I 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.
> the Queen’s family, which came from a corner of England
First time I see Germany classified as “a corner of England”, lol.
(To be fair, before the current crop, the English aristocracy spoke mainly French, and I guess France could be classed as “a corner of England” by people still a bit hung-up on the loss of Brittany...)
RP English is heavily influenced by French and Germanic tones. Local dialects are very different. I still find it hard to compare British languages with what developed in North America, where the influence of non-English-speakers was clearly massive. Isn’t it more interesting to look at Australia and South Africa, where direct links with English natives are way more recent, and still the language departed markedly...?
> (To be fair, before the current crop, the English aristocracy spoke mainly French, and I guess France could be classed as “a corner of England” by people still a bit hung-up on the loss of Brittany...)
Normandy, not Brittany. Brittany was never part of the English crown, and it was independent from the French crown for a long time as well (de jure not until the French Revolution, although it was de facto part of France for about 250 years prior).
Not quite that simple. Yes, SA English follows after certain features of Afrikaans, but some of those Afrikaans features were local innovations, not brought from the Netherlands (centralization of /i/ is one example).
That's only one of the English accents in SA. There are many others including an RP-like accent (which I and my friends use), the Cape Coloured accent, and the accent which most of the country's people use (as seen initially in this video https://youtu.be/KfIvbVLuCh8?t=3)
I thought primary Norman French speaking died out with the Plantagenets. I'm sure almost all the royals after the first few Plantagentes were at least bilingual in English/French. George I could not speak English IIRC. His first language was German. Do you have a reference for the Tudors and later houses speaking primarily French? James I (of England, VI of Scotland), yep, I'll believe that without reference.
A modern example of English aristocracy speaking French is that English uses Anglo-Saxon words for animals, but French words for prepared food--which was very expensive. cow/beef pig/pork sheep/mutton
also by Danish..where do you think Anglo came from? yes, the term is Roman for what they called brits but the actual group that was not Saxon(Saxon ie German Saxony) came from the middle of Denmark..
Anglia (which is currently in Germany) wasn't a Danish speaking region until well after the Angles settled in Britain. Which was well after the Roman period. They spoke Old English.
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.
IIRC, the American accent is also specifically derived from the West Country accent, which to this day has some features that are more associated with AmE such as rhoticity and the father-bother merger.
This was because Bristol in particular was a major sea hub in colonial-era England, much moreso than London. As an interesting side note, Americans know the West Country accent as the "pirate accent" thanks to the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island, where Robert Newton played Long John Silver and managed to convince the director to let him use his native Dorset accent because he thought it would be more historically accurate than the RP accent the director originally wanted him to do, and his portrayal was so iconic that pretty much every pirate story since has used some variation on Newton's accent.
Bill Bryson has no actual training in linguistics and The Mother Tongue features at least one factual error on every single page. (Some Goodreads reviews list these.) I would never recommend that book to any curious reader, it is as bad as pop-sci could possibly get.
Most of the complaints I've seen have to do with what he gets wrong about other languages, and often in the way that locals are offended when you misuse a localism. Or in the way a physicist complains about a grade schooler being wrong because their answer used the Bohr model.
As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works.
It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist, and manages to make some obtuse concepts relatable, without getting bogged down in technicalities. Similar to what Michael Crichton could do with cutting edge sciences. (Granted, he kept mostly to fiction.)
Whereas the most basic begginer's article written by a linguist is still indecipherable to me. And linguists seem to be ok, or even happy, about that.
Linguists writing about a linguistic Lockheed A-12 would be aghast that anyone could ever mistake it for an SR-71, let alone be willing to explain the differences to the casual observer, or even make the mental effort to see how someone might mistake the two.
So as an engineer that hates the casual misuse of technical terms, I get you. But like the model of the atom, sometimes teaching the simplified but wrong model has its benefits for a certain crowd, until they're ready to go deeper.
> Most of the complaints I've seen have to do with what he gets wrong about other languages
Bryson gets many, many details about the history of English wrong as well.
> As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist.
No, Bryson is a hack writer and does more harm than good. You make it sound as if the only alternative to Bryson is eggheaded scholarly publications. In fact, there is a wide selection of popular-science treatments of the history of English and other languages that are both reliable and friendly and accessible for ordinary readers (for example, Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English does right what Bryson set out to do).
It is like with archaeology: if an ordinary person wants to learn about the Pyramids, there is no need for someone to recommend Graham Hancock to them as if otherwise they would have to read obtuse archeological-dig reports and disputes among scholars.
There is be a certain degree of irony to English going through the Great Vowel Shift† (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift) and then having a German dynasty which manages to distort the language again††.
† Which made English less-Germanic sounding, at least to my ears.
†† In my humble opinion modern British English sounds marginally more Germanic than American English.
The great vowel shift needs to be taught much more. Native English speakers commonly default to not taking the great vowel shift into account when encountering a new language. They'd be so much closer to the correct pronunciation by just pronouncing it like it was a word from any language other than English they might already know a little.
This should be one of the first things that gets hammered home when learning the first foreign language.
No, because that town's accent will have been changing since 1700, too.
But you definitely find, for example, places in England where "r"s at the ends of words or before consonants are pronounced, like in America but unlike in RP.
> Interesting, for some reason I found England accents to have a strong historical feel
This is mass broadcast media playing to Americans' biases around the eliteness of English accents. This effect is at least as old as cross Atlantic broadcast media, heard until a few decades ago in the artificial Mid-Atlantic accents of the east coast elites.
On the other hand, to many in the UK, when watching a show like Game of Thrones, the Northmen sound like modern blokes from Yorkshire, not some kind of medieval people.
> So the American pronounciation is original, and the British one changed in the meantime.
The article says basically the same thing (in its discussion of rhotic vs. non-rhotic accents). So the article's title is misleading: it should really be "When Did the British Gain Their British Accents?"
Perhaps, but don't take the claim too far. From the article:
"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. "
This is plainly not the case. The grain of truth here is that certain linguistic features common to many dialects of 16th century British English have been preserved in most dialects of American English, whereas most dialects of British English have lost these features. (E.g., most American English dialects are rhotic.) But there is ample evidence that many aspects of American English have changed in the past few hundred years. Americans are clearly not speaking some kind of fossilized dialect from the 15th century.
By the way, the term "Old English" strictly speaking refers to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English. No-one is claiming that Americans speak this language.
That's a common stereotype of Québécois French, but I think it's more accurate to say that, just like for pretty much all widely spoken languages, there was a lot more regional variation in the French-speaking world a few hundred years ago, but it's been consolidating over time, and different places happened to consolidate differently.
IOW, Parisian French also retains some primitive features that have largely disappeared from one Canadian region or another. But we don't talk about those as much. I'm guessing because doing so wouldn't jive well with certain stereotypes about Québec being a backwards hinterland.
No, just the particular fads, e.g., the one that drove the change to the non-rhoticity of RP, didn't exist in 15th century Britain.
That the current accent is driven by a particular fad aimed at highlighting upper class status doesn't imply that class distinctions are novel, just the particular effort to demarcate them (which wasn't durable, obviously, as RP isn't exclusive to the upper classes.)
Sure, accents are partly markers of social status, but it's quite wrong to ascribe the diversity of accents in Britain to this. There was never a period where everyone in Britain spoke with the same accent.
> but it's quite wrong to ascribe the diversity of accents in Britain to this.
No one, AFAICT, did that. The reference to “modern British English” is not, as I read it, a reference to “the current diversity of British accents”, but rather “the current dominant British accent”.
The current dominant British accent, if there is such a thing, isn't a marker of social status. If you're referring to RP, then hardly anyone even speaks RP nowadays (even the Queen only makes a half-assed effort...)
They're a combination of that pretty much everywhere, but it's not clear to me what the "dominant" British accent is supposed to be. If there is such a thing, it's probably some kind of fairly unremarkable Estuary accent that doesn't have any strong connotations of a particular social status.
"They're a combination of that pretty much everywhere"
Fair point - I would also agree that the idea of a "dominant" British accent seems a bit odd - certainly not in terms of what people actually sound like (rather than the broadcast media).
If you are talking about speaking French as a first language, this is false, except possibly in relation to the upper reaches of the aristocracy. If you are talking about speaking French as a second language, then this continued to be a marker of class for a long time afterwards.
In a highly class-conscious society where the vast majority of people spoke English as their first language, it seems fairly unlikely that accent would have had no connotation of social status.
It thus seems hard to believe that the development of the modern diversity of English dialects would have been spurred by some sudden need to mark class distinctions.
I 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?
It'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.
You 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.
People say this, but I've always thought it was just another piece of pop badlinguistics nonsense that you hear about practically every language. Do you have a reliable source?
Smaller populations very reliably have slower-evolving language. Icelandic is similar to old Norse and old English. Just like you'll hear a lot of Iowan accents in Atlanta but not if you drive 80 miles outside of town.
Believe it or not, there is an entire field called linguistics that studies human language and how it evolves.
Although Icelandic maintains an orthography close to Old Norse, the value of the letters is very different today indeed. The vowel system, for example, has been greatly restructured. Preaspiration became a quality of the consonants.
In terms of lexicon, much of the archaic flavour is actually the result of 19th-century language reformers trying to restore old words. In the meantime, Icelandic had borrowed heavily from Danish.
Indeed, there is the field of linguistics, and scholarly treatments of Icelandic (as opposed to pop-sci presentations of the language as a time capsule like yours) point out that Icelandic has undergone a great deal of innovation like any other North Germanic language.
This 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.
I 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.
The 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:
> 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.
I 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...
It 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!
Some 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.
MentalFloss 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.
Original 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.
There is a recording of a recent talk by David Crystal, where he gives a brief example of Shakespeare's pronunciation as compared with the British received pronunciation. He also makes a point that the rhotic pronunciation of Shakespeare's time is closer to today's American, and that some sounds typical of Shakespeare's pronunciation are now characteristic of regional dialects, including Westcountry, Yorkshire and Wales.
When I first learned about these OP (Original Pronunciation) productions of Shakespeare, from a BBC news article on-line, they commented that it sounded like the English of North Carolina! If you are interested in this, I recommend "Pronouncing Shakespeare" by David Crystal. It documents how he worked with the Globe company on an OP performance of "Romeo and Juliet".
I would imagine that they're not talking about general North Carolina English so much as the dialect of the island of Ocracoke, which has a number of conservative features that date back to Shakespeare's day.
Related, 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.
> 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?
That'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.
> 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.
But if you're simply making a narrow point about that pronunciation then I don't see how this particularly refutes what gowld said. That there's uncertainty or ambiguity around one specific archaising use of a word in a Blake poem doesn't change the fact that we (apparently—I'm no expert) know that someone wading through stanzas of Shakespeare in a cut-glass RP accent is doing it badly wrong (at least if any of period-accuracy, rhyme or the author's intentions are important goals) and that our best guess at OP is probably a lot closer to the mark, even if it’s not certain that every single pronunciation is exactly right. (And even if it's all somewhat indeterminate since not every actor and writer in early-1600s London had exactly the same accent, etc.)
> 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.
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.
No mention of the role of Noah Webster 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.
A 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.
While 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.
The 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.
If 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.
Erm. 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.
I 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.
Class 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.
Why 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...
Anyone 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.
No, 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.
That 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.
A 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.
