Map of U.S. Accents“In the world of linguistics, precise language is important. In most uses, 'accent' and 'dialect' are used interchangeably. Accents – distinctive modes of pronunciation of a language associated with a particular nation, locality, or social class – are just one part of a dialect – a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group.
“An accent refers to how people pronounce words, whereas a dialect is all-encompassing. A dialect includes the pronunciations, grammar and vocabulary that people use within a group.
“When we’re born, we’re blessed with the ability to create whatever sounds we choose. Unfortunately, the decision to pick up an accent really isn’t up to us, rather it’s on our parents to guide us. Each language around the world focuses on differing sounds. It’s nurture and not nature that determines the particular strengths we develop in speaking over the weaknesses we “inherit.”
(“Why do people have different accents when they speak English?” Telc. January 2015.)
Of course, English colonists who settled America had a British accent. According to an article in Matt Soniak writer for Mental Floss and Scientific American, what a lot of Americans think of as the typical "British accent” is what's called standardized Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as Public School English or BBC English.
What most people think of as an "American accent," or most Americans think of as "no accent," is the General American (GenAm) accent, sometimes called a "newscaster accent" or "Network English."
By the time we had recordings of both Americans and Brits (the first audio recording of a human voice was made in 1860), the sounds of English as spoken in the Old World and New World were very different. Soniak reminds us that 300 years is a big gap.
So, when did Americans start to sound different from the British? In other words, when did they lose their British accents?
Important Historical Note:
"There are more
accents per square mile in Britain than in any other part of the
English-speaking world. This is because of the hugely diverse history
of English in the British Isles, with the originally Germanic
dialects of Europe mixing with the Norse accents of the Vikings, the
French accents of the Normans, and wave after wave of immigration
from the Middle Ages down to the present day.
"But it's also
because of the rise of 'mixed' accents, as people move house around
the country and pick up features of the accent wherever they find
themselves."
(David Crystal and Ben Crystal, "Revealed: Why the Brummie Accent Is Loved Everywhere but Britain." Daily Mail. October 3, 2014.)
Why Americans Don't Sound British
According to Mary Linn, a linguist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, people in England were already aware of “the quirky new ways Americans were speaking English within a generation of the colonists’ arrival.” Linn says over time, the changes went beyond accent to include different words and grammatical structures, adding up to a new dialect. She tells us dialects have two main causes:
(1) Isolation – early colonists had only sporadic contact with the mother country.
Exposure to other languages – the colonists came into contact with Native American languages, mariners’ Indian English pidgin and other settlers, who spoke Dutch, Swedish, French and Spanish.
(2) Exposure To Other Languages – all of the languages above influenced American English, as did the English-speaking colonists’ origins in different parts of England, Wales and Scotland. Later, as metropolitan centers such as Boston and New York City had more contact with England, they adopted the then-trendy r-less accent of the English upper class.
(“When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents And More Questions From Our Readers.” Smithsonian Magazine. June 2015.)
In pre-colonial times, the nautical pidgins (simplified form of langauage) used by early explorers to communicate with native people were arguably among the first purely “American” ways of speech. In A History of American English, J.L. Dillard notes that by the time the Pilgrims first touched down in Massachusetts, there were already native people here who could effectively communicate with them in English. Slaves also had their own version of English from the nautical regions of West Africa.
(J.L. Dillard. A History of American English. 1992.)
What most Americans consider to be a British accent is what linguists call Received Pronunciation or BBC English. We speak General American or a Newscaster Accent.
The big difference between the two accents is known as rhotacism. That means in BBC English, the “r” is not really enunciated, so “card,” for example, becomes “cahd.”The standard American accent – what Americans think of as having no accent – is rhotic, meaning that speakers pronounce their “r’s.”
Before and during the American Revolution, the English, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don't know much more about said accent, though. 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.
(Matt Soniak. “When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?” Mental Floss. December 01, 2021.)
In post-1776, British people began to de-rhotacize their way of speech – dropping the “r” sounds from words like “car” and “hard.” Non-Rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper and upper-middle classes. The “posh” accent was a signifier of class and status – then standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably.
Americans held on to their robust rhotic pronunciation for the most part, but some former colonists, especially those who lived in port cities like Boston, Richmond, Charleston and Savannah, adopted this affectation. From the Southeastern coast, the RP sound spread through much of the South along with plantation culture and wealth.
(Steph Koyfman. “How American English Grew Its Wings. Babbel Magazine. November 22, 2017.)
Then, in 1806, Noah Webster published the first American dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Webster (of Merriam-Webster fame) was hugely instrumental in American standardization, but many of his earliest attempts to simplify English spelling were ridiculed. In this early work, he suggested “tung” for “tongue” and “wimmen” for “women.” Though he was apparently referred to as “an incurable lunatic” and “a prostitute wretch,” he did believe it was important for America to assert itself culturally, and he believed words should be spelled the way they actually sound.
(Steph Koyfman. “How American English Grew Its Wings. Babbel Magazine. November 22, 2017.)
Then Webster published the vastly more successful An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828 and earned the right to take credit for nixing the “u” from “colour” and the “re” from “theatre,” as well as changing “defence” to “defense,” “catalogue” to “catalog,” and more. Webster’s dictionary also contained more than 70,000 words (compared to roughly 40,000 in Johnson’s dictionary).
And, over in England, they eventually dropped the “k” from words like “magick.” Other changes that occurred in America, however, were looked down on. The Brits were actually flexible on spellings like “colour” and “theatre,” but that was before they came to be seen as American.
In America the spread of industrialization (started sometime between 1820 and 1870) and the Civil War shifted the power centers to the Midwest. Political and economic power largely passed from the port cities and cotton regions to the manufacturing hubs of the Mid Atlantic and Midwest – New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, etc.
By then, the British elite had much less cultural and linguistic influence in these places, which were mostly populated by the Scots-Irish and other settlers from Northern Britain, and rhotic English was still spoken there. As industrialists in these cities became the self-made economic and political elites of the Industrial Era, Received Pronunciation lost its status and fizzled out in the U.S. The prevalent accent in the Rust Belt,
(Matt Soniak. “When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?” Mental Floss. December 01, 2021.)
So, as industrialists in these cities became the self-made economic and political elites of the Industrial Era, Received Pronunciation faded and General American became the standard and spread across America.
Today, what is termed as the American accent is an umbrella accent perceived to be neutral and free of regional characteristics. It lacks certain noticeable sociolinguistic salient features such as non-rhotic speech, ethnic features such as the clear pronunciation of letter “l”, and social-economic features.
Molly John of World Atlas shares this:
“Traditional US regional accents are on the verge of extinction due to the influence of social, mass, and mainstream media. Children learn less about their native languages and cultures from the agents of socialization in society such as their parents, grandparents, and teachers. They are more glued to YouTube, Disney Channels, and Nickelodeon whose main characters speak in standard Midwestern American accents that children adopt and abandon their own accents.”
(Molly John. “Where Did the American Accent Come From?” World Atlas. October 21, 2019.)
Figure 1: Mean scores of the rankings for ‘correct English’ of the fifty states, Washington, DC, and NYC by south-eastern Michigan respondents (‘1’ = ‘worst English’; ‘10’ = ‘best English’)
A Problem: American Accent Myths Persist
Informal assessments of
accents are bolstered by quantitative studies – responses that
confirm what every American knows – the lowest ratings are for the
South and NYC (and nearby New Jersey, infected by its proximity to
the NYC metropolitan area). This is, of course, a U.S. language
myth.
Dennis Preston – University Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, MSU; Ph.D., UW-Madison and past-president of the American Dialect Society – cited research to confirm this myth.
Preston states …
“In summary, respondents from all over the US confirm the myth that some regions speak better English than others, and they do not hesitate to indicate that NYC and the South are on the bottom of that pile.
“Students of US culture will have little difficulty in understanding the sources of the details of this myth. The South is thought to be rural, backward and uneducated; its dialect is quite simply associated with the features assigned its residents. NYC fares little better. As one of Labov’s respondents told him in the mid 1960s, ‘They think we’re all murderers.’ Just as US popular culture has kept alive the barefoot, moonshine-making and drinking, intermarrying, racist Southerner, so has it continued to contribute to the perception of the brash, boorish, criminal, violent New Yorker. Small wonder that the varieties of English associated with these areas have these characteristics attributed to them.
“Like all groups who are prejudiced against, Southerners (and New Yorkers) fight back by making their despised language variety a solidarity symbol, but there is no doubt they suffer linguistic insecurity in spite of this defensive maneuver.”
(Dennis Preston. “Language Myth # 17.” Language Myths. PBS. 1999.)
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