7 ms·

I read somewhere that the American accent is closer to what British was like in the 1700-1800s. Later the Queen's family, which came from a corner of England, e

I read somewhere that the American accent is closer to what British was like in the 1700-1800s. Later the Queen's family, which came from a corner of England, established its accent as the norm. So the American pronounciation is original, and the British one changed in the meantime. Not sure if this is true.

telesilla 7y ago
Yes, this is basically considered fact. American is old-English. The same with Québécois and French.
- jaratec 7y ago
  I am not sure about these "facts". Why would quebec accent stay the same for centuries? Languages are unstable, especially their pronunciation. Consider also the extraordinary diversity of accents in uk. Did only one cross the Atlantic?
  - thefringthing 7y ago
    It's possible for both dialects to evolve, but at different rates. Present-day Quebecois French is not identical to 17th century French, but it's closer to it than present-day Parisian French is.
    - jeromegv 7y ago
      You can't just make that kind of statement as a fact without providing any kind of source. Read any text from 17th century, languages have evolved quite a bit on both sides of the atlantic. One big reason why Parisian french would be quite different is that colonization to New France did not come from Paris.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      People say this, but I've always thought it was just another piece of pop badlinguistics nonsense that you hear about practically every language. Do you have a reliable source?
  - cultus 7y ago
    Smaller populations very reliably have slower-evolving language. Icelandic is similar to old Norse and old English. Just like you'll hear a lot of Iowan accents in Atlanta but not if you drive 80 miles outside of town. Believe it or not, there is an entire field called linguistics that studies human language and how it evolves.
    - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
      Although Icelandic maintains an orthography close to Old Norse, the value of the letters is very different today indeed. The vowel system, for example, has been greatly restructured. Preaspiration became a quality of the consonants. In terms of lexicon, much of the archaic flavour is actually the result of 19th-century language reformers trying to restore old words. In the meantime, Icelandic had borrowed heavily from Danish. Indeed, there is the field of linguistics, and scholarly treatments of Icelandic (as opposed to pop-sci presentations of the language as a time capsule like yours) point out that Icelandic has undergone a great deal of innovation like any other North Germanic language.
  - Tainnor 7y ago
    It's true that languages generally change, but they don't necessarily change equally fast everywhere. See also this answer: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4033/do-languages-change-at-different-rates https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4033/do-lang...
- foldr 7y ago
  This is plainly not the case. The grain of truth here is that certain linguistic features common to many dialects of 16th century British English have been preserved in most dialects of American English, whereas most dialects of British English have lost these features. (E.g., most American English dialects are rhotic.) But there is ample evidence that many aspects of American English have changed in the past few hundred years. Americans are clearly not speaking some kind of fossilized dialect from the 15th century. By the way, the term "Old English" strictly speaking refers to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English. No-one is claiming that Americans speak this language.
- paleotrope 7y ago
  Yeah, in a way you could consider modern British English to be largely an affectation to denote class distinctions.
  - foldr 7y ago
    Because class distinctions didn't exist in 15th century Britain?! This is simply nonsense.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      No, just the particular fads, e.g., the one that drove the change to the non-rhoticity of RP, didn't exist in 15th century Britain. That the current accent is driven by a particular fad aimed at highlighting upper class status doesn't imply that class distinctions are novel, just the particular effort to demarcate them (which wasn't durable, obviously, as RP isn't exclusive to the upper classes.)
      - foldr 7y ago
        Sure, accents are partly markers of social status, but it's quite wrong to ascribe the diversity of accents in Britain to this. There was never a period where everyone in Britain spoke with the same accent.
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        > but it's quite wrong to ascribe the diversity of accents in Britain to this. No one, AFAICT, did that. The reference to “modern British English” is not, as I read it, a reference to “the current diversity of British accents”, but rather “the current dominant British accent”.
        foldr 7y ago
        The current dominant British accent, if there is such a thing, isn't a marker of social status. If you're referring to RP, then hardly anyone even speaks RP nowadays (even the Queen only makes a half-assed effort...)
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  That's a common stereotype of Québécois French, but I think it's more accurate to say that, just like for pretty much all widely spoken languages, there was a lot more regional variation in the French-speaking world a few hundred years ago, but it's been consolidating over time, and different places happened to consolidate differently. IOW, Parisian French also retains some primitive features that have largely disappeared from one Canadian region or another. But we don't talk about those as much. I'm guessing because doing so wouldn't jive well with certain stereotypes about Québec being a backwards hinterland.
oblio 7y ago
There is be a certain degree of irony to English going through the Great Vowel Shift† (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift) and then having a German dynasty which manages to distort the language again††. † Which made English less-Germanic sounding, at least to my ears. †† In my humble opinion modern British English sounds marginally more Germanic than American English.
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  The great vowel shift needs to be taught much more. Native English speakers commonly default to not taking the great vowel shift into account when encountering a new language. They'd be so much closer to the correct pronunciation by just pronouncing it like it was a word from any language other than English they might already know a little. This should be one of the first things that gets hammered home when learning the first foreign language.
beerandt 7y ago
The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson covers this pretty well. Along with covering many other quirks of the English language. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29.The_Mother_Tongue https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29.The_Mother_Tongue
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  Bill Bryson has no actual training in linguistics and The Mother Tongue features at least one factual error on every single page. (Some Goodreads reviews list these.) I would never recommend that book to any curious reader, it is as bad as pop-sci could possibly get.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    Most of the complaints I've seen have to do with what he gets wrong about other languages, and often in the way that locals are offended when you misuse a localism. Or in the way a physicist complains about a grade schooler being wrong because their answer used the Bohr model. As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist, and manages to make some obtuse concepts relatable, without getting bogged down in technicalities. Similar to what Michael Crichton could do with cutting edge sciences. (Granted, he kept mostly to fiction.) Whereas the most basic begginer's article written by a linguist is still indecipherable to me. And linguists seem to be ok, or even happy, about that. Linguists writing about a linguistic Lockheed A-12 would be aghast that anyone could ever mistake it for an SR-71, let alone be willing to explain the differences to the casual observer, or even make the mental effort to see how someone might mistake the two. So as an engineer that hates the casual misuse of technical terms, I get you. But like the model of the atom, sometimes teaching the simplified but wrong model has its benefits for a certain crowd, until they're ready to go deeper.
    - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
      > Most of the complaints I've seen have to do with what he gets wrong about other languages Bryson gets many, many details about the history of English wrong as well. > As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist. No, Bryson is a hack writer and does more harm than good. You make it sound as if the only alternative to Bryson is eggheaded scholarly publications. In fact, there is a wide selection of popular-science treatments of the history of English and other languages that are both reliable and friendly and accessible for ordinary readers (for example, Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English does right what Bryson set out to do). It is like with archaeology: if an ordinary person wants to learn about the Pyramids, there is no need for someone to recommend Graham Hancock to them as if otherwise they would have to read obtuse archeological-dig reports and disputes among scholars.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Not sure if this is true. It's true to the extent that, as the article notes, the dominant British accent used to be rhotic (probounced-r) like General American, but became non-rhotic as a result of upper class fashion (which was copied in some parts of the US, producing the modern Boston accent, among others.) But both sets of accents have evolved considerably otherwise, so it's not really true broadly, as best I understand.
toyg 7y ago
> the Queen’s family, which came from a corner of England First time I see Germany classified as “a corner of England”, lol. (To be fair, before the current crop, the English aristocracy spoke mainly French, and I guess France could be classed as “a corner of England” by people still a bit hung-up on the loss of Brittany...) RP English is heavily influenced by French and Germanic tones. Local dialects are very different. I still find it hard to compare British languages with what developed in North America, where the influence of non-English-speakers was clearly massive. Isn’t it more interesting to look at Australia and South Africa, where direct links with English natives are way more recent, and still the language departed markedly...?
- brazzledazzle 7y ago
  Isn’t South Africa a former Dutch colony?
  - pinkfoot 7y ago
    Yip, and a former British colony. Hence… 'A' is for aardvaark.
- scoot 7y ago
  The South African accent has a much stronger Dutch influence (from Afrikaans), despite the language being English.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    Not quite that simple. Yes, SA English follows after certain features of Afrikaans, but some of those Afrikaans features were local innovations, not brought from the Netherlands (centralization of /i/ is one example).
    - scoot 7y ago
      Hence "influence".
seppin 7y ago
It's not close at all, but it's closer but it's changed less. Same with Canadian French.
amyjess 7y ago
IIRC, the American accent is also specifically derived from the West Country accent, which to this day has some features that are more associated with AmE such as rhoticity and the father-bother merger. This was because Bristol in particular was a major sea hub in colonial-era England, much moreso than London. As an interesting side note, Americans know the West Country accent as the "pirate accent" thanks to the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island, where Robert Newton played Long John Silver and managed to convince the director to let him use his native Dorset accent because he thought it would be more historically accurate than the RP accent the director originally wanted him to do, and his portrayal was so iconic that pretty much every pirate story since has used some variation on Newton's accent.
agumonkey 7y ago
Interesting, for some reason I found England accents to have a strong historical feel. Also not to far away from germany (saxon tribes ?)
- danans 7y ago
  > Interesting, for some reason I found England accents to have a strong historical feel This is mass broadcast media playing to Americans' biases around the eliteness of English accents. This effect is at least as old as cross Atlantic broadcast media, heard until a few decades ago in the artificial Mid-Atlantic accents of the east coast elites. On the other hand, to many in the UK, when watching a show like Game of Thrones, the Northmen sound like modern blokes from Yorkshire, not some kind of medieval people.
pdonis 7y ago
> So the American pronounciation is original, and the British one changed in the meantime. The article says basically the same thing (in its discussion of rhotic vs. non-rhotic accents). So the article's title is misleading: it should really be "When Did the British Gain Their British Accents?"
projectramo 7y ago
Perhaps, but don't take the claim too far. From the article: "Various 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. "
awb 7y ago
> I read somewhere that the American accent is closer to what British was like in the 1700-1800s. Wouldn't you then expect a small isolated town in England to still have an "American" accent?
- umanwizard 7y ago
  No, because that town's accent will have been changing since 1700, too. But you definitely find, for example, places in England where "r"s at the ends of words or before consonants are pronounced, like in America but unlike in RP.
  - danans 7y ago
    > places in England where "r"s at the ends of words or before consonants are pronounced, like in America but unlike in RP Specifically in the west country of England. This accent was borrowed by Hollywood to create what we know today as the "pirate" accent.
atomi 7y ago
An interesting aside, the Celts descended from Iberian fishermen. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-descended-from-spanish-fishermen-study-finds-416727.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...

telesilla 7y ago

Yes, this is basically considered fact. American is old-English. The same with Québécois and French.

jaratec 7y ago
I am not sure about these "facts". Why would quebec accent stay the same for centuries? Languages are unstable, especially their pronunciation. Consider also the extraordinary diversity of accents in uk. Did only one cross the Atlantic?
- thefringthing 7y ago
  It's possible for both dialects to evolve, but at different rates. Present-day Quebecois French is not identical to 17th century French, but it's closer to it than present-day Parisian French is.
  - jeromegv 7y ago
    You can't just make that kind of statement as a fact without providing any kind of source. Read any text from 17th century, languages have evolved quite a bit on both sides of the atlantic. One big reason why Parisian french would be quite different is that colonization to New France did not come from Paris.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    People say this, but I've always thought it was just another piece of pop badlinguistics nonsense that you hear about practically every language. Do you have a reliable source?
- cultus 7y ago
  Smaller populations very reliably have slower-evolving language. Icelandic is similar to old Norse and old English. Just like you'll hear a lot of Iowan accents in Atlanta but not if you drive 80 miles outside of town. Believe it or not, there is an entire field called linguistics that studies human language and how it evolves.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    Although Icelandic maintains an orthography close to Old Norse, the value of the letters is very different today indeed. The vowel system, for example, has been greatly restructured. Preaspiration became a quality of the consonants. In terms of lexicon, much of the archaic flavour is actually the result of 19th-century language reformers trying to restore old words. In the meantime, Icelandic had borrowed heavily from Danish. Indeed, there is the field of linguistics, and scholarly treatments of Icelandic (as opposed to pop-sci presentations of the language as a time capsule like yours) point out that Icelandic has undergone a great deal of innovation like any other North Germanic language.
- Tainnor 7y ago
  It's true that languages generally change, but they don't necessarily change equally fast everywhere. See also this answer: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4033/do-languages-change-at-different-rates https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4033/do-lang...
foldr 7y ago
This is plainly not the case. The grain of truth here is that certain linguistic features common to many dialects of 16th century British English have been preserved in most dialects of American English, whereas most dialects of British English have lost these features. (E.g., most American English dialects are rhotic.) But there is ample evidence that many aspects of American English have changed in the past few hundred years. Americans are clearly not speaking some kind of fossilized dialect from the 15th century. By the way, the term "Old English" strictly speaking refers to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English. No-one is claiming that Americans speak this language.
paleotrope 7y ago
Yeah, in a way you could consider modern British English to be largely an affectation to denote class distinctions.
- foldr 7y ago
  Because class distinctions didn't exist in 15th century Britain?! This is simply nonsense.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    No, just the particular fads, e.g., the one that drove the change to the non-rhoticity of RP, didn't exist in 15th century Britain. That the current accent is driven by a particular fad aimed at highlighting upper class status doesn't imply that class distinctions are novel, just the particular effort to demarcate them (which wasn't durable, obviously, as RP isn't exclusive to the upper classes.)
    - foldr 7y ago
      Sure, accents are partly markers of social status, but it's quite wrong to ascribe the diversity of accents in Britain to this. There was never a period where everyone in Britain spoke with the same accent.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > but it's quite wrong to ascribe the diversity of accents in Britain to this. No one, AFAICT, did that. The reference to “modern British English” is not, as I read it, a reference to “the current diversity of British accents”, but rather “the current dominant British accent”.
        foldr 7y ago
        The current dominant British accent, if there is such a thing, isn't a marker of social status. If you're referring to RP, then hardly anyone even speaks RP nowadays (even the Queen only makes a half-assed effort...)
mumblemumble 7y ago
That's a common stereotype of Québécois French, but I think it's more accurate to say that, just like for pretty much all widely spoken languages, there was a lot more regional variation in the French-speaking world a few hundred years ago, but it's been consolidating over time, and different places happened to consolidate differently. IOW, Parisian French also retains some primitive features that have largely disappeared from one Canadian region or another. But we don't talk about those as much. I'm guessing because doing so wouldn't jive well with certain stereotypes about Québec being a backwards hinterland.

oblio 7y ago

There is be a certain degree of irony to English going through the Great Vowel Shift† (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift) and then having a German dynasty which manages to distort the language again††. † Which made English less-Germanic sounding, at least to my ears. †† In my humble opinion modern British English sounds marginally more Germanic than American English.

ajmurmann 7y ago
The great vowel shift needs to be taught much more. Native English speakers commonly default to not taking the great vowel shift into account when encountering a new language. They'd be so much closer to the correct pronunciation by just pronouncing it like it was a word from any language other than English they might already know a little. This should be one of the first things that gets hammered home when learning the first foreign language.

beerandt 7y ago

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson covers this pretty well. Along with covering many other quirks of the English language. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29.The_Mother_Tongue https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29.The_Mother_Tongue

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
Bill Bryson has no actual training in linguistics and The Mother Tongue features at least one factual error on every single page. (Some Goodreads reviews list these.) I would never recommend that book to any curious reader, it is as bad as pop-sci could possibly get.
- beerandt 7y ago
  Most of the complaints I've seen have to do with what he gets wrong about other languages, and often in the way that locals are offended when you misuse a localism. Or in the way a physicist complains about a grade schooler being wrong because their answer used the Bohr model. As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist, and manages to make some obtuse concepts relatable, without getting bogged down in technicalities. Similar to what Michael Crichton could do with cutting edge sciences. (Granted, he kept mostly to fiction.) Whereas the most basic begginer's article written by a linguist is still indecipherable to me. And linguists seem to be ok, or even happy, about that. Linguists writing about a linguistic Lockheed A-12 would be aghast that anyone could ever mistake it for an SR-71, let alone be willing to explain the differences to the casual observer, or even make the mental effort to see how someone might mistake the two. So as an engineer that hates the casual misuse of technical terms, I get you. But like the model of the atom, sometimes teaching the simplified but wrong model has its benefits for a certain crowd, until they're ready to go deeper.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > Most of the complaints I've seen have to do with what he gets wrong about other languages Bryson gets many, many details about the history of English wrong as well. > As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist. No, Bryson is a hack writer and does more harm than good. You make it sound as if the only alternative to Bryson is eggheaded scholarly publications. In fact, there is a wide selection of popular-science treatments of the history of English and other languages that are both reliable and friendly and accessible for ordinary readers (for example, Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English does right what Bryson set out to do). It is like with archaeology: if an ordinary person wants to learn about the Pyramids, there is no need for someone to recommend Graham Hancock to them as if otherwise they would have to read obtuse archeological-dig reports and disputes among scholars.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Not sure if this is true. It's true to the extent that, as the article notes, the dominant British accent used to be rhotic (probounced-r) like General American, but became non-rhotic as a result of upper class fashion (which was copied in some parts of the US, producing the modern Boston accent, among others.) But both sets of accents have evolved considerably otherwise, so it's not really true broadly, as best I understand.

toyg 7y ago

> the Queen’s family, which came from a corner of England First time I see Germany classified as “a corner of England”, lol. (To be fair, before the current crop, the English aristocracy spoke mainly French, and I guess France could be classed as “a corner of England” by people still a bit hung-up on the loss of Brittany...) RP English is heavily influenced by French and Germanic tones. Local dialects are very different. I still find it hard to compare British languages with what developed in North America, where the influence of non-English-speakers was clearly massive. Isn’t it more interesting to look at Australia and South Africa, where direct links with English natives are way more recent, and still the language departed markedly...?

brazzledazzle 7y ago
Isn’t South Africa a former Dutch colony?
- pinkfoot 7y ago
  Yip, and a former British colony. Hence… 'A' is for aardvaark.
scoot 7y ago
The South African accent has a much stronger Dutch influence (from Afrikaans), despite the language being English.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  Not quite that simple. Yes, SA English follows after certain features of Afrikaans, but some of those Afrikaans features were local innovations, not brought from the Netherlands (centralization of /i/ is one example).
  - scoot 7y ago
    Hence "influence".

seppin 7y ago

It's not close at all, but it's closer but it's changed less. Same with Canadian French.

amyjess 7y ago

IIRC, the American accent is also specifically derived from the West Country accent, which to this day has some features that are more associated with AmE such as rhoticity and the father-bother merger. This was because Bristol in particular was a major sea hub in colonial-era England, much moreso than London. As an interesting side note, Americans know the West Country accent as the "pirate accent" thanks to the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island, where Robert Newton played Long John Silver and managed to convince the director to let him use his native Dorset accent because he thought it would be more historically accurate than the RP accent the director originally wanted him to do, and his portrayal was so iconic that pretty much every pirate story since has used some variation on Newton's accent.

agumonkey 7y ago

Interesting, for some reason I found England accents to have a strong historical feel. Also not to far away from germany (saxon tribes ?)

danans 7y ago
> Interesting, for some reason I found England accents to have a strong historical feel This is mass broadcast media playing to Americans' biases around the eliteness of English accents. This effect is at least as old as cross Atlantic broadcast media, heard until a few decades ago in the artificial Mid-Atlantic accents of the east coast elites. On the other hand, to many in the UK, when watching a show like Game of Thrones, the Northmen sound like modern blokes from Yorkshire, not some kind of medieval people.

pdonis 7y ago

> So the American pronounciation is original, and the British one changed in the meantime. The article says basically the same thing (in its discussion of rhotic vs. non-rhotic accents). So the article's title is misleading: it should really be "When Did the British Gain Their British Accents?"

projectramo 7y ago

Perhaps, but don't take the claim too far. From the article: "Various 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. "

awb 7y ago

> I read somewhere that the American accent is closer to what British was like in the 1700-1800s. Wouldn't you then expect a small isolated town in England to still have an "American" accent?

umanwizard 7y ago
No, because that town's accent will have been changing since 1700, too. But you definitely find, for example, places in England where "r"s at the ends of words or before consonants are pronounced, like in America but unlike in RP.
- danans 7y ago
  > places in England where "r"s at the ends of words or before consonants are pronounced, like in America but unlike in RP Specifically in the west country of England. This accent was borrowed by Hollywood to create what we know today as the "pirate" accent.

atomi 7y ago

An interesting aside, the Celts descended from Iberian fishermen. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-descended-from-spanish-fishermen-study-finds-416727.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...