'Mahlbourne' to my Sydney-sider ears.

The difference is probably about as pronounced (if not moreso) as the difference between a middle class non-regional East Coast American versus the same on the West Coast.

JacobAldridge• 16 years ago

You can always tell a Victorian, you just can't tell him much.

As a Queesnlander, I find South Australians easiest to pick, slightly more refined vowel sounds, although my fellow cane toads do stand out when I'm at work in Sydney or Melbourne.

brc2• 16 years ago

There are a few clues. Queenslanders will say 'castle' with a short 'a', rhyming with hassle. South Australians will always elongate the 'a' - 'caarstle'. Then there's the dialect differences - Victorians will go to the 'milk bar' to get some milk. Queenslanders will pack a 'port' to go travelling.

It's true, though, it wasn't until I lived overseas that I could start to pick up the differences. And as for the city/country difference, I would say it is more a function of education level than geography.

That said, I think there will be no more divergence in Australian accents because of high population mobility and nationalised TV broadcasting.

liedra3• 16 years ago

Yeah, I totally agree. You can tell some areas, most definitely! I grew up in Sydney and can tell Melburnians, partly because they can have a bit more of a nasal accent than us from Sydney. I bumped into some people from the Sunshine Coast today in Luxembourg and they had quite a Queensland accent (a la Pauline Hanson) but I couldn't really tell you what about it made it particularly Queenslandery. (The different names for things definitely makes it more obvious, but since we're talking about accents I didn't mention those :)

I do agree also on the city/country difference being education, you can definitely hear the "country" accent in the outer suburbs of Sydney, for example. Still, it's the best way I could really describe the two, since that's more traditionally where they're from :)

wooster• 16 years ago

Well, there's Tangier, Virginia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

Which has an accent thought to have remained unchanged since Colonial times.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

From the article:

Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.

Really? Because that surprises the hell out of me. Americans were an ocean away from Britain for maybe a century before 1776, and the accents still hadn't diverged?

martey• 16 years ago

I do not think it is that surprising. Being part of the same political entity, there should have been a decent amount of intermingling and cross-travel in both directions. There was a NYTimes op-ed today about colonists from Massachusetts who returned to England to fight in the English Civil War in the mid-17th century: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04tinniswood.html

philwelch3• 16 years ago

On the other hand, transatlantic travel was far more time-consuming, unpleasant, expensive, and difficult then than now. If you couldn't afford it outright, one-time passage was worth years of indentured servitude even if you were from a rich country. While the odd rich American aristocrat like Jefferson or Franklin could travel to France for a few years serving as a diplomat, and a group of Puritans could commission a ship to take them across for their latest religious crusade, transatlantic travel can't have been that common.

sprout• 16 years ago

Most of the population growth was fed by immigration, and most Americans traded regularly with British merchants even after 1776.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

Immigration from lots of different countries, though I'm not sure how many immigrants standardized on English at the time. And while contact with British merchants may have been a factor in port cities where trade happened, there were a lot of farmers far away from that influence as well.

stoney• 16 years ago

But as mentioned elsewhere, there was (and is) no one "British" accent - so the immigrants would have had quite a mix of accents.

csbutler• 16 years ago

I don't know much about how the American accent arose. But from what I know about the Australian accent, it apparently arose in the first generation of children born in the country.

Mark_Book5• 16 years ago

Can someone tell me when did english people start pronouncing sixth with a k instead of an x. I've only noticed this phenomenon this decade. It's almost as irritating as pronouncing 'three' as 'free' which at least has the merit of being easier to say

pbhjpbhj4• 16 years ago

>It's almost as irritating as pronouncing 'three' as 'free' which at least has the merit of being easier to say

Free vs Three has been a constant battle for me. I found these extremely difficult to differentiate aurally and three very hard to make orally. This was a constant source of me being corrected throughout school.

British people can certainly tell the difference and I've learnt it well enough to make the difference in pronunciation and to hear it enough to teach it to my son and correct him - he doesn't appear to have my problem with it (he's in infant school).

Chav English and other dialects ignore the difference.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

"England and America are two countries divided by a common language" - George Bernard Shaw

joeyo• 16 years ago

Considering that the Declaration of Independence was published virtually simultaneously in German (July 9) as well as English (July 5), the accents in 1776 were probably quite varied.

brc2• 16 years ago

A good book which also covers this (and is quite entertaining) is Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/038071543...

nickpatrick• 16 years ago

Hey everyone, I'm the author of the post. I'm a longtime HN lurker, so I was very excited to see it shared here. I've really enjoyed reading the discussion.

A quick disclaimer: I have zero background in linguistics. The only materials I used for research were Wikipedia and Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C). Moreover, this is nothing more than a short post on my personal blog. So, don't expect an academic paper on the subject. ;)

Anyway, thanks for reading!

joshkaufman2• 16 years ago

Thanks for writing - forwarded this to a famous dialect professor. Here's what he added to your analysis: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489723

korch• 16 years ago

Canada too! Their English speakers sound subtly more British than American.

The New World-Old World divergence also applies to French speakers in Quebec. If you take their perfect French from Montreal to Paris, to the Parisians much of it sounds like an antiquated form of French. I suppose it's equivalent to the way King James or Shakespearean English sounds antiquated to us now.

silvertab• 16 years ago

Yup, I'm a French Canadian and I've heard it before from French people (from France)... Some also say it sounds more like the French that is spoken in the more remote or rural parts of the country...

stan_rogers2• 16 years ago

Well, until recently we've managed to avoid the vowel flattening and raising that has been pretty much a constant throughout the US since independence. We're accused of saying "oot", "aboot" and "hoose", but what we hear from our neighbours to the south is "aot", "abaot" and "haose" -- the vowel being a tail-rounded flat "a" to the Canadian ear. (We use the same vowel in "house", the verb form, which is distinguished in Canadian speach by more than just the zeddifying of the ess.)

That being said, one shouldn't be deceived into thinking that there is a single Canadian English dialect or accent -- we have a number of regional variants. The upper crust of both Ontario and Quebec (the former Upper and Lower Canada) both spoke with an essentially North American vocabulary and a "mid-Atlantic" accent (the sort of halfway meeting between RP and mid-American that, say, Deutche Welle would use for its English-language world news service). The lower classes in the same provinces were, like the American south, far more heavily influenced by Cornish, Kentish, Geordie, Scots and Scottish and Irish gaelic -- but without the black feedback loop. Nova Scotia has several accents, ranging from the heavily Gaelic Cape Breton to the German Lunenberg. Newfoundland "English" is a language of its own -- the accent is a Gaelic-heavy mix, but the grammar is very much Irish Gaelic. British Columbia speaks an odd mix of SoCal and Pacific Northwest with a tiny tinge of RP in the mix. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are essentially indistinguishable from rural Pennsylvania, but for an odd metre that leaked in from the local aboriginal languages. And, well, Alberta is a State at heart -- I don't think an American would have any difficulty picking out the new economic immigrants to that province from the natives in a sentence or two. There is a lot of overlap between political borders, of course, but there are several distinct regional dialects.

allend• 16 years ago

Does this mean Kevin Costner didn't actually have a ridiculous accent in Robin Hood?

hugh34• 16 years ago

Well, the Robin Hood stories are set about five centuries earlier, so I don't think anybody knows how things were pronounced back then. If you wanted a verbally authentic version of Robin Hood then it would be in a version of English closer to Chaucer's than Shakespeare's, and it would be almost completely incomprehensible.

kmfrk• 16 years ago

If you are interested in the subject, you should check out Origins of the Specious: http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Specious-Misconceptions-Englis.... It also addresses this.

goatforce52• 16 years ago

Melvyn Bragg (who is in possession of a beautiful accent himself) has done a large number of BBC radio programmes on the recent evolution of the english language, accents, etc.

Routes of English: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/routesofenglish/

wazoox• 16 years ago

Amusingly, this hold equally true for Québec French, of which pronunciation remains closer to 17th century French than contemporary France's French.

joshkaufman2• 16 years ago

Here's a follow-up to this post by Rocco Dal Vera, a world-renowned dialect expert: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489723

Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?

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