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[gilana]

My mind seems to be on accents today. So far the TV I've been watching has inspired me to ask what sort of accent did the founding fathers have and what is Lister's accent on Red Dwarf (answer: Scouse). See, TV can be educational!

Comments

[beowabbit]

I am not very convinced by that Yahoo Answers article. As it happens, I just listened to a Thomas Edison recording (so late 19th century). His accent is distinctively American in a bunch of ways, but also pretty different from a modern New Jersey accent in some ways that are more similar to (many forms of) British English.

One thing that article definitely gets right is that there was a lot more regional variation on both sides of the pond 200-250 years ago than there is now. Basically, a whole bunch of people (but not a representative sample) from the British Isles came over and settled in different places (in general, fairly homogeneous; you had the Scots-Irish in Appalachia, for instance). So in the new world and in the old, there were a mix of different dialect features creating regional accents (and influencing each other, and perhaps influencing each other in new ways in the new world because speech communities that were geographically separated in the British Isles were contiguous or overlapping).

And, basically, over time, and with the advent of recording and broadcasting, different dialects, and different collections of features within them won out on the two sides of the Atlantic.

If we’d been able to hear George Washington speak, he probably would have sounded (modern) Virginian in some ways, and English in others, and he probably would have had some speech features that have died out or become marginalized on both sides of the Atlantic which just sound strange. And he probably would have sounded fairly different from Sam Adams, and a lot different from Andrew Jackson.

Here’s a random slightly-related piece of historico-linguistic trivia: Generally, a language or language group will have the greatest variation (per unit of area) in the region where it originated, and will be relatively homogeneous over much larger geographical areas in the parts of the world where its speakers migrated later. In the British Isles, you have regional dialects indigenous to fairly small areas, and you have a lot of them, and some of them are as disparate as Scots and Received Pronunciation (i.e., BBC English). In the US, you have regional dialects, but they cover much wider swaths of area, and there are fewer of them. That sometimes helps historical linguists figure out where a language family originated. (For instance, there’s a lot more variation in regional dialects in Indonesia then there is across the huge swath of Pacific islands and Australia where other Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken.)

OK, I’m starting to bore myself now, so I’ll shut up.

[gilana]

No, that's fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

[shereminisces.livejournal.com]

If you're interested in American English and it's developments, I know a few books on it. I would highly recommend "Made in America" by Bill Bryson. I think he actually addresses the founding fathers thing directly. I don't have a copy with me, or I'd check. In any case, the whole thing is hilarious and worth checking out.

[gilana]

Thanks, I'll have to check that out.