Day: June 15, 2016

fiftysevenacademics:

18thcentury-turnt:

morelikecreamhuff:

nethilia:

nopeabsolutelynot:

fangirlingoverdemigods:

tyleroakley:

peacelovelesbian:

libby-on-the-label:

busterposeys:

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

Actually, Americans still have the original British accent. We kept it over time and Britain didn’t. What we currently coin as a British accent developed in England during the 19th century among the upper class as a symbol of status. Historians often claim that Shakespeare sounds better in an American accent.

whAT THE FUCK

I’m too tired for this

Always add in the video that according to linguists, Native southern drawl is a slowed down British.

T’ be or not t’be, y’all.

Fun fact: Same thing happened with the French accent. French Canadians still have the original French accent from the 15th century.

Êt’e ou n’pô zêt’e, vous z’auts.

I’ve been trying to find this post for months. I’m freakishly obsessed with this and want the truth of what early colonists sounded like.

While it’s true that Shakespeare’s English sounded more like American English in some ways than contemporary British English, it’s not entirely correct to assume that the American accent is the same as it was in the 17th Century. First, watch this video of the Crystals discussing differences between Shakespeare’s pronunciation and modern English, and compare it with contemporary American English. You’ll see it’s still quite different. Second, England had an enormous amount of linguistic diversity, and settlers came to America from all parts of England. Not all of them were speaking Shakespeare’s English. There was no standardized language in the 18th Century– what later became the standardized form you hear nowadays on the BBC emerged from the dialect spoken in and around London. There’s a thing in linguistics called levelling, where people who speak different varieties of the same language gradually shift their speech patterns to accommodate their friends and neighbors until eventually a standardized form of the language emerges, which linguists call a “koiné”. By the early 1700s movements of people throughout the colonies were constant enough to facilitate this standardization to the point where three of the main varieties of the American dialect we speak today were already beginning to emerge: a standard form, a “Boston” form, and a Southern form. By the time of the American Revolution, American English sounded similar to the English we speak today, with the exception that certain regional dialects, such as New York and Southern, probably were not yet as distinct as they are now. The parts of America that had the most contact with England, such as New York, Boston, and the South, remained under the influence of British English longer and as Britain lost the rhotic “r”, so did the speech of American merchants, planters, and socialites who wished to emulate the prestigious speech of England.