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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.
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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...)
I would say accents in the UK are a combination of social status and location.
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 differ…
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).
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I would say accents in the UK are a combination of social status and location.
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.
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).
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 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?"
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.
"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. "
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> 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...
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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…
https://theprodigaltongue.com/
The author has a blog that is no longer as active as it once was: