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Yeah I've always wondered why that has happened in Britain but not so much in the US in that people on different ends of the country can often sound not too dis

by spraak 8y ago

Yeah I've always wondered why that has happened in Britain but not so much in the US in that people on different ends of the country can often sound not too dissimilar,

arethuza 8y ago
I would guess that parts of the UK haven't had any serious external influences in terms of culture or population for a very long time indeed - at least until fairly recently. e.g. In my mouth I remember my parents joking that anyone whose family hadn't been in the village for at least three generations were still regarded as "incomers".
lainga 8y ago
It used to be that way in the US, too, up until radio and TV began exposing everyone to the accents from the Northeast (politicians) and California (Hollywood).
- pilsetnieks 8y ago
  The accent of Hollywood wasn't actually the accent of California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
yorwba 8y ago
The west coast was settled barely 200 years ago, and at that time they would have spoken essentially the same mix of accents as those on the east cost. That's not a lot of time to differentiate. In addition, there's a lower population density in th US and people need to move larger distances, e.g. to shop at the nearest town, so the areas of mostly similar pronunciation should be expected to be larger. Then there are travel and long-distance communication, which cause linguistic convergence in essentially every country, so there dialects in the US are never going to be as fractured as they used to be in Europe.
TulliusCicero 8y ago
I went to BYU which has mormons from all over the US, it was really rare for me to be able to tell where someone was from (and even noticing someone having a non-standard but still American accent was fairly uncommon).
smallnamespace 8y ago
This is a hypothesis about how variation relates to the period of time in which a language has been in an area. Simply put, the more diversity within a region, the more likely that place is the origin [1]. So in this case, England will have the most linguistic diversity within English since it originated there. This hypothesis has an analogue within population genetics, e.g. Africa has the most genetic diversity compared to other regions. I don't know if this effect has been given a name yet, but it would seem to apply to any system where 1) mutations accumulate over time 2) populations tend to be stable but 3) groups occasionally move about very large distances. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/3dq1ko/why_does_england_have_so_many_accents/?st=jilyd3tr&sh=093af996 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/3dq1ko/why... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982205002095 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...

by spraak 8y ago

Yeah I've always wondered why that has happened in Britain but not so much in the US in that people on different ends of the country can often sound not too dissimilar,

arethuza 8y ago

I would guess that parts of the UK haven't had any serious external influences in terms of culture or population for a very long time indeed - at least until fairly recently. e.g. In my mouth I remember my parents joking that anyone whose family hadn't been in the village for at least three generations were still regarded as "incomers".

lainga 8y ago

It used to be that way in the US, too, up until radio and TV began exposing everyone to the accents from the Northeast (politicians) and California (Hollywood).

pilsetnieks 8y ago
The accent of Hollywood wasn't actually the accent of California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

yorwba 8y ago

The west coast was settled barely 200 years ago, and at that time they would have spoken essentially the same mix of accents as those on the east cost. That's not a lot of time to differentiate. In addition, there's a lower population density in th US and people need to move larger distances, e.g. to shop at the nearest town, so the areas of mostly similar pronunciation should be expected to be larger. Then there are travel and long-distance communication, which cause linguistic convergence in essentially every country, so there dialects in the US are never going to be as fractured as they used to be in Europe.

TulliusCicero 8y ago

I went to BYU which has mormons from all over the US, it was really rare for me to be able to tell where someone was from (and even noticing someone having a non-standard but still American accent was fairly uncommon).

smallnamespace 8y ago

This is a hypothesis about how variation relates to the period of time in which a language has been in an area. Simply put, the more diversity within a region, the more likely that place is the origin [1]. So in this case, England will have the most linguistic diversity within English since it originated there. This hypothesis has an analogue within population genetics, e.g. Africa has the most genetic diversity compared to other regions. I don't know if this effect has been given a name yet, but it would seem to apply to any system where 1) mutations accumulate over time 2) populations tend to be stable but 3) groups occasionally move about very large distances. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/3dq1ko/why_does_england_have_so_many_accents/?st=jilyd3tr&sh=093af996 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/3dq1ko/why... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982205002095 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...