History and accent change (2024)

FAQs

How have accents changed over time? ›

Accents also shift over time across the whole of the nation. In the 19th century, linguists noted that the “h” sound began to disappear. Right now, younger speakers are more likely to pronounce the “th” in words such as “thanks” so it resembles an “f” sound.

The first is isolation; early colonists had only sporadic contact with the mother country. The second is exposure to other languages, and the colonists came into contact with Native American languages, mariners' Indian English pidgin and other settlers, who spoke Dutch, Swedish, French and Spanish.

General American English and British English split

By around 1720, Americans had begun to notice that their evolving dialect was different from the ol' mother tongue. The Scots and the Irish began to arrive in the United States, bringing new dialects and a distinctive accent.

After the accent's decline following the end of World War II, this American version of a "posh" accent has all but disappeared even among the American upper classes, as Americans have increasingly dissociated from the speaking styles of the East Coast elite; if anything, the accent is now subject to ridicule in ...

The accents that formed in the United States also were heavily influenced by the waves of migration that came into the country. There's a reason people from New Orleans don't sound the same as those from the Pacific Northwest; there were different accents mixing together.

They didn't. American English preserves many of the features of the accents common in South-West England in the 16th and 17th Century when the USA was being settled. Both British and American English have evolved in different directions since that time.

Generally, the places where accents are changing the most have been the sites of significant immigration. As people mingle and converse — at work, in school, at restaurants — their accents go through a subtle process called leveling, where the variation between two or more ways of speaking diminishes.

In fact, some regional accents may even be on their way out, including one you probably think of as very “American,” according to a brand-new study published in the journal Language Variation and Change. If that's hard to imagine, you might want to consider how much language has evolved over the past few decades.

In fact, most of the founding fathers probably had British accents because they were British subjects only a few generations removed from living in England. The British accent extended to much of the population of the United States at that time.

You'll find that among upper class Americans, accents are subtle. You know they're American, as opposed to Brits or Kiwis, but you can't tell where they're from within the US, unless you really know what to listen for. That's the closest we have to a 'posh' accent.

Did George Washington have an accent? ›

Considering all of this and his farmer upbringing, it is safe to speculate that Washington's natural accent was, as Morse portrays it, predominantly American with a detectable English influence.

Kind of, yes. Scholars can trace the history of dialects, and there are similarities between English as spoken in parts of the American Southeast and English as spoken in England during the early colonial era, but in general English of the time was in the same general range of intelligibility.

Among the higher socioeconomic classes on the Eastern seaboard, the Transatlantic accent soon became the de facto pronunciation style. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Norman Mailer, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis were just a few of the people in the public sphere who used the Transatlantic accent to great social success.

Sound quality was often lousy, and audiences were easily distracted. So, actors had to project, speak distinctly, and get their points across quickly. This rapid-fire delivery, though unnatural to modern ears, served a crucial purpose – ensuring everyone understood the story, even if the sound was crackly.

The Transatlantic or Mid-Atlantic Accent was artificially created in prep schools in the early 20th century, a hybrid accent designed to sound more British than mainstream American English.

As human beings spread out into isolated communities, stresses and peculiarities develop. Over time, they can develop into identifiable accents. In North America, the interaction of people from many ethnic backgrounds contributed to the formation of the different varieties of North American accents.

The arrival of European settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries profoundly impacted the development of American dialects. English, Spanish, Dutch, and French colonizers brought their languages with them, influencing the dialects spoken in various regions.

In fact, British accents have undergone more change in the last few centuries than American accents have – partly because London, and its orbit of influence, was historically at the forefront of linguistic change in English.

The “American English” we know and use today in an American accent first started out as an “England English” accent. According to a linguist at the Smithsonian, Americans began putting their own spin on English pronunciations just one generation after the colonists started arriving in the New World.