Did Americans In 1776 Have British Accents?

Common Sense Evaluation ^

[gaggs]

Have you ever wondered if the Founding Fathers spoke with a British accent? I know I have. Well here is the answer.

The typical English accent didn’t develop until after the Revolutionary War, so Americans actually speak proper English. Here comes the science.

[American in Israel]

Gunner loves grief. It is a rare day he shares opinions. Usually pretty good actually, but don’t tell him I said that. Would not want to ruin the cloud on his silver lining.

Seriously, blogs and news is what FR is all about...

[wardaddy]

African influence in the south for whites is some words mostly about food

More than accent

Except wiggers

French accent in South is of course north central gulf coast and remnants maybe from Huguenots in the Carolinas

Higher southern accents in Deep South morphed from second and third son folks wanting to sound more Gentry and others following suit

Country southern just didn’t bother

Country accent and southern overlap but are largely class or self motivation defined

Mathew McConahey or Sela Ward is higher southern accent

Billy Bob Thornton or Waylon is country

Elvis is higher thanks to momma

[Yaelle]

Re The Californians: Agreed!! They NAILED us on the constant freeway route conversations. I died laughing. But not everyone speaks that Valley speak or Kardashian vocal fry (still enough doing the latter to annoy me terminally). Their accents didn’t quite get it.

Probably none of the early film stars were from here. Probably few of the grips, best boys, secretaries, and hookers were from here. But it’s hard to hear what people sounded like back then except for recorded interviews of famous people.

[Pelham]

There’s linguists who believe that some American Southern accents are closer to 1776 British speech than modern British accents are.

[Pelham]

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history)

[P.O.E.]

Cockney Star Trek

[Yaelle]

Thanks for those delineations. I just don’t have enough exposure to know. I love the Southern accent and it (generic) gets such a bad rep up here. I don’t know what accents prevail in Charleston but going there 4x a year really exposed me to that delightful speech. It is the only city I’ve ever felt I might be rude in. I check myself and wonder if I was nice enough. Doesn’t happen anywhere else.

[SoCal Pubbie]

John Wayne was born in Iowa but moved here pretty early and graduated from Glendale High. Fellow Trojan Buster Crabbe was born in Oakland but grew up in Hawaii before going to USC. There were so few people here in those days that almost everyone was from somewhere else.

[Yaelle]

That is very cool. I bet you are right. That amount of distance, they were both more isolated populations, so that identical sound came from whence they both came!

I watched the Harrison Ford movie The Witness (about a murder in Amish country) before and after I lived a decade in Switzerland. I was stunned the second time I saw it to actually understand the Amish. They are still speaking Swiss German!

[Pelham]

Washington grew up where the Tidewater/Piedmont Virginia accent was found. Still is in pockets. “You all” is common there rather then “y’all”.

[SoCal Pubbie]

Several years ago it was a documentary about the development of the English language throughout history. I think it was this one:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_English

There was a mention of an island I believe in South Carolina where there had been more limited interchange with surrounding areas over the years and the accent stated pretty much the same in the last couple of hundred years. The narrator said that this accent was probably closer to what the British spoke during the revolution than the British themselves today. I did not see this shown on the episode list, but I’m pretty sure that this was the series I remember.

[laplata]

Thanks.

There are still at least one area where British English is still spoken. I can’t remember where but think it’s in the area you mention.

[Wallace T.]

Many of the first settlers of Southern California were Southerners. There was a good amount of pro-Confederate sentiment in Los Angeles and San Diego. However, the New England and New York settlers in Northern California were more numerous, and the Golden State stayed in the Union. These migration patterns persisted after Appomattox. Clint Eastwood’s ancestors came from New York to the Bay Area after the Civil War. General George Patton’s grandfather migrated from Virginia to Orange County, California in 1877.

The Midwestern predominance in California occurred after the railroads developed fully. Good self promotion by Southern California chambers of commerce attracted huge numbers of Midwestern people looking for a new life in a better climate. The parents of John Wayne and Richard Nixon came to the state from Iowa and Ohio, respectively, for that reason in the early 1900s. Sam Yorty, the last conservative mayor of Los Angeles, came from Nebraska. Waves of Northeasterners after World War II, blacks, Asians, and most notably Hispanic, changed the character, and unfortunately the politics of California again. Orange County, where a 1960s era GOP candidate once joked he joined the John Birch Society to get the middle of the road vote,was carried by Hillary Clinton last year. Barry Goldwater carried the county in 1964.

[Fiji Hill]

You’re an SC fan right?

Yes, I am--I have a master's degree from there.

[laplata]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxVOIj7mvWI&t=112s

[Pelham]

You are probably thinking of Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay.

There’s also the Gullah dialect of the South Carolina-Georgia coast, it’s a black dialect that preserves some very old English forms.

[laplata]

I detected what sounded like a British Cockney accent in some of the people in the video I sent you.

[laplata]

I detected what sounded like a British Cockney accent in some of the people in the video I sent you.

[Fiji Hill]

Try listening to the epic poem Beowulf spoken in Old English. It sounds epic but I cannot understand a damn word of it. Listening to it it makes me feel like I had a stroke and lost my English, it sounds so familiar like you should understand it but you cannot.

The same goes for the Lord's Prayer in Anglo-Saxon, which is available on several Youtube sites. Even though Anglo-Saxon is an earlier form of my native English, I understand the Lord's Prayer less in that language than I do when reading it in Italian, which I have never studied.

[COBOL2Java]

I like to remind people that if George Washington had not defeated Lord Cornwallis in Yorktown in 1781 we would still be speaking English in this country.

And we'd all have bad teeth...