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
Cite this please because I need the source like my life
That claim is wrong, and it stems from a sloppy interpretation of a scholarly claim (which I can’t find a source for at the moment, other than my college lit professor, if he’ll do) that an American accent is closer to Shakespeare’s original pronunciation (OP) than modern English ‘received pronunciation’ (RP, aka ‘how they read the news on BBC’) is.
Frankly I can’t remember which American accent, except that it was one of the eastern ones: mid-Atlantic (the American accent we tend to hear on the news), the New England accent, or a southern accent (which is in fact the American accent closest to most modern English accents).
(Apparently actors who do Shakespeare in vernacular accents like the way it works in the southern accent, though. They say it’s really snappy.)
What we know for sure is that:
1: RP English didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time.
2: All varieties of commonly spoken British and American accents have changed in the last few hundred years—as languages do when they’re used. American accents have probably changed slightly less, because we historically haven’t as much daily social interaction with as many different nationalities as the British. (You may note that changes in American English have picked up a lot in the past 40 years, as world travel and communication have grown.)
Anyway, you can judge for yourself. Here’s a video of a linguistics scholar and a Shakespearean actor demonstrating the difference between RP as commonly used for Shakespeare today vs. Shakespeare’s contemporary accent as reconstructed from rhyme schemes and period documents written with phonetic spelling.
To me, it sounds a lot working class, a bit Gaelic, and a touch French. (The French-speaking Normans had ruled England for a long time; it’s the reason English has such a huge number of Latin-based roots and it took a few centuries for the general Frenchness to get pounded out the pronunciation.)
It’s worth noting, though, that the pronunciation would’ve changed a bit depending on the actor (they had accents too!). Also, didn’t Shakespeare utilize dialect in his plays? I’m pretty sure I remember the rustics not speaking with the same pretty, florid speech that all the kings and ladies were throwing around. 17th century actors were perfectly capable of faking an accent as appropriate.
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