There are many, many
evolving regional British and American accents, so the terms “British
accent” and “American accent” are gross oversimplifications. What a lot
of Americans think of as the typical "British accent” is what's called
standardized Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as Public School
English or BBC English. What most people think of as an "American
accent," or most Americans think of as "no accent," is the General
American (GenAm) accent, sometimes called a "newscaster accent" or
"Network English." Because this is a blog post and not a book, we'll
focus on these two general sounds for now and leave the regional accents
for another time.
English colonists established their first permanent settlement in the
New World at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, sounding very much like
their countrymen back home. By the time we had recordings of both
Americans and Brits some three centuries later (the first audio
recording of a human voice was made in 1860),
the sounds of English as spoken in the Old World and New World were
very different. We're looking at a silent gap of some 300 years, so we
can't say exactly when Americans first started to sound noticeably different from the British.
As for the "why," though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents is rhotacism. The General American accent is rhotic and speakers pronounce the r in words such as hard. The BBC-type British accent is non-rhotic, and speakers don't pronounce the r, leaving hard sounding more like hahd.
Before and during the American Revolution, the English, both in England
and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don't know
much more about said accent, though. 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.
Friday, January 25, 2013
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