7 ms·
When did Americans lose their British accents?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jeffadotio 7y agoThis is an interesting read but the article cites no sources for its claims. Even the claims that refer to linguistics debunking other theories have no citation. It also makes some suspect statements. I live in New England and saying that it is hard to find someone who does not have an accent that links them to some New England locale is just silly. Then there is the claim that the “general American” accent heard on TV and radio is confined to a small region in the Midwest. That just sounds weird on its face. I imagine NPR must recruit reporters exclusively from this region because it would be difficult to find the accent anywhere else, according to the article. Having lived in the Deep South, far West, rural Midwest and urban East coast I have found that regional accents are largely overblown by articles like this.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y agoYep. 7 years in Boston and the only time I have ever heard a “Boston” accent unironically was at Fenway Park.
- gowld 7y agoPeople on TV/radio learn General American. They generally don't act with their native voices.
- scarface74 7y agoSome examples can easily be found on the Walking Dead - three or four of the actors have a natural British accent but their characters speak with a southern American accent. Also, as someone who moved from a small town in the Deep South 20+ years ago to a metropolitan area still in the south, I spent some time working on my accent. I thought it was better but some of my coworkers working in India that I have gotten to know asked me was English my first language (it is) because they couldn’t understand me as clearly as other native speakers. I still have work to do - especially as I move more into consulting and leading teams who may be offshore. Not to mention that I use phrases and references out of habit that are well understood by native speakers but not by non native or especially people in foreign countries.
- SloopJon 7y agoThe front-page article on this site is "8 Surprising Facts about James Dean," so I wouldn't take it too seriously. It reads like a high-school or undergraduate essay. Also, FWIW, it's from 2012. Hopefully a linguist will come along with better treatments of the subject, but Google turned up a couple of articles with more links: https://curiosity.com/topics/the-american-accent-is-older-than-the-british-accent-curiosity/ https://curiosity.com/topics/the-american-accent-is-older-th... http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-pres... And, of course, there's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pfarrell 7y agoMentalFloss is recreational reading, not a peer-reviewed journal. This particular article didn’t seem to go anywhere. Usually I find articles from the dead tree version of the publication have a bit higher quality a bit more content that can lead you to seek deeper articles.
- throwaway894345 7y ago> I imagine NPR must recruit reporters exclusively from this region because it would be difficult to find the accent anywhere else People can learn other accents. In the UK, there is (was?) a "BBC accent" which presumably didn't imply that every BBC personality was hired from a particular region.
- arethuza 7y agoI think it's been a very long time since there was a "BBC accent" - I'm in my 50s and I can remember presenters from my youth (e.g. John Noakes) with very distinct regional accents. Not to mention the idea of BBC Scotland all talking in RP is quite amusing...
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y agoJohn Noakes would never have been asked to read the news.
- Spooky23 7y agoIt depends on the circles that you find yourself in. In most areas there's the homogenized, suburban communities with corporate folks who are from wherever and sound like they are from anywhere, and then the people who are from that place. In that group, you could get knocked on the head somewhere near Boston and wake up in some subdivision near Charlotte and have no idea where you are. There are exceptions, but if you're a reporter seeking out regional dialects, you won't be hanging out in suburbia, and you'll find plenty of them, particularly in older or coastal places like New England and New York where they are everywhere!
- cgriswald 7y agoI think regional accents are fading. If I had to guess, it is due in part to TV, in part to ease of travel and relocation, and in part due to a huge decrease in European immigration. My accent has faded in the ~two decades I've been away from Minnesota. But if you spoke to me in person you could identify where I'm originally from inside 3 seconds unless I was very careful in my word choices. I suspect you're deaf to New England accents. I used to think people back home in the Twin Cities didn't have an accent. To me they sounded like the people on TV. It seemed like only the older folks or folks from rural areas had the Minnesotan accent. When I travel back to Minneapolis, I hear the accent. It's not "Fargo" level (although I've known people who talk like that), but it's clear and unambiguous.
- sundarurfriend 7y agoA good, enjoyable read. It's informative while remaining concise, a quality mainstream media articles sorely lack - if this had been a newspaper article, it would've been nearly twice as long, with unnecessary quotes from people with long titles (which are watered down enough to be basically content-free), and still managed to be somewhat less informative than this one is. Reminds me of old (and possibly current) "How Stuff Works" articles.
- abjecton 7y agoOriginal pronunciation Shakespeare is a good example of this. It's performed with the sorts of accents people had in 16th/17th century England. To my ear as an English person, it sounds like a Westcountry accent, an example of an English accent which is still rhotic today. But other people might perceive it as being slightly American or Irish sounding.
- gowld 7y agoRelated, it's such a farce that people will recite and listen to some of the best-regarded _poetry_ in history, and do it in a totally different accent from the original, ruining its auditory aesthetic, and then say that people who don't like it are boorish and low.
- azangru 7y ago> and do it in a totally different accent from the original Take William Blake's The Tyger: Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? How are we to know how the word "symmetry" was supposed to be pronounced by Blake? No-one has recorded his pronunciation. Did it rhyme with the word "eye" (as such words must have done several centuries prior) or was it a completely "eye-rhyme" (and not very good at that, either), intended to be seen as a rhyme, but not pronounced as such?
- leoc 7y agoThat's what professional students of linguistics are for. Presumably when you see multiple instances of a word or family of words being rhymed in a particular way by different authors of a particular place and time, you start to get a reasonable idea of how it was originally pronounced. Sometimes people also directly comment in writing about contemporary pronunciations.
- azangru 7y ago> That's what professional students of linguistics are for. Professional students of linguistics will say that the terminal -y was pronounced as "eye" in the time of Shakespeare; but by the time of Blake such pronunciation has already become obsolete. However, this doesn't help us distinguish between two possibilities: - Blake's -y rhyme is purely visual and is no more than a nod to the tradition; it is not intended to be pronounced as /ai/, or - Poems of that time used to be delivered in an archaic pronunciation, in which case "symmetry" actually rhymed with "eye". I don't think linguists have an answer that would convincingly point to either of the two possible pronunciations.
- david_draco 7y agoI 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.
- 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.
- telesilla 7y agoYes, this is basically considered fact. American is old-English. The same with Québécois and French.
- jaratec 7y agoI 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 agoIt'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 agoYou 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.
- dmos62 7y agoAnyone else cringe at the choice of words in the title? If you migrate and your pronunciation gradually mutates away from what you had originally, and if you then say that you lost what you had, you're invalidating the evolution you've gone through. Or, if the "americans lose their british accents" implies that [english accent = american accent + something you can lose], it's an American-centricity that treats the English accent as if it were something you put on to be a more convicing villain on TV.
- dragonwriter 7y agoNo, the title asks a popular question and, like, the first sentence of the article directly addresses why the popular question isn't actually the right question to ask.
- dmos62 7y agoThat very well may be true, but whether or not the article acknowledges that this isn't the right question is independent of whether or not this specific wrong question makes you cringe.
- Merrill 7y agoClass must have been important, considering that many early colonists in the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies were shipments of prisoners and indentured servants. After the War of Independence, a large number of other Europeans left traces of their languages in the regional American accents. English are not the largest ethnic group.
- fergie 7y agoA disproportionate number of immigrants to North America from the British Isles came from Scotland and Ireland. You can still hear that mild Canadian/Scottish/US/Irish accents can under some circumstances be really close.
- dwnvoted2hell 7y agoIt feels like this article needs counterbalance. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-pres...
- enriquto 7y agoMost likely both accents evolved independently from a common one. It makes no sense that evolution happened only on one side.
- naasking 7y agoTechnically, there is no "British accent". There are many accents. Even people who grew up in different parts of London have different accents.
- bordercases 7y agoWhen did Americans develop an accent unique from all accents on the British Isles?
- adwww 7y agoAlthough a lot of London's accents are currently blending into MLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
- OJFord 7y agoThe article opens by stating that since it is 'not a book' it is addressing only RP vs. 'General American'/'GenAm' (new to me). So that there is a wealth of non-RP British accents - and indeed non-GenAm American - is irrelevant to a discussion that began by setting those aside.
- jrochkind1 7y agoWhy would you assume that American accent(s) changed, but not British ones? Maybe it's the British accent that changed since then, not the American one, so it's not that Americans lost their British accents, but that British accents changed and American ones stayed behind. Or of course, both probably have changed. After reading the article -- yup, in that vein. But I think this is an important conceptual shift for us in even what questions we ask. We are inclined to think things are much more stable than they are, especially within geographic bounds. We assume British accents must be more stable in the British geography, and it must be American accents that changed. When in fact there's no reason to have this assumption, because that's not how things work, the right question in the first place, even before you know anything, is "Why have American and British accents diverged", without assuming one was stable but not the other. Now, the trick is realizing this applies to culture in general, not just accents or even languages. Consider how this applies to those genetic tests telling people they "are" 35% German or something and what people think this means about the stability of the category of "German" over generations...
- dragonwriter 7y agoThe first sentence of the article addresses that.
- auiya 7y ago> GenAm now considered generally confined to a small section of the Midwest The GenAm is way more prevalent than just a small section of the Midwest. It's all over the West coast and generally every large metro area regardless of region. Even in regions of heavily divergent accents, like New England or the Southeast the GenAm is quite prevalent in the cities. Atlanta for instance isn't made up of people who all sound like Scarlett O'Hara and Houston isn't made up of people who all sound like Boomhauer from King of the Hill.
- Spooky23 7y agoI think they confused origin with practice. GenAm is the most common accent (probably 50-65% of speakers), and was originally (1900-1930s) associated with the migration path through Pennsylvania/Western Mass/Upstate NY as far west as the Upper Midwest. That pattern has changed though, and there are some shifts in these regions.
- war1025 7y agoI guess I don't find it terribly surprising given that a majority of immigrants to America didn't speak English and picked it up (sometimes several generations) later.
- otterley 7y ago(2012)
- ChrisArchitect 7y agoagreed. This is not news or even recent. Stop posting stuff like this
- slashblake 7y agoStill alive in NC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7MvtQp2-UA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7MvtQp2-UA
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y agoFor folks who are genuinely interested in the relationship between British and American English, it's worth checking out https://theprodigaltongue.com/ https://theprodigaltongue.com/ The author has a blog that is no longer as active as it once was: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/ https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/
- jackfoxy 7y agoNo mention of the role of Noah Webster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue-backed_speller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue-backed_spell... in standardizing American grammar and spelling, and probably trickling down to bringing pronunciations closer together across the states and regions. Sure spelling is after the pronunciation fact, but his work must have had an influence on standardizing pronunciation.
- xbryanx 7y agoIf you want to know a whole lot more about this, I highly recommend the book "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America." It's a deep and long book, but super enjoyable and easy to read. It explains in much more nuance, the origins of various American accents and their roots in different historical British cultures.
- umichguy 7y agoAmerican newscasters and classic film stars sported an accent half in between the U.S.- UK accents, also called as Transatlantic accent. Look back at old films even as late the end of 60s and you wil hear it.
- hateful 7y agoTL;DR: we didn't, they did.
- mullen 7y agoI highly recommend the History of English Podcast for anyone interested in this topic: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
- Tagbert 7y agoThat is a delightful and informative podcast that gives historical trends and context to the exploration of the language.
- mjh2539 7y agoTldr: rhoticity was the norm, but the prestige dialect became non-rhotic at a certain point.
- handelaar 7y agoErm. OK, but there is at least one Irish accent which is obviously similar to "generic American", but of all the UK accents none persist in the US, nor vice-versa.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- poulsbohemian 7y agoWhile there were obviously many colonials who were English speaking and thus had an accent to lose, this article like many about that time and place in history fails to observe that English was by no means the only language in use and the reason we do not have an official language in this country today. My German-speaking family arrived on this continent before the revolution and only switched to English around 1898, as near as we can tell.