I learned today from John McWhorter at Lexicon Valley that British and American accents were indistinguishable during the Revolution. The American Accent Came First. This seems impossible to me, given how different British accents are from each other, as far back as we can trace. So perhaps it means the type of British people who ruled and policed America up until 1775. But colonists speaking to each other about the possibility of spies note often that they can't tell whether someone is British or American by listening to them. The British accent distinct from American did not start differentiating until after 1800.
Wouldn't the Scots-Irish and English Borderers in Appalachia sound different? Oh wait, if the coastal accents of both countries were that similar, then people on the frontier would detect even less difference between them. I do recall hearing that the coastal colonial accent was consistent up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I trust McWhorter, but I'm having a hard time getting my head around this one.
6 comments:
I don't know if the West Country accent and the Somerset accent are the same thing.
I didn't listen to the episode so I don't know how heavily he leans on the spy evidence but that does seem a bit flimsy to me, too. Accent is one of those things that we know exists in general but can seem to evaporate on inspection of a specific example due to the malleability of the human voice. My wife's speech, for example, can be entirely different when she's speaking with her business peers versus speaking with her family where she slips into a quite country/Southern inflection that reflects prior generations from Mississippi even though she, her parents, and her siblings were all born and raised in Iowa and Illinois. I can definitely see people thinking it should be easy to distinguish an Englishman from an American by speech and then discovering because of the variability both in speakers and in specific accents that it really wasn't possible. I don't know if that would be a reliable indication of when an American accent developed, however.
I follow a YouTube channel called "Lost in the Pond," by an Englishman who married an American and now lives in Chicago. The channel is all about comparing the US and the UK. Often, he deals in language. He's no linguist, but he cites them and often talks about how various American pronunciations were preservations of lost British proninciation. So there's that.
There must have been many American accents already. I wonder if any given American accent was very similar to some British accent, and vice versa. So New Yorkers sounded like cockneys, perhaps, and Virginians sounded like Oxfordshire, and Down-East New Englanders sounded like Yorkshiremen. Something like that.
I once heard some British actors carefully performing Shakespeare using the reconstructed accents of Shakespeare's own time, and they did sound rather American.
That may be it. The accents may have been different, but not specifically British. They may have sounded like possibly a Virginia accent to a New Englander or one of the many other possibilities.
Born and raised in Boston. 40 years spent in corporate American toned down my accent (working class not Brahmin) somewhat, forcing the pronunciation of trailing Rs. Was in an airport bar waiting for a flight bantering with fellow travelers, when the fellow next to me blurts out, "Where the hell are you from?" Apparently, a few beers was enough to bring out the Boston in me.
Accents are fascinating. Wasn't there something in Albion's Seed about various American accents? I need to re-read that. I grew up in southwestern Colorado but was raised by and around Texans and Arkansans. IMHO, we can mimic accents we "grew" up hearing. While I think my "normal" accent is more Western US than Southern, I can mimic the deepest South, but not Appalachian. My pronunciation of Spanish words doesn't have a southern accent because I heard the regional equivalent of that language so often growing up -- not that anyone from Spain would think my accent authentic.
On a tangent... my granddaughter is required to take a foreign language this year and Latin is offered! I'm considering a cash bribe... although she's interested anyway.
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