Which explains why we can understand Aussies and Kiwis, but a random Nigel from the UK would have a speech that baffles. It boggles the mind how two people from different corners of London have different accents. Not to mention Manc vs Scouser vs the myriads of tongue-twisting nasal hiccups uttered all over them Shires.
It's like they almost take pride in differentiation. Throw an international party and the two UKians that show up will have a verbal civil war that puts us Somalis to shame. The shopkeepers maintain their peace with healthy and frequent exchange of muted disdain and murmured resentment. That's, when the other ethnic tonsils are not being inflamed (Scotts, Welsh, and the verile Manx; consciously absent are the clover-wielding gentlemen of the east, left out of the union for my own safety, and to keep membership of my drinking club.)
All good people though. Except the Chavs; a meta-culture of mediocrity that belongs on the next boat leaving for America, to plug the Gulf oil well.
[Edit:
Oh, this seems to have offended someone, most likely a fellow yank. No need to be a hero; piss-taking is a national past-time of the Isles, and its cultural debris scattered around the world, outside the U.S (we have escaped the wit shrapnels I guess) I have deliberately disclosed my own heritage within that rant above, expecting to be paid in kind ;-) When in doubt, stay out of it. It's a bonding experience]
I seem to remember a statistic where UK is reputed to have a greater number of dialects than any other country in the world, which probably has a lot to do with the difficulty people have with understanding some accents (tried Glaswegian, anyone?)
Also, IIRC, the colonies tended to have a commonality in heritage of the colonists, too. E.g. at one time, Australia had a "large number" of criminals, there are quite a lot of Dutch in NZ -- there are large parts of NZ with very strong Scots heritage -- New York is famous for Irish heritage, other parts of USA are famous for German, etc.
The UK hasn't really had the same homogenisation outside the big cities.
Funny you should say that. I saw someone post a link from an Aussie comedy show on another site. Apparently most of the Americans couldn't understand half of what he was saying, which surprised me because while distinctive, it's certainly not the thickest I've heard.
Edit: My experience (and that of other Aussies traveling to America) seems to be that you have to slightly Americanise the way you speak to be understood easily.
Interestingly, it's also hypothesized that Brazilian Portuguese is closer to Portuguese proper 500 years ago than Portuguese proper today. The fact that the Portuguese spoken in former Portuguese colonies in Africa sounds more Brazilian Portuguese than Portuguese proper suggests the hypothesis is right. Moreover, Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent, which further strengthens the hypothesis.
For what is worth, African Portuguese sounds more like European Portuguese to us Brazilians.
Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent
In this case I wonder which Brazilian accent? I guess it would be Rio accent or some Northeastern accent.
In case anyone is curious the hear the differences, this page contains recordings of a Portuguese sentence spoken by people of several different areas:
I can't say that this is entirely incorrect, but it's at least full of inaccuracies. RP has indeed been evolving as the accent of the English upper class, but it originated in the accent common in the English west midlands and as far as I know has been non-rhotic for quite a long time. Rhoticism in Germanic languages comes and goes, and since Britain always had many different regional and social accents, it's entirely possible that some of them were non-rhotic still before the stipulated "divergence" began. While in England, accents that are mostly non-rhotic were the most common, America had a large community of immigrants from Ireland, where the accent is rhotic, from southern Germany, where the accent is rhotic, and from many non-English speaking countries (learners of English as a foreign language often default to rhotic pronunciation since it's closer to the way the words are written). Most importantly, there isn't such a thing as a British accent, but there is (with only minor variation) such a thing as an American accent. Americans often don't realise how diverse the UK is simply because they're not used to this sort of diversity from their own country.
> Americans often don't realise how diverse the UK is simply because they're not used to this sort of diversity from their own country.
Spoken like someone who has never been here. There are a ton of different accents: northeastern, midwestern, southern, californian, northwestern are the broad top level ones and the distill even further depending on where you are in those areas. For example, people from Minnesota and people from Indiana clearly sound different (Indiana having a slight twang or drawl, while Minnesota sounding mildly Norwegian). It's a big contrast with the likes of Strong Island in New York. Or with Texas.
Hey everyone, I'm the author of the post. I'm a longtime HN lurker, so I was very excited to see it shared here. I've really enjoyed reading the discussion.
A quick disclaimer: I have zero background in linguistics. The only materials I used for research were Wikipedia and Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C). Moreover, this is nothing more than a short post on my personal blog. So, don't expect an academic paper on the subject. ;)
As I recall from an article in Time a while back, the Southern American accent is the most authentic representative of the pre-revolutionary war accent. The Northern American accent has been changed more by waves of immigrants (especially those coming in the 1890-1920).
I've heard that the French-Canadian accent is closer to pre-Revolutionary French as well.
It seems that those areas with the least upheavals are where language stays the most constant.
Canadian French is actually close to what is (or was, at least until shortly after WWII) spoken in Normandy. Our soldiers were better able to communicate with the locals on D-Day than even the Free French.
"Standard" French was once just the local dialect of Isle-de-France, a small region including Paris, but "French", even in France today, is but a loose collection of mutually-comprehensible dialects. Canadian French has its own little quirks, though, in that it had to create its own vocabulary not only for the uniquely North American flora, fauna and landscape, but also for new items of technology that emerged while we were almost without communication with France. F'rinstance, to the French ear, a French Canadian would seem to indicate that he had just created a park (in the public gardens sense) out of his tank (armoured and armed military vehicle) rather than that he'd just parked his car.
It's actually rather unlikely that any current dialect of American English has any strict correspondence to the various dialects that were spoken in America at the time of the Revolution.
I wouldn't describe the American South as having had few upheavals. It's actually had more than most places in the United States. Though, I would agree that it's had fewer lninguistic influences than other regions of the country.
I always been fascinated by accents and dialects, coming from a very young country like Italy, built on top of thousands of city-states, where it's enough to drive 30 minutes to encounter a completely different dialect and culture.
I think Australia will be an interesting country to watch accent-wise. At the moment there are very obvious "city" (closer to British non-rhotic) vs. "country" (Steve Irwin) accents, but it's much harder to tell which city and which part of the country any particular Aussie is from. Considering the distances needed to travel between towns and cities, it'll be interesting to see if, over time, these accents become more localised or if (due to easy transport, etc.) they remain fairly indistinguishable.
> What is surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.
He claims that RP has diverged much more than American English, but only goes on to support this claim with the divergence of the (r) variable. Any other variables that characterize the innovations of RP since American and British English divergence?
- the gas/pass divide: in many British accents pass is pronounced like 'pahs', but gas retains the same vowel as in American accents. gas and pass will basically always rhyme in America, but in Britain it'll depend on where you are. In RP they won't rhyme. In the 18th century, it was the same sound everywhere, the one Americans retained.
- the long o, in words like go, home, etc. changed in many British accents from [ou] to [eu]. If you can imagine a very "British", RP pronunciation of home, that's the difference you hear.
I remember hearing that there was a concerted effort in England (initiated by some Queen) sometime after Shakespeare to modify the way that vowels were pronounced and that this was largely responsible for the divergence we hear today. I did a little searching but couldn't find anything. Any links would be appreciated.
Here in SA we are very proud of how much better (and some may say more poetic) Afrikaans sounds than Dutch. But hey, that is a very subjective opinion indeed :-)
This article's explanation is a little too curt. I think regional American accents at the time of the Revolution matched up better with certain regional British accents explains it a little better. For a more in depth study of not just accents, but the micro English speaking cultures that came to make up the United States I recommend "The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America" by Kevin Phillips. http://www.amazon.com/Cousins-Wars-Religion-Politics-Anglo-A...
Spelling gives some hints. One technique is to look for common spelling mistakes. An especially interesting mistake is hypercorrection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection).
For example, there was a time when the K in words like "knee" and "knight" became silent. We can pinpoint this time by looking for Ks in front of words, that never used to start with K. The writer doesn't pronounce the K in "kn" any longer, but remembers that proper spelling has a K for some words. Since pronunciation doesn't help, she has to rote learn those words. And occasionally will make a mistake.
Another one, especially in fairly recent times, is too look for prescriptive texts, that lament this or that development in the language.
Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.
Really? Because that surprises the hell out of me. Americans were an ocean away from Britain for maybe a century before 1776, and the accents still hadn't diverged?
I do not think it is that surprising. Being part of the same political entity, there should have been a decent amount of intermingling and cross-travel in both directions. There was a NYTimes op-ed today about colonists from Massachusetts who returned to England to fight in the English Civil War in the mid-17th century: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04tinniswood.html
I don't know much about how the American accent arose. But from what I know about the Australian accent, it apparently arose in the first generation of children born in the country.
I always thought that northern New England was the closest to the original English. Why else would we subject ourselves to such ridicule from the rest of the country?
Several hundred years ago England had different dialects in different parts of the country.
New England was settled by a different group of English than various parts of the South. Therefore the dialects were already different before they came here.
Considering that the Declaration of Independence was published virtually simultaneously in German (July 9) as well as English (July 5), the accents in 1776 were probably quite varied.
Well, the Robin Hood stories are set about five centuries earlier, so I don't think anybody knows how things were pronounced back then. If you wanted a verbally authentic version of Robin Hood then it would be in a version of English closer to Chaucer's than Shakespeare's, and it would be almost completely incomprehensible.
I'd agree with the analysis that English is closer to how its spoken in the US today accent-wise. If you look at how people speak English in British colonies, the pronunciation isn't heavily accented to how its spoken in the UK today. For example, South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh).
I don't think this is relevant, since speakers in Asia rarely speak English as their mother tongue. Whatever accent they have is due to the sources they've been exposed to. Well educated speakers in India and Pakistan, for example, usually speak with an accent that is quite closed to RP. Other speakers often learn their pronunciation from American movies.
Melvyn Bragg (who is in possession of a beautiful accent himself) has done a large number of BBC radio programmes on the recent evolution of the english language, accents, etc.
[+] [-] mahmud|15 years ago|reply
It's like they almost take pride in differentiation. Throw an international party and the two UKians that show up will have a verbal civil war that puts us Somalis to shame. The shopkeepers maintain their peace with healthy and frequent exchange of muted disdain and murmured resentment. That's, when the other ethnic tonsils are not being inflamed (Scotts, Welsh, and the verile Manx; consciously absent are the clover-wielding gentlemen of the east, left out of the union for my own safety, and to keep membership of my drinking club.)
All good people though. Except the Chavs; a meta-culture of mediocrity that belongs on the next boat leaving for America, to plug the Gulf oil well.
[Edit:
Oh, this seems to have offended someone, most likely a fellow yank. No need to be a hero; piss-taking is a national past-time of the Isles, and its cultural debris scattered around the world, outside the U.S (we have escaped the wit shrapnels I guess) I have deliberately disclosed my own heritage within that rant above, expecting to be paid in kind ;-) When in doubt, stay out of it. It's a bonding experience]
[+] [-] ErrantX|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wwortiz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildjim|15 years ago|reply
Also, IIRC, the colonies tended to have a commonality in heritage of the colonists, too. E.g. at one time, Australia had a "large number" of criminals, there are quite a lot of Dutch in NZ -- there are large parts of NZ with very strong Scots heritage -- New York is famous for Irish heritage, other parts of USA are famous for German, etc. The UK hasn't really had the same homogenisation outside the big cities.
[+] [-] hetman|15 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suVxmPpyR9s
Edit: My experience (and that of other Aussies traveling to America) seems to be that you have to slightly Americanise the way you speak to be understood easily.
[+] [-] intellectronica|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rod|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nandemo|15 years ago|reply
Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent
In this case I wonder which Brazilian accent? I guess it would be Rio accent or some Northeastern accent.
In case anyone is curious the hear the differences, this page contains recordings of a Portuguese sentence spoken by people of several different areas:
http://www.learningportuguese.co.uk/audio/compare-accents.ht...
[+] [-] intellectronica|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawngee|15 years ago|reply
Spoken like someone who has never been here. There are a ton of different accents: northeastern, midwestern, southern, californian, northwestern are the broad top level ones and the distill even further depending on where you are in those areas. For example, people from Minnesota and people from Indiana clearly sound different (Indiana having a slight twang or drawl, while Minnesota sounding mildly Norwegian). It's a big contrast with the likes of Strong Island in New York. Or with Texas.
[+] [-] Locke1689|15 years ago|reply
Hahahahahaha. Oh, good one.
[+] [-] nickpatrick|15 years ago|reply
A quick disclaimer: I have zero background in linguistics. The only materials I used for research were Wikipedia and Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C). Moreover, this is nothing more than a short post on my personal blog. So, don't expect an academic paper on the subject. ;)
Anyway, thanks for reading!
[+] [-] joshkaufman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|15 years ago|reply
I've heard that the French-Canadian accent is closer to pre-Revolutionary French as well.
It seems that those areas with the least upheavals are where language stays the most constant.
[+] [-] stan_rogers|15 years ago|reply
"Standard" French was once just the local dialect of Isle-de-France, a small region including Paris, but "French", even in France today, is but a loose collection of mutually-comprehensible dialects. Canadian French has its own little quirks, though, in that it had to create its own vocabulary not only for the uniquely North American flora, fauna and landscape, but also for new items of technology that emerged while we were almost without communication with France. F'rinstance, to the French ear, a French Canadian would seem to indicate that he had just created a park (in the public gardens sense) out of his tank (armoured and armed military vehicle) rather than that he'd just parked his car.
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
It may very well be that Time reported that, as I have read that statement in various places, but I have also read disagreements with that statement.
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/886/
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=380983
http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodica...
http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C&pg=PA126&#...
It's actually rather unlikely that any current dialect of American English has any strict correspondence to the various dialects that were spoken in America at the time of the Revolution.
[+] [-] astine|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wooster|15 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E
Which has an accent thought to have remained unchanged since Colonial times.
[+] [-] davidedicillo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liedra|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] settrans|15 years ago|reply
He claims that RP has diverged much more than American English, but only goes on to support this claim with the divergence of the (r) variable. Any other variables that characterize the innovations of RP since American and British English divergence?
[+] [-] anatoly|15 years ago|reply
- the gas/pass divide: in many British accents pass is pronounced like 'pahs', but gas retains the same vowel as in American accents. gas and pass will basically always rhyme in America, but in Britain it'll depend on where you are. In RP they won't rhyme. In the 18th century, it was the same sound everywhere, the one Americans retained.
- the long o, in words like go, home, etc. changed in many British accents from [ou] to [eu]. If you can imagine a very "British", RP pronunciation of home, that's the difference you hear.
[+] [-] rgrieselhuber|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackfoxy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|15 years ago|reply
For example, there was a time when the K in words like "knee" and "knight" became silent. We can pinpoint this time by looking for Ks in front of words, that never used to start with K. The writer doesn't pronounce the K in "kn" any longer, but remembers that proper spelling has a K for some words. Since pronunciation doesn't help, she has to rote learn those words. And occasionally will make a mistake.
Another one, especially in fairly recent times, is too look for prescriptive texts, that lament this or that development in the language.
[+] [-] philwelch|15 years ago|reply
Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.
Really? Because that surprises the hell out of me. Americans were an ocean away from Britain for maybe a century before 1776, and the accents still hadn't diverged?
[+] [-] martey|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sprout|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csbutler|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stoney|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] russell|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btilly|15 years ago|reply
New England was settled by a different group of English than various parts of the South. Therefore the dialects were already different before they came here.
[+] [-] joeyo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allend|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugh3|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinker|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intellectronica|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gormo|15 years ago|reply
Caribbean English accents also remind me of Scottish.
I wonder if there were certain areas of the British Empire that had disproportionate Scottish influence.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brc|15 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/038071543...
[+] [-] goatforce5|15 years ago|reply
Routes of English: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/routesofenglish/