Philk

or so this article claims

http://mentalfloss.com/article/29761...ritish-accents

Speedwell

Nobody's native accent here is supposed to be GenAm (General American). I had a linguist boyfriend back in the day who told me, however, that due to my immigrant parentage and moving around many times in my childhood, that my GenAm was as perfect as if I'd taken acting elocution lessons. Meh, it's just my voice The good thing about it is that it makes me well suited to being an international corporate classroom trainer; if you can understand the American TV news, you can understand me.

AdobePinon

They have news on TV?

Pulaski

Yes, American news, ...... apparently nothing of interest happens anywhere else in the world.

On a more serious note, I read several years ago that if we had recordings of Shakespeare's voice he would likely sound American.

HumphreyC

Both the British and American regional accents have changed significantly since the American Revolution. As a general rule though, the accents on the Atlantic seaboard are closest to certain British regional accents from the 17th-18th centuries whereas the American accent tends to level out as you get west of the Appalachians. In the east the ancestor to the regional accents is the intonation pattern and pronunciations of colloquial dialects of the commercial classes in England before 1700.

Good example is New England - the original 20,000 settlers here mainly came from a hundred mile circle in Essex, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. They spoke with a middle class East Anglian accent with early tendencies towards received pronunciation. Hence in the region you find people drop the [r] in speech - so you get Haa-v’d instead of Harvard - but it's an 'aah' sound rather than an 'arr' sound as in received pronunciation English. There used to be a lot more relics of the early accent - so by looking at early poetry you can see that they used to say yistidy for yesterday, ginral for general, dafter or darter for daughter, drownd for drown, gownd for gown.

In the South - the tidewater was settled as a nearly feudal agrarian society consisting of a cavalier elite, their indentured servants and slaves. Most of these came from the rural counties of Southern England so that colloquial Southern speech comes from colloquial Southern English speech of the 16th and 17th century - hence howdy for hello, afterclap for any unexpected event, shuck for husk, porely for unwell, drag for harrow, craw for throat, afeared for afraid, grit for courage, lick for beat, links for sausage etc etc

Linguists reckon it would sound like a cross between Irish accents, West Country and Yorkshire. See:

https://soundcloud.com/evie-jeffreys

Sally Redux

Interesting.

A German person once said to me that American English sounds to them like 'rarr rarr rarr'.

paddingtongreen

This is made more difficult because there was "The Great Vowel Shift" in England from the thirteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth.

tonrob

I read that quickly and thought you typed "Great Bowel Shift". That would have been more interesting.

robin1234

My wife has always said "gownd" for gown. She's from the Bronx...

A couple of other really archaic words, still in common use in the US; faucet and skillet. The OED has instances of "faucet" back to the fifteenth century, and it looks like it became obsolete in Britain by the mid nineteenth century.

Here's another; the archaic word "fall" for autumn. The wikipedia article on the term says;

The alternative word fall for the season traces its origins to old Germanic languages. The exact derivation is unclear, with the Old English fiæll or feallan and the Old Norse fall all being possible candidates. However, these words all have the meaning "to fall from a height" and are clearly derived either from a common root or from each other. The term came to denote the season in 16th century England, a contraction of Middle English expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year".[11]

During the 17th century, English emigration to the British colonies in North America was at its peak, and the new settlers took the English language with them. While the term fall gradually became obsolete in Britain, it became the more common term in North America.

I have a few elderly neighbors here who will usually say "in the fall of the year" rather than just "in the fall" when they are talking about seasonal phenomena (wildlife, gardening, etc.)

jeffreyhy

Replaced by?

Regards, JEff

robin1234

Tap. Which is an even older word than faucet.. according to the OED, tap has common germanic roots while faucet is of French origin, unknown etymology. Certainly sounds french. When I first visited America, and heard the word "faucet," I thought it must be a modern word with proprietary origins (e.g. someone called M. Faucet invented a new, improved tap in the 1920s..)

RoadWarriorFromLP

From what I know of this, it's not so much that east coast American accents today are similar to English accents of 200-300 years ago, as it is that American accents have changed less during that same time, given that there wasn't a shift to non-rhotic pronunciation.

English as spoken in the South is probably closest to what some variations of British English once were, but it too has changed over time and includes Scot-Irish and African influences.

I don't think that this sort of difference in linguistic change is unusual, with the breakaway speakers making fewer changes than the original speakers. Swiss German and French Canadian French come to mind --Swiss German is similar to Middle German (as opposed to the later High German), while French in Quebec retains some words that are no longer used in France.