American English is actually older Of course, these people were posh and everyone wanted to copy them, so this new way of speaking – which British people now refer to as Received Pronunciation – spread across the rest of the south of England.
The “American English” we know and use today in an American accent first started out as an “England English” accent. According to a linguist at the Smithsonian, Americans began putting their own spin on English pronunciations just one generation after the colonists started arriving in the New World.
American English, which is older than British English, came to the American continent with the English settlers, whose pronunciation was based on rhotic speech.
As the oldest English dialect still spoken, Geordie normally refers to both the people and dialect of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in Northeast England.
Most scholars have roughly located “split off” point between American and British English as the mid-18th-Century. There are some clear exceptions.
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.
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.
The Transatlantic accent is sometimes thought of as that “old-timey” way of speaking in 1930s and 1940s films; but its usage and impact extends far beyond American cinema. Sometimes referred to as a Mid-Atlantic accent, it is a carefully crafted dialect meant to imitate the upper-crust elite.
The earliest mention of a specific American (non-European) accent I can find is from 1783. More specifically the accent described seems to be Virginian.
The Anglo-Saxons bring English to England
Invasions and migration have to a great extent been a driving force in the development of dialects and accents in Britain. In the fifth century, Germanic tribes from the northwest of the European continent began settling on the island.
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.
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.
British English is much older than American English and these differences are mainly the fault of the French who invaded England in 1066. At the time the English were not impressed but the French did bring a little extra in the way of culture and cooking and a lot in the way of enriching the English language.
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.
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).
Answer and Explanation: Before English, people in the Americas spoke Spanish and various Native American languages. The Native American tribes throughout America each had their own, unique language. The first European language spoked in America was Spanish, which the Spanish conquistadors brought with them.
New England accents were the hardest to understand. Rhode Island came in at No. 1, Maine at No. 2, Connecticut at No.
According to the renowned American linguist William Labov, the New York accent is often perceived as the “most American” as it's the one that appears all the time in popular culture. Like it happens in Boston, New Yorkers tend to drop their r's and change the quality of vowels.
#1: Southern Accent
Photo Credit: Depositphotos. Of the 1,000 individuals surveyed, 41% responded that they consider the Southern accent the most attractive in America.
As a result, although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn't.
More recently, the term "mid-Atlantic accent" can also refer to any accent with a perceived mixture of American and British characteristics.
Colonists adapted to and adopted different modes of speaking, mixing up their dialects, leveling out many regional quirks, which in turn was transferred to their innovating colonial kids, who developed it further and became the first native speakers of this new American tongue.
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.
In the United States, there are about 30 major English dialects, and with it, countless ways to pronounce words for the same meaning.
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.