Yes. Yes. Hello. Linguistics Grad Student Here. Big Fan Of Historical And Socio- Phonetics. Let's Look

Yes. Yes. Hello. Linguistics grad student here. Big fan of historical and socio- phonetics. Let's look at a few concrete examples.

"It is a widely held belief that colonial or Extraterritorial (ET) dialects are inherently conservative. Being out of touch with the trendier developments of their Mainland sources, they develop more slowly, and are likely to show distinctly archaic features. This property has come to be known as 'colonial lag'. The notion is alive and well in English folk-linguistics: the 'pure Elizabethan English' periodically supposed to be spoken in the fastnesses of Appalachia is one of its loonier and better-known manifestations. Even sober scholars are prone to hold similar ideas; though colonial lag as a global property of ET dialects has now been discredited in a fine study by Manfred Görlach (Lass, 1990)." Some examples from this article of cases in which neither American nor England English are the most traditional: Modern Scots, despite being, you know, in Britain, has a number of conservative forms such as the velar fricative (like the <ch> in "loch", or German "Bach", found in Old English pronunciation of words like "night") that are lost in most other Englishes. While most Englishes merged the vowels of words like "earn" and "urn", Southern Hiberno-English (Ireland, though not all varieties) has kept these separate (with roughly the vowels of "bet" and "but" respectively).

Many dialects of North America keep the r where standard England English drops it, but here's some sounds Americans changed and the English preserved (from Schneider et al., 2004): pin/pen merger: the "eh" vowel becomes more like "ih" when before nasals (n, m, ng), so where in the conservative form "pen" and "pet" have the same vowel, in the innovative form found in the speech of many Americans (MOST MARKEDLY IN THE SUPPOSEDLY TRADITIONAL SPEECH OF THE SOUTH), the vowel in "pen" merges with the vowel in "pin". Betty bought a bit of bitter butter: in RP English, every /t/ in this phrase is pronounced as a classic t sound, but becomes a light d sound in North American speakers. (Compare "bitter" and "bidder" in an American accent and a posh English accent.)

This is all just English, but I'm sure New World French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and other post-colonial European languages work similarly. Icelandic is another interesting example: often referenced because of its geographic isolation from other Scandinavian languages, it kept certain Old Norse verb endings, but lost features like vowel length (Lass, 1990).

So what did English of Shakespeare's time sound like? There were many dialects of English back then and the language was in flux, so there's no single answer, but in general, it was definitely not identical to any current living dialect of English. If you can imagine a slightly illiterate Canadian pirate, you're in the ballpark. (For examples and explanation from scholars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s )

Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood linguist

The sources: Lass, R. (1990). Early Mainland Residues in Southern Hiberno-English. Irish University Review, 20(1), 137-148. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484343 Schneider, E. W., Burridge, K., Kortmann, B., Mesthrie, R., & Upton, C. (2004). A handbook of varieties of english: A multimedia reference tool two volumes plus CD-ROM. De Gruyter Mouton Courses I've taken, including sociolinguistics, history of English, and historical linguistics.

In short: Statements like 'Americans kept the original British accent' or 'Southern drawl is slowed-down British' are drastic and misleading oversimplifications. Dialects that are conservative in some senses are innovative in others. Because languages - ALL languages - change over time. Also, Shakespeare would sound strange to any modern ear.

at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents