![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asher553I've always been a bit of a language nerd, so I couldn't resist when I ran across this article (via Pocket): When did Americans lose their British accents? Specifically, the article focuses on rhoticity - what you do with the letter R.
Around the turn of the 18th 19th century, not long after the revolution, non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper and upper-middle classes. It was a signifier of class and status. This posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably.
In the United States, the fashion was emulated in port cities that maintained strong trading ties with Britain - Boston, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah - but failed to catch on in the industrial cities populated by the Scots-Irish and other settlers from Northern Britain.
The title of the article bothers me a little, since it implies that the "British accent" was something that remained constant in England and changed only in America, which isn't necessarily the case. Also it says "Americans" specifically and not "North Americans".
The article doesn't cover Canadian speech, where as far as I know the R is never dropped; that would be an interesting topic in itself. (And it doesn't go into vowel sounds. The RP treatment of the long O sounds like "ew" to American ears; and Canadians do something very weird and mysterious with the "ou" sound.)
But you can hear the difference between modern RP English and what Shakespeare's English might have sounded like, thanks to David and Ben Crystal. Notice, too, that the -tion suffix is pronounced as two syllables in 17th-century English, and not "-shun" as we say it today.
Here's David and Ben reading Shakespeare:
Here's the Proclaimers with a few thoughts on rhoticity:
Around the turn of the 18th 19th century, not long after the revolution, non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper and upper-middle classes. It was a signifier of class and status. This posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably.
In the United States, the fashion was emulated in port cities that maintained strong trading ties with Britain - Boston, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah - but failed to catch on in the industrial cities populated by the Scots-Irish and other settlers from Northern Britain.
The title of the article bothers me a little, since it implies that the "British accent" was something that remained constant in England and changed only in America, which isn't necessarily the case. Also it says "Americans" specifically and not "North Americans".
The article doesn't cover Canadian speech, where as far as I know the R is never dropped; that would be an interesting topic in itself. (And it doesn't go into vowel sounds. The RP treatment of the long O sounds like "ew" to American ears; and Canadians do something very weird and mysterious with the "ou" sound.)
But you can hear the difference between modern RP English and what Shakespeare's English might have sounded like, thanks to David and Ben Crystal. Notice, too, that the -tion suffix is pronounced as two syllables in 17th-century English, and not "-shun" as we say it today.
Here's David and Ben reading Shakespeare:
Here's the Proclaimers with a few thoughts on rhoticity:
