When did the American accent start to develop, and when did the

>>300569
>When did the American accent start to develop, and when did the American people generally stop sounding British?

It didnt
Americans speak the way Brits spoke in 18th century
Meanwhile, British accent degenerated from 1783 to nowdays into the faggy thing it's now

The British accent that you, for example, hear on BBC is fairly new.

During the founding of America both the Americans and the British would of had an accent that sounded somewhat like a modern Scottish accent.

The HBO miniseries John Adams does the best job of demonstrating that accent.

>>300728
Wow, so britain and japan were culturally destroyed by losing wars? That's scary.

>>300569
Maybe it's like Quebec where it's actually the new world that kept the original accent while the old world changed, supposedly.

By the way, how the fuck can we know which accent sounds more like the original? I see people making those claims and I have no idea how you can come to the conclusion.

>>300740
>like the original
ye old english has it's own dangalang nobody uses anymore

>>300728
The accents in John Adams sound much closer to a West Country/Norfolk accent, which makes sense given how these places are thought of as being backward and full of farmers

>>300740
>Maybe it's like Quebec where it's actually the new world that kept the original accent while the old world changed, supposedly.

But that's false, retard
Quebec accent is literally an "Englishified" version of French accent (due to living among Anglos for so long)

>>300722
>>300728

Pretty much this. The English accents have changed more than American ones have. Some linguists think that the American Southern accent is closest to what Brits sounded like a few hundred years ago; I've heard a few reconstructions of Elizabethan English that basically sound like a weird mix of Southern and Australian.

>>300740
When people say that the American accent is closer, they mean that it is more rhotic than the current British accent. Which, by the way, is only justifiable if you think all Yanks sound like they're talking out their nose and all Pommes speak like they're on the BBC.

File: tumblr_inline_nohz62Ke8H1sevq13_500[1].png (46KB, 500x350px) Image search: [Google]

46KB, 500x350px

>>300722
>>300728
This is just a popular and reductive meme, and pretty retarded. American accents obviously evolved from rather than preserved the melting pot of regional accents from which they originated, the UK and England in particular is still is one of the most diverse places in the world in terms of regional accents, and though rhotic accents have withdrawn during the 20h century large parts of England still have rhotic accents. Just like Anglophone Canadian and Australian accents, accents in the USA are admixtures of the various regional accents of migrants that settled in these areas.

>>300772
Balivernes. The French accent changed drastically at the revolution, where the "bel usage" was replaced by the accent of the bourgeoisie. Aristocrats used to skip a lot of letters in their pronunciation.

British accents at the time also would have been very different.

Also there's really no 'American accent'. Accents along the East Coast of the US (the part that was actually involved in the revolution) are all over the fucking place, and hardly nearer to each other than they are accents from Britain.

The uniform "North American English" accent across the Western US and Canada is a product of the radio age.

>>300786
Actually even the Southern accent has changed over the years and the closest we have to the old southern dialects is actually the fucking Ebonics, believe it or not.

Like for example nigs say "ax" instead of "ask" not because they're retarded, but because that's how it was pronounced back then even among white people.

>>300808

I still say ax instead of ask, but Louisiana is a weird mix of the old (and dying) Cajun speak and Southern accents.

>>300808
>the closest we have to the old southern dialects is actually the fucking Ebonics

I'm pretty sure this isn't correct. I mean, ebonics is such a weird thing linguistically that some people can argue somewhat convincingly that it's actually a creole language. And white people have always made distinctions about how blacks pronounced words, just look at Mark Twain and Steven Foster. I'm sure there's some influence there, but I'm doubtful that everyone would have sounded like that at any time.

>>300794

That's why I specified the kind of English accent you would hear on BBC. Also, I never claimed that modern American accents are closer to the 'source'.

The only point I was making was that English accents are new and they would not have sounded like that during the Colonial period.

>>300740

>By the way, how the fuck can we know which accent sounds more like the original? I see people making those claims and I have no idea how you can come to the conclusion.

Because we have documents where people talked about how words were pronounced. Particularly in commentaries about plays and poems.