During the 17th and 18th centuries, dialects from many different regions of England and the British Isles existed in every American colony, allowing a process of extensive dialect mixture and leveling in which English varieties across the colonies became more homogeneous compared with the varieties in Britain.
In case you don't feel like reading this wall of text, the TL;DR version is that there's evidence of American accents before 1700, and more circumstantially, an accent separate from any heard back in Europe began to develop by the mid-1600s with the first American-born generation of English speakers.
Most scholars have roughly located “split off” point between American and British English as the mid-18th-Century. There are some clear exceptions.
“The original British accent”. There have been many accents that originated in Great Britain, and you can still hear several of them today. Some of them would have sounded similar to the relatively uniform US American accent, but that accent has evolved over the centuries, so it wouldn't have been the same.
The main feature that separates the American accent from a lot of other accents in English is rhotic speech. This means that most Americans pronounce the r in words such as “ hard ” (har-d). There are some exceptions, of course. Some Americans in the New England area of the US use non-rhotic speech.
Australian English arose from a dialectal melting pot created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of Southeast England.
1788: The Australian accent, at least according to modern experts, began developing right after the arrival of European settlers and convicts.
Generally speaking though, it can be said that the Welsh accent is probably closest to an Australian one. This is due to their similarities in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary choices – both Welsh and Australians tend to end words on a 'v' sound rather than an 'r' sound like other English speakers do.
The first is isolation; early colonists had only sporadic contact with the mother country. The second is exposure to other languages, and the colonists came into contact with Native American languages, mariners' Indian English pidgin and other settlers, who spoke Dutch, Swedish, French and Spanish.
The Canadian accent is most closely related to General American English with similar rules for pronunciation and accent. The main difference is how Canadians will speak some diphthongs (a sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable) higher than their American neighbors.
Early European settlers to Australia — many of whom were convicts — were from all over Great Britain and Ireland, and their speech patterns blended to form the new Australian accent.
Considering all of this and his farmer upbringing, it is safe to speculate that Washington's natural accent was, as Morse portrays it, predominantly American with a detectable English influence.
It's partly that many of the distinctive characteristics of an accent aren't reproduced well when you sing. Vowel sounds get stretched, and the precise articulation of the consonants is lost. The result is a neutral baseline accent that sounds vaguely American.
Geordie, an English dialect and the people who speak it, is the oldest English dialect still spoken. If you're not a Geordie, it's also probably the hardest for you to understand.
Abroad, American accents are most likely to be considered “friendly,” (34 percent of non-U.S. respondents), “straight-forward” (27 percent), and “assertive” (20 percent).
Also, add to the list Ben Franklin — yes, he likely had a British accent. In fact, most of the founding fathers probably had British accents because they were British subjects only a few generations removed from living in England. The British accent extended to much of the population of the United States at that time.
In some ways, however, modern American English is older than modern British English. It's all down to an R. When the first English settlers arrived in America, they used rhotic speech where 'r' is pronounced in words, whereas in Britain, the soft 'r' of received pronunciation was being born.
By the outbreak of the War of 1812 a few decades later, a significant part of the population of Ontario – which had about 100,000 inhabitants – were of US extraction. The result, especially west of Quebec, was an accent lightly shaped by British English, but much more so by 18th Century colonial American English.
In America the spread of industrialization shifted the power centers to the Midwest, which was largely settled by people of Scot-Irish heritage who still pronounced “r” as “r.” So, Received Pronunciation faded and General American became the standard.
Article Talk. Strine, also spelled Stryne /ˈstraɪn/, describes a broad accent of Australian English.
Australia was colonised two centuries later, which explains why the accent of Australian English is more similar to British English compared to American English. However, American English became very popular in Australia later in history, which affected their pronunciation.
In Australia, this dialect is sometimes called Strine /ˈstɹɑɪn/ (or "Strayan" /ˈstɹæɪən/, a shortening of the word Australian), and a speaker of the dialect may be referred to as an Ocker.
There were, of course, many other native tongues – at least 250, by recent estimates – spoken by First Nations people long before white settlers arrived, and some of their words – kangaroo, galah and goanna, to name a few – found their way into Australian English, although Aboriginal languages appear to have had little ...
The harsh environment in which convicts and new settlers found themselves meant that men and women closely relied on each other for all sorts of help. In Australia, a 'mate' is more than just a friend and is a term that implies a sense of shared experience, mutual respect and unconditional assistance.
Before Europeans arrived in Australia, there were up to 300 different Aboriginal languages and around 700 different dialects. Many of these languages are no longer used or are under threat of disappearing. There are now only 20–50 Indigenous languages that are 'healthy', meaning they are spoken to and used by children.