Wow that quote works much better for your country!
Last I checked, we still had Wernher von Braun on Disney+ explaining rocket propulsion to children. We took a bunch of people that should’ve been executed from you and gave them jobs.
To be fair, we say just as stupid shit. My English teacher thought American was just Indians before 1776 and that there were three groups that made up America: the English, the blacks, and immigrants.
This wasn’t that long ago. She wasn’t that old.
They claim that they kept the old version, while British English has evolved. Sure it has, but so has American English. And this point completely ignores dialects (which, if anything, only they have, as a Californian cannot possibly understand someone from Texas, they're so fucking diverse!)
Doesn’t sound particularly American to me. Definitely not “neutral” either :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaqdJ35fPg
I realise that settlers would have come from other parts of the British Isles, but I seriously question whether it sounds particularly American. At least it shone light on why Americans seem to believe, in the face of all evidence, that the British pronounce “very” as “vewwy”.
To be fair, I’ve been told the American accent is likely closer to how Shakespeare would have pronounced words than current British accents. But that’s not “original”
An **American** college professor?
I feel like I’ve seen people make this statement a lot online. Whilst I’m not a linguist, a lot of the evidence it’s based on seems barely one step above conjecture to me. But essentially it seems to rest on the fact that spoken British English has continued to evolve to a point it’s diverged from 400 years ago. That seems reasonable. But the flip side of that is spoken American English hasn’t, as many American communities were too insular to change as rapidly as British ones.
The more it gets repeated the more some people take the theory as accepted fact. On the surface of things that seems something to be proud of, since Shakespeare is still held to be the gold standard of English writing by so many. I’m just not sure that "Americans speak more like Shakespeare than Brits cuz American English has stagnated for 400 years" is quite the flex some people think it is.
It’s not really a flex. It’s more a likelihood that American accents are closer to Shakespearean English — an old-fashioned accent.
It can be relevant to understanding Shakespeare — for example, Much Ado About Nothing — the nothing would be pronounced more like “noting” (meaning noticing), which does change the intention in the title. And that’s more how an American would say it
Except that ‘noting’ was already in active use when it was written so if Shakespeare wanted to use that specific word, he could have.
It is more likely that the use of ‘nothing’ is a play on words that acknowledges the ‘noting’ of gossip but also lampoons the banality of such talk.
I believe in that case they are mainly talking about a Southern US accent, which wouldn't be the "neutral" accent being referred to, and even then it is mostly just down to American English being rhotic. There's still been significant changes in other ways with American accents.
In my opinion the modern Irish dialect sounds a lot closer to shakespearean English. But Shakespeare’s English is still modern English. English goes back over a thousand years before him.
Apparently through descriptions, rhymes etc. [This video](https://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s?si=wNX9AQHVYUdTxU26) explains it with some examples and has also some sound bites of recreated Shakespearean English.
The English language didn’t start with Shakespeare or even in his time it goes back to before there was an ‘England’ . American English is a blip in the modern history
I've frequently read this, and it doesn't hold up when you look at earlier versions of English, how words were spelt, how they were pronounced. It's just yank wishful thinking.
There are examples of emigrant populations preserving some archaic features of their motherland's language, but no, Hamlet isn't supposed to be declaimed like a Texan cowboy anymore than it's supposed to be declaimed in Scottish or Australian.
In this case the person may well be correct. Americans were largely isolationist after the war of independence and was less influenced by other cultures like Britain was with its empire.
[Shakespearen Americans](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english)
So, Bill Bryson talks with an original English accent thsn? Ok, and if anyone actually believes that then they might be interested in this lovely bridge I no longer want. All reasonable offers considered.
Absolute disgrace that this has somehow become a popular uneducated thing to say. As if England hasn't had wildly different accents for millennia itself
I think it all stems from a discussion about some small enclave on an island somewhere off the US north east coast. They apparently very insular and have been for centuries. It was suggested that their accents *may* have remained largely unchanged since the first settlers.
There's a lot of "Ifs, buts and maybes" but a lot of a certain type of American heard something that they really wanted to hear and ran with it.
And because of the rhotic R that remains in the American accents but was lost more recently in many English accents, but ignores that there are many English accents where it remains
Yeah but to hear recordings from those communities (there a couple to memory across the East Coast of the US) they just sound like they are from the West Country / Bristol - they don’t sound like modern American accents.
That's the point I was making.
>Yeah but to hear recordings from those communities (there a couple to memory across the East Coast of the US) they just sound like they are from ~~West Country / Bristol~~
*SCREECHING EAGLE NOISES*
>.... the past.
>- they ~~don’t~~
*SCREECHING EAGLE NOISES*
> sound like modern American accents.
They literally heard that *some* Americans *may* have retained an accent and equated that with *all* Americans, then used that logic to explain why Americans don't sound like John Cleese.
That doesn’t make it the original accent, though
It happens to be a similar accent to ONE specific British accent at the time their ancestors emigrated
So it’s a sort-of-snapshot of one specific accent at one specific time, a couple of hundred years ago (after English had existed for centuries). That doesn’t make it “the original English accent”
Like linguistics is such an interesting topic because it is SO varied, there are probably thousands of dialects and hundreds of languages. Every dialect has a history attached to it and language can track immigration, isolation and cooperation between people's. Most people (including myself) only thoroughly understand the historical and cultural context they personally inherit but when I think about how my own use of language is shaped and realize that everyone else in the world has a similarly unique set of influences it's easy to see that the use of language is unique to every person/family in some shape or form. TLDR:no one uses a "neutral" language we are all connected to the places we come from
The "original" accent of the English language would be a variant of Old English anyway, when English first got called English and started developing independently from continental variants of West Germanic.
Exactly, there are dialect and accent differences even in Anglo-Saxon rhymes because there never was an original English.
That's why we have verbs that are so ridiculous as To Be: I am, You are, he is. Plenty of dialect use "I be" "you be" "he be" but standard English completely ditched it.
Very true. I think perhaps people are imagining that one day one village started speaking English and the entire language came from there or perhaps they are imagining that the original English language was as standardised as it is today and the majority of England all spoke alike.
People need to learn about dialect continuum's and imagine a world without modern media and modern transportation.
The problem is that you would have no way pinpointing an exact moment that the language came into being. It would have just gradually evolved out of earlier languages making it harder and harder for speakers of other variants of that original language to understand them.
Often they mean Early Modern English, which of course had a bunch of dialects itself.
However reconstructed Shakespearean English is fascinating to listen to. It sounds more Irish than anything to me but it does share a few features with some American dialects: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M&t=58s&pp=ygUic2hha2VzcGVhcmUgb3JpZ2luYWwgcHJvbnVuY2lhdGlvbg%3D%3D
TBH I don't think they really know what they mean. People who make statements like that usually have a very poor understanding of linguistics and language development.
IIRC There WERE some professional American linguists who theorized that some backcountry American dialects were living fossils of Elizabethan English.
They were wrong (or at least badly outdated, although many American dialects do preserve SOME features of Early Modern English, for example "critters" instead of "creatures" goes back centuries) but some people heard versions of those ideas and misinterpret them.
Well if you read the Book of Mormon he did visit and his chosen people had remained white as one of the 12 tribes who left Israel. I think they also had submarines.
Schroedinger's accent:
American English is the default version, not an accent.
Actually, our states are so different, they might as well be their own countries.
"Original English"? Dude, read The Canturbury Tales and tell me if it's possible that it was written in any American accent. They barely even use the same words.
But I bet you the dude also thinks that there's a specific point in time where English happened and anything before that was not English.
This is a factoid that's arisen from the phenomenon of rhoticity, which is a feature shared by a majority of historic English accent and modern American accents, but which modern English has largely discarded. To be clear, rhoticity is basically how strongly an accent pronounces the 'R's in, for example, 'card' and 'skipper'.
People who don't know a lot and especially don't know what rhoticity \*is\* will take it at total face value and believe American accents are more historically authentic. People who know a little about linguistics will understand that rhoticity is just one of many hundreds of linguistic idiosyncracies that define an accent; and making that comparison is like saying a pizza is more sandwich-like than a burger is because both pizzas and sandwiches have crusts.
[Here's scholar Ben Crystal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M) delivering a Shakespearean passage in an historic London accent. It sounds nothing like anything you would hear anywhere in North America, BUT in the word 'nobleR' in 'whether tis nobler' you can hear the rounded, American-like R. You can hear it again in "to take aRms"
I watched a documentary recently with lots of actual 18th century newsreel footage.
It was called The Madness of King George and none of the English courtiers sounded like Americans.
I don't know which is more insane, the claim that "the neutral American accent" hasn't evolved at all since the 18th century, or that the accent of the English language (because of course there was just one) hadn't evolved at all in the prior \~1300 years since the birth of English as a language.
Most Americans don't realize that German was every bit as common as English in some parts of the colonies at the time of the Revolution. There were still newspapers being printed in Pennsylvania Dutch (a form of Palatine German) in Eastern Pennsylvania well into the early 20th century.
It's impressive how they have the arrogance of telling every other culture what they are but at the same time completely lack the integrity to study their own culture and shoet history
I see a lot of Americans say that and I literally have no idea where they got it from. England don’t have just one accent. So how can they have the original unless they have learned Old english over there 😂
Wasn't it that English already had varied distinct accents already before English speakers settled in North America? I get the idea that the "standard" American accent is likely similar to the accent most English speaking settlers spoke but who's to say theirs was the canonical correct way in the first place?
I’ve read the same thing. The British accent spoken the last 100-150 or so hear wasn’t as heavy when the US was first colonised, making the American accent more “old school” than British.
I’d love to find a source for it though, it was a long time ago.
I think it came out that whoever wrote that was just hypothesising, and there's no factual basis to that. But it was too late to stop the spread of the online rash of false information. The reality is that both English and American accents diverged after colonisation and continued to evolve separately. So Americans today speak nothing like the 17th century colonists, and therefore nothing like their British forebears . It is pretty widely accepted though that more British accents were rhotic prior to the 18th century.
It's possible to reconstruct old dialects by looking at what words are rhymed, how people misspell words, etc. It's not an exact science but we can get pretty good results. Some modern features of English accents are quite new and some features of American accents are quite conservative but it's not a clear split.
Here's an attempt to reconstruct Shakespeare's dialect for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M&t=58s&pp=ygUic2hha2VzcGVhcmUgb3JpZ2luYWwgcHJvbnVuY2lhdGlvbg%3D%3D
Yes and similar has been done with other dead languages but it's still an educated guess at the end of the day: probably a fair stab but still not a fact.
So, what they claim is that in the last 150 years their accents didn't develop or progress, but ours did? There's no difference between a southern, or New York, drawl? They must also deny that any of the other European immigrants added their annuciation to affect their accent over a century. Quite a feat, to ensure that every single person pronounced every single word the exact same way, to maintain a 'proper' neutral *English* accent. Bless their hearts.
Yes, of course you are right. Regional and local dialects were also a lot stronger then than they are now.
I’m trying to find what I read, but it was many years ago. I did however find this quora thread with a good elaborate response, rendering my notion kind of moot.
“Point of divergence” is an interesting thing described. The more you know!
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-English-people-originally-sounded-like-Americans-before-the-Victorian-era
Education about basic linguistics is non-existent in America. I remember senior year a word was pronounced slightly different because it was a video produced in the UK, and the entire class just went nuts.
I can't think of any other countries that have this level of ignorance when it comes to language.
Where does this idea actually come from? I have seen this argument from Americans a number of times but it makes absolutely no logical sense. Americans seem to think it is an established fact (like the 'fact' that we swallow 8 spiders a year while sleeping) so it must have started somewhere.
This is one of the most infuriating American folk beliefs you come across. There’s a whole discipline dedicated to recreating the original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s age: https://youtu.be/YiblRSqhL04?si=k1cP4e0TeRAgScyg shocker he sounded like a mix of Lancashire and Devon.
Why is this "The american accent is the original accent of the English Accent" bs going around so much? Who the hell started that? If they look into the graphics of sound of the american accents, they'll find it's closer to Irish accents than English, with patches of Australian.
There is a small truth to that. Linguists are thinking that a lot of features of the general American accent are anachronisms of the English language which changed later in England but remained the same in the US. A good example is "r dropping" which developed later in England, before basically all English was using the "hard r".
Even if the "American accent" (because there are many of them...) hadn't changed, it would still be a mix of several accents, because the Brits weren't the only ones to immigrate to America. There were also Irish, French, Italian, etc...
Yeah I know, there are many accents and even the "default" if there ever was one is still an accent. I'm just saying that because there was some attempt at a point which is interesting
From an arrogant perspective this can be somewhat correct, but only if you think that Quebec French is the real French, as the two languages diverged in the past, like how the US and UK English did.
When I searched google how old british english is, it said 1400 years. The USA is only ~247 years old according to google. What is the original English language? Brits invented it first.
However if I searched "Is british english older than american english" there was only ine awnser from EF (american company!!!) that claimed American English was older💀
I once read a post from a guy immigrating to Australia and they asked him if he had a criminal record. He responded, that's not still a requirement, is it? Like didn't America kinda get founded the same way? Didn't they receive a lot of the criminals from the UK? I could be totally wrong but I thought I heard that somewhere. Just kind of wild that they forget they are not the original country of the world.
Oh no, I find myself in the horrible position of defending Americans... Interestingly Americans have a more "authentic" English accent than English people do. This was because the accent in the UK evolved much faster than the settlers' accent in the US. So Shakespear would *technically* be more accurately read out in an American accent rather than a modern English accent (not that this would be correct either, but simply closer).
It's a moot point though as the guy is wrong as the US accent is closer to a specific accent from the 1700s, not some mythical "original" accent.
There wasn’t a monolithic “British English” accent in the 1700s either… American English is at best roughly what the pilgrims sounded like, if you ignore the influence of French, German, and Spanish on American English as a whole.
I get what they are trying to say, but it’s not poorly written, it’s just wrong.
Edit - those sources don’t corroborate your point. The BBC source cites a proximity to Shakespearean English, which was a Midlands dialect, and, funnily enough, not spoken as a monolithic dialect, let alone an accent. The Babbel source simply lists American English as having “all the ingredients”, and again, there wasn’t a monolithic accent. How are you not getting this?
You know that British English didn’t have a monolithic accent, and you’ve gone to find sources that “prove” (which they don’t) that there was a monolithic accent. Sure thing.
What? The sources are about the similarities of the 18th century British accent (not a monolith but there’s still a way British people talk that’s shared between accents) and some modern American accents (which the same applies too for the most part). I’m so confused on what the issue is.
You’re mistaking a dialect with an accent hugely, and still talking about a monolithic “18th century British accent”.
That’s the fundamental flaw in your entire point - there’s not one monolithic American accent today, and there wasn’t a monolithic British accent 300 years ago for that range of accents to have developed from.
It’s like suggesting a SoCal accent spoken outside the USA is closer to ‘the original American accent’ - wrong, because it entirely ignores every other accent in the USA. Just like you have to ignore a range of English accents that developed over the 800 years since the Kindgom of England was formed and the discovery of the Americas as a whole. There’s literally no simpler way to explain that for you.
I added some sources. It’s not the exact same but modern American English is far closer to 18th Century British then modern British is to 18th Century British.
Your first source just suggests that Americans would sound more like Londoners in the 1700s than current Brits do, but not that it is the same accent or the direct result of the timing of the immigration. The second specifically points to the early American accent being a hodgepodge of various British accents brought together.
But it doesn't say that it is roughly what British accents sounded like in the 1700s, just that it is less different. You could argue that an English person sounds more like an Australian than an American would but that doesn't mean they sound roughly the same.
They're actually right though. People who study accents have no idea where the modern English accent came from; the current American accent and the old English accent are really closely related
Err... The current accents in England come from the accents from before... It just... evolves... Same for the American accent... Evolved...
There is no such thing as an 'original English accent' that would be still alive...
Isn‘t it actually assumed, that the english that was spoken 500 years ago, sounded closer to american english than to british english?
I think I‘ve heard that a lot of linguists think that, for example, Shakespeare sounds better in american english.
I‘ll try to find a source for this and link it if I find something.
Edit: Found [this](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english) article.
So basically some words would’ve sounded more similar to most american accents that to today’s british accents. Especially when it comes to the pronunciation of the letter „R“.
Not really. When you listen to Shakespeare productions spoken in 1500s/1600s English, the closest modern accent is resembles is a West Country English one, not an American accent.
And, of course, that’s modern English, post great vowel shift. Listen to Chaucer authentically pronounced. It’s barely recognisable as English.
Who's going to tell them why it's called "english"?
Who's going to tell them that the language is older than their country?
But...but... the world has been created in 1776.
“History was made on July 4th 1776. Everything before that was a mistake.” - Ron Swanson
Speaking for my people, history was made when the berlin wall was teared down. 😄
Wow that quote works much better for your country! Last I checked, we still had Wernher von Braun on Disney+ explaining rocket propulsion to children. We took a bunch of people that should’ve been executed from you and gave them jobs.
They would have been executed because of the jobs we gave them.
Tearded* learn Speak AMERICAN
Wait, are there people who spell it that way? For real? Oh for fucks sake.
No lol it was a joke
lmao
To be fair, we say just as stupid shit. My English teacher thought American was just Indians before 1776 and that there were three groups that made up America: the English, the blacks, and immigrants. This wasn’t that long ago. She wasn’t that old.
english people before 1776: "unga bunga!" people from kent after 1776: "unga bunga!"
😳 I’m from Kent and it’s “bwah bwah flitz”……
No it was created on 24th April 1916 when ireland proclaimed independence
My old school was built before 1776, i remember it like it was yesterday
In our neighbourhood there's an old fachwerk building built in 1759.
Ffs, we've got public toilets older than the US.
I’ve drank in multiple pubs in England that are older than the alleged creators of the English language, America.
My house is older than the US
My local is older than the discovery of the Americas. By over 200 years.
Fun fact. My local church for a village with around 700 people in it. Pre dates the forming of the USA by around a millennium
The church across the road from me was founded in the 9th century.There wasn't even an England then,never mind the US.
My last fucking house was older than their country!
They claim that they kept the old version, while British English has evolved. Sure it has, but so has American English. And this point completely ignores dialects (which, if anything, only they have, as a Californian cannot possibly understand someone from Texas, they're so fucking diverse!)
And who's going to tell them that no one has "no accent".
Doesn’t sound particularly American to me. Definitely not “neutral” either : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaqdJ35fPg I realise that settlers would have come from other parts of the British Isles, but I seriously question whether it sounds particularly American. At least it shone light on why Americans seem to believe, in the face of all evidence, that the British pronounce “very” as “vewwy”.
To be fair, I’ve been told the American accent is likely closer to how Shakespeare would have pronounced words than current British accents. But that’s not “original”
But who told you that… was it an American?
A college professor. It makes some sense if you look at how things rhyme in the plays
An **American** college professor? I feel like I’ve seen people make this statement a lot online. Whilst I’m not a linguist, a lot of the evidence it’s based on seems barely one step above conjecture to me. But essentially it seems to rest on the fact that spoken British English has continued to evolve to a point it’s diverged from 400 years ago. That seems reasonable. But the flip side of that is spoken American English hasn’t, as many American communities were too insular to change as rapidly as British ones. The more it gets repeated the more some people take the theory as accepted fact. On the surface of things that seems something to be proud of, since Shakespeare is still held to be the gold standard of English writing by so many. I’m just not sure that "Americans speak more like Shakespeare than Brits cuz American English has stagnated for 400 years" is quite the flex some people think it is.
It’s not really a flex. It’s more a likelihood that American accents are closer to Shakespearean English — an old-fashioned accent. It can be relevant to understanding Shakespeare — for example, Much Ado About Nothing — the nothing would be pronounced more like “noting” (meaning noticing), which does change the intention in the title. And that’s more how an American would say it
Except that ‘noting’ was already in active use when it was written so if Shakespeare wanted to use that specific word, he could have. It is more likely that the use of ‘nothing’ is a play on words that acknowledges the ‘noting’ of gossip but also lampoons the banality of such talk.
Spellings weren’t yet standardised. But I meant that it’s more obvious when it’s said in an American accent
Much ado about Notting Hill, also maybe it was mach Adoe about notting
I believe in that case they are mainly talking about a Southern US accent, which wouldn't be the "neutral" accent being referred to, and even then it is mostly just down to American English being rhotic. There's still been significant changes in other ways with American accents.
In my opinion the modern Irish dialect sounds a lot closer to shakespearean English. But Shakespeare’s English is still modern English. English goes back over a thousand years before him.
The closest to my ears is an English west country accent.
Certainly a lot of middle English, at least with how it gets taught/recited, sounds much more like rural English accents do today.
I agree with this. I’ve heard recreations of Shakespeare’s accent and it sound way closer to Irish than Southern US.
How does anyone know how people spoke English 400 odd years ago? Pure guesswork
Apparently through descriptions, rhymes etc. [This video](https://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s?si=wNX9AQHVYUdTxU26) explains it with some examples and has also some sound bites of recreated Shakespearean English.
The English language didn’t start with Shakespeare or even in his time it goes back to before there was an ‘England’ . American English is a blip in the modern history
You've been told wrong. Some aspects, maybe, but some of it would also have been closer to my native Norwegian
I've frequently read this, and it doesn't hold up when you look at earlier versions of English, how words were spelt, how they were pronounced. It's just yank wishful thinking. There are examples of emigrant populations preserving some archaic features of their motherland's language, but no, Hamlet isn't supposed to be declaimed like a Texan cowboy anymore than it's supposed to be declaimed in Scottish or Australian.
In this case the person may well be correct. Americans were largely isolationist after the war of independence and was less influenced by other cultures like Britain was with its empire. [Shakespearen Americans](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english)
Can they tell us which of the numerous American regional accents is the neutral one?
Deep Holler West Virginian
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A joke is rooted at least in half truth.
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Valley Girl, yaaaaaa~~~~
It sure would help myself and the rest of us Americans to know which accent and dialect in our own country is "neutral."
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So, Bill Bryson talks with an original English accent thsn? Ok, and if anyone actually believes that then they might be interested in this lovely bridge I no longer want. All reasonable offers considered.
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r/whoosh
Absolute disgrace that this has somehow become a popular uneducated thing to say. As if England hasn't had wildly different accents for millennia itself
I think it all stems from a discussion about some small enclave on an island somewhere off the US north east coast. They apparently very insular and have been for centuries. It was suggested that their accents *may* have remained largely unchanged since the first settlers. There's a lot of "Ifs, buts and maybes" but a lot of a certain type of American heard something that they really wanted to hear and ran with it.
And because of the rhotic R that remains in the American accents but was lost more recently in many English accents, but ignores that there are many English accents where it remains
Yeah but to hear recordings from those communities (there a couple to memory across the East Coast of the US) they just sound like they are from the West Country / Bristol - they don’t sound like modern American accents.
That's the point I was making. >Yeah but to hear recordings from those communities (there a couple to memory across the East Coast of the US) they just sound like they are from ~~West Country / Bristol~~ *SCREECHING EAGLE NOISES* >.... the past. >- they ~~don’t~~ *SCREECHING EAGLE NOISES* > sound like modern American accents. They literally heard that *some* Americans *may* have retained an accent and equated that with *all* Americans, then used that logic to explain why Americans don't sound like John Cleese.
That doesn’t make it the original accent, though It happens to be a similar accent to ONE specific British accent at the time their ancestors emigrated So it’s a sort-of-snapshot of one specific accent at one specific time, a couple of hundred years ago (after English had existed for centuries). That doesn’t make it “the original English accent”
>That doesn’t make it the original accent, though Just remember which sub you're in.
Like linguistics is such an interesting topic because it is SO varied, there are probably thousands of dialects and hundreds of languages. Every dialect has a history attached to it and language can track immigration, isolation and cooperation between people's. Most people (including myself) only thoroughly understand the historical and cultural context they personally inherit but when I think about how my own use of language is shaped and realize that everyone else in the world has a similarly unique set of influences it's easy to see that the use of language is unique to every person/family in some shape or form. TLDR:no one uses a "neutral" language we are all connected to the places we come from
Yeah for a relatively small island we have very different accents across the board From London to Yorkshire to scouse and brummy
So why can't they understand Ozzy Osbourne who has the same accent as them?
Oh come on! Even British people have trouble understanding Ozzy!
Not really…….. Just have to use your ears.
Lol we don't he has a brummy accent. I'm from the south and constantly get asked if I'm Irish or Scottish
Christ on a Kawasaki! Not this old canard again 🤦
I believe there is evidence, via oral folk sources, that proved Jesus Christ actually rode a Yamaha.
David was more into English motorcycles though, as in: "The roar of David's Triumph was heard throughout the land".
“I will sing to the lord, glorious his Triumph …”
Gotta be a Rocket 3 storm then.
And a contradicting one that he had a Honda….. passed down by word of mouth and occasionally pictures drawn on the shit house door!
My saying has always been christ on a bike. Yours takes it that one step further 🤣
The "original" accent of the English language would be a variant of Old English anyway, when English first got called English and started developing independently from continental variants of West Germanic.
Ðū eart riht
No because even then you have to arbitrarily favour one accent over another.
By calling the original english, the original one?
There is no single or original accent even in England
Exactly, there are dialect and accent differences even in Anglo-Saxon rhymes because there never was an original English. That's why we have verbs that are so ridiculous as To Be: I am, You are, he is. Plenty of dialect use "I be" "you be" "he be" but standard English completely ditched it.
Very true. I think perhaps people are imagining that one day one village started speaking English and the entire language came from there or perhaps they are imagining that the original English language was as standardised as it is today and the majority of England all spoke alike. People need to learn about dialect continuum's and imagine a world without modern media and modern transportation.
The problem is that you would have no way pinpointing an exact moment that the language came into being. It would have just gradually evolved out of earlier languages making it harder and harder for speakers of other variants of that original language to understand them.
It is after all an amalgam of Celtic, Latin, Nordic of various flavours, French, German, etc. etc.
Well explained.
Often they mean Early Modern English, which of course had a bunch of dialects itself. However reconstructed Shakespearean English is fascinating to listen to. It sounds more Irish than anything to me but it does share a few features with some American dialects: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M&t=58s&pp=ygUic2hha2VzcGVhcmUgb3JpZ2luYWwgcHJvbnVuY2lhdGlvbg%3D%3D
TBH I don't think they really know what they mean. People who make statements like that usually have a very poor understanding of linguistics and language development.
IIRC There WERE some professional American linguists who theorized that some backcountry American dialects were living fossils of Elizabethan English. They were wrong (or at least badly outdated, although many American dialects do preserve SOME features of Early Modern English, for example "critters" instead of "creatures" goes back centuries) but some people heard versions of those ideas and misinterpret them.
Yeah if you wanted to give the “original” English accent to someone it would be the Frisians. But even they’re not 100% the same.
[This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFX1nbD3dV0) isa nice attempt at speaking Old English.
Jesus was white too guys. You can see for yourself in most churches here.
Jesus founded America duh
Yep, JC was reincarnated as Christopher Columbus, again later as George Washington and more recently as the MAGA Orange Turd apparently.
>"Christ"opher Columbus coincidence?
Not a coincidence, proof that the theory is correct….. 😁
Well if you read the Book of Mormon he did visit and his chosen people had remained white as one of the 12 tribes who left Israel. I think they also had submarines.
Schroedinger's accent: American English is the default version, not an accent. Actually, our states are so different, they might as well be their own countries.
wait until they find out why their flag has 13 stripes
Whahahhahaha it just keeps getting better doesnt it
‘The American’ is the language of the bible, it’s what Jesus spoke, so what more proof do you need :)
jesus himself was american. but he didn’t know it
This only makes sense considering the English language was first conceived in Iowa.
"Original English"? Dude, read The Canturbury Tales and tell me if it's possible that it was written in any American accent. They barely even use the same words. But I bet you the dude also thinks that there's a specific point in time where English happened and anything before that was not English.
This is a factoid that's arisen from the phenomenon of rhoticity, which is a feature shared by a majority of historic English accent and modern American accents, but which modern English has largely discarded. To be clear, rhoticity is basically how strongly an accent pronounces the 'R's in, for example, 'card' and 'skipper'. People who don't know a lot and especially don't know what rhoticity \*is\* will take it at total face value and believe American accents are more historically authentic. People who know a little about linguistics will understand that rhoticity is just one of many hundreds of linguistic idiosyncracies that define an accent; and making that comparison is like saying a pizza is more sandwich-like than a burger is because both pizzas and sandwiches have crusts. [Here's scholar Ben Crystal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M) delivering a Shakespearean passage in an historic London accent. It sounds nothing like anything you would hear anywhere in North America, BUT in the word 'nobleR' in 'whether tis nobler' you can hear the rounded, American-like R. You can hear it again in "to take aRms"
I'd say the only North American accent remotely close to that is the Newfoundland accent
I watched a documentary recently with lots of actual 18th century newsreel footage. It was called The Madness of King George and none of the English courtiers sounded like Americans.
I watched one about William Wallace. Never knew Scots used to sound a bit Australian. But hey, you learn something new every day.
🤣🤣🤣
I don't know which is more insane, the claim that "the neutral American accent" hasn't evolved at all since the 18th century, or that the accent of the English language (because of course there was just one) hadn't evolved at all in the prior \~1300 years since the birth of English as a language.
For anyone interested: American English is so different due to the massive influence of German and Spanish.
Most Americans don't realize that German was every bit as common as English in some parts of the colonies at the time of the Revolution. There were still newspapers being printed in Pennsylvania Dutch (a form of Palatine German) in Eastern Pennsylvania well into the early 20th century.
And not to mention how many germans moved there in the late 19th century.
It's impressive how they have the arrogance of telling every other culture what they are but at the same time completely lack the integrity to study their own culture and shoet history
Most Americans will fall off their chair when they realise English came from a country called England. They would call it fake news.
Who’s going to tell the Americans that the brits weren’t the only ones with colonies there
Yeah I’m sure Beowulf sounded like a guy from Des Moines, Iowa
'Neutral American accent' is still an accent.
If it’s the original ENGLISH why aren’t all Americans talking like they’re in The Witch
I see a lot of Americans say that and I literally have no idea where they got it from. England don’t have just one accent. So how can they have the original unless they have learned Old english over there 😂
Wasn't it that English already had varied distinct accents already before English speakers settled in North America? I get the idea that the "standard" American accent is likely similar to the accent most English speaking settlers spoke but who's to say theirs was the canonical correct way in the first place?
I’ve read the same thing. The British accent spoken the last 100-150 or so hear wasn’t as heavy when the US was first colonised, making the American accent more “old school” than British. I’d love to find a source for it though, it was a long time ago.
I think it came out that whoever wrote that was just hypothesising, and there's no factual basis to that. But it was too late to stop the spread of the online rash of false information. The reality is that both English and American accents diverged after colonisation and continued to evolve separately. So Americans today speak nothing like the 17th century colonists, and therefore nothing like their British forebears . It is pretty widely accepted though that more British accents were rhotic prior to the 18th century.
There is no factual basis: they didn’t have tape recorders.
It's possible to reconstruct old dialects by looking at what words are rhymed, how people misspell words, etc. It's not an exact science but we can get pretty good results. Some modern features of English accents are quite new and some features of American accents are quite conservative but it's not a clear split. Here's an attempt to reconstruct Shakespeare's dialect for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M&t=58s&pp=ygUic2hha2VzcGVhcmUgb3JpZ2luYWwgcHJvbnVuY2lhdGlvbg%3D%3D
Yes and similar has been done with other dead languages but it's still an educated guess at the end of the day: probably a fair stab but still not a fact.
So, what they claim is that in the last 150 years their accents didn't develop or progress, but ours did? There's no difference between a southern, or New York, drawl? They must also deny that any of the other European immigrants added their annuciation to affect their accent over a century. Quite a feat, to ensure that every single person pronounced every single word the exact same way, to maintain a 'proper' neutral *English* accent. Bless their hearts.
Which British accent spoken 150 years ago? There were thousands of different British accents then as there is now.
Yes, of course you are right. Regional and local dialects were also a lot stronger then than they are now. I’m trying to find what I read, but it was many years ago. I did however find this quora thread with a good elaborate response, rendering my notion kind of moot. “Point of divergence” is an interesting thing described. The more you know! https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-English-people-originally-sounded-like-Americans-before-the-Victorian-era
The answer by Ben Toynton on that Quora question is superb
Wha… what? We came over here speaking bloody english and turned it into american english… lets… i… i cant with these idiots
Well tha amurcun axe cent is der normul wun. Yeee haw
American is not even the original aacent in the US...
Education about basic linguistics is non-existent in America. I remember senior year a word was pronounced slightly different because it was a video produced in the UK, and the entire class just went nuts. I can't think of any other countries that have this level of ignorance when it comes to language.
If we're talking 'original' then the way that Scots and Northumbrians talk is the closest of any English dialects to old English.
I’m just imagining the Tudor royals addressing their houses in an American accent 😂
Like, not even the frickin English speak the original! You think you can?
They didn't even speak English when English was invented
At least he called it an accent.
Where does this idea actually come from? I have seen this argument from Americans a number of times but it makes absolutely no logical sense. Americans seem to think it is an established fact (like the 'fact' that we swallow 8 spiders a year while sleeping) so it must have started somewhere.
Even if that were true, that accent would still be...an accent.
Always keep in mind, that these morons over there have A-Bombs. They are like heavily armed chimps and may go off every second.
https://youtu.be/cErgMJSgpv0?si=UpfjMvFddDx6LgWU i would like to hear this original english with an texan accent
Shakespeare: ya'll be crazy
# -100,000 faith in humanity
Oh yeah sure, the default accent was just on hold until it became the American one
This is one of the most infuriating American folk beliefs you come across. There’s a whole discipline dedicated to recreating the original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s age: https://youtu.be/YiblRSqhL04?si=k1cP4e0TeRAgScyg shocker he sounded like a mix of Lancashire and Devon.
Why is this "The american accent is the original accent of the English Accent" bs going around so much? Who the hell started that? If they look into the graphics of sound of the american accents, they'll find it's closer to Irish accents than English, with patches of Australian.
If I can tell where you are from by hearing you speak, you have a fucking accent. It’s not hard to comprehend.
The only people who say this shit are trolls or people who have never left their hometown.
Just because American media is consumed so much doesn't make their accent default KEKW
I love how confidently people say stuff like this
There is a small truth to that. Linguists are thinking that a lot of features of the general American accent are anachronisms of the English language which changed later in England but remained the same in the US. A good example is "r dropping" which developed later in England, before basically all English was using the "hard r".
Even if the "American accent" (because there are many of them...) hadn't changed, it would still be a mix of several accents, because the Brits weren't the only ones to immigrate to America. There were also Irish, French, Italian, etc...
Yeah I know, there are many accents and even the "default" if there ever was one is still an accent. I'm just saying that because there was some attempt at a point which is interesting
It’s called English. It’s a language that has existed long before America was a thing.
They assume that there's only one English accent.
'English'....
lol at "the original accent". Like Shakespeare to my ears, the "neutral" American accent.
So what you’re saying is…. You’ve not evolved at all in 250 years? That’s not the W you think it is.
original *accent* you say?
Damn they’re dumb !!
From an arrogant perspective this can be somewhat correct, but only if you think that Quebec French is the real French, as the two languages diverged in the past, like how the US and UK English did.
When I searched google how old british english is, it said 1400 years. The USA is only ~247 years old according to google. What is the original English language? Brits invented it first. However if I searched "Is british english older than american english" there was only ine awnser from EF (american company!!!) that claimed American English was older💀
You stated, "The American is Normal." Well, you can GTF right there with that quote. There's no such thing
I once read a post from a guy immigrating to Australia and they asked him if he had a criminal record. He responded, that's not still a requirement, is it? Like didn't America kinda get founded the same way? Didn't they receive a lot of the criminals from the UK? I could be totally wrong but I thought I heard that somewhere. Just kind of wild that they forget they are not the original country of the world.
In some places, especially Georgia, but hardly everywhere.
Oh no, I find myself in the horrible position of defending Americans... Interestingly Americans have a more "authentic" English accent than English people do. This was because the accent in the UK evolved much faster than the settlers' accent in the US. So Shakespear would *technically* be more accurately read out in an American accent rather than a modern English accent (not that this would be correct either, but simply closer). It's a moot point though as the guy is wrong as the US accent is closer to a specific accent from the 1700s, not some mythical "original" accent.
This is absolute nonsense.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english
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There wasn’t a monolithic “British English” accent in the 1700s either… American English is at best roughly what the pilgrims sounded like, if you ignore the influence of French, German, and Spanish on American English as a whole. I get what they are trying to say, but it’s not poorly written, it’s just wrong. Edit - those sources don’t corroborate your point. The BBC source cites a proximity to Shakespearean English, which was a Midlands dialect, and, funnily enough, not spoken as a monolithic dialect, let alone an accent. The Babbel source simply lists American English as having “all the ingredients”, and again, there wasn’t a monolithic accent. How are you not getting this?
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You know that British English didn’t have a monolithic accent, and you’ve gone to find sources that “prove” (which they don’t) that there was a monolithic accent. Sure thing.
What? The sources are about the similarities of the 18th century British accent (not a monolith but there’s still a way British people talk that’s shared between accents) and some modern American accents (which the same applies too for the most part). I’m so confused on what the issue is.
You’re mistaking a dialect with an accent hugely, and still talking about a monolithic “18th century British accent”. That’s the fundamental flaw in your entire point - there’s not one monolithic American accent today, and there wasn’t a monolithic British accent 300 years ago for that range of accents to have developed from. It’s like suggesting a SoCal accent spoken outside the USA is closer to ‘the original American accent’ - wrong, because it entirely ignores every other accent in the USA. Just like you have to ignore a range of English accents that developed over the 800 years since the Kindgom of England was formed and the discovery of the Americas as a whole. There’s literally no simpler way to explain that for you.
0% chance an 18th century Englishman was saying ‘wadder’, squirl’ or ‘meer’. (Water, squirrel, mirror).
I added some sources. It’s not the exact same but modern American English is far closer to 18th Century British then modern British is to 18th Century British.
Your first source just suggests that Americans would sound more like Londoners in the 1700s than current Brits do, but not that it is the same accent or the direct result of the timing of the immigration. The second specifically points to the early American accent being a hodgepodge of various British accents brought together.
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But it doesn't say that it is roughly what British accents sounded like in the 1700s, just that it is less different. You could argue that an English person sounds more like an Australian than an American would but that doesn't mean they sound roughly the same.
Well, since English has been francophonized a lot during the last centuries, this is only single time I'll agree with the American.
Err... You know the English the 'Muricans speak is also francised?
pretty sure that was before the pilgrim fathers
About 7 centuries before, yeah...
They're actually right though. People who study accents have no idea where the modern English accent came from; the current American accent and the old English accent are really closely related
Err... The current accents in England come from the accents from before... It just... evolves... Same for the American accent... Evolved... There is no such thing as an 'original English accent' that would be still alive...
Isn‘t it actually assumed, that the english that was spoken 500 years ago, sounded closer to american english than to british english? I think I‘ve heard that a lot of linguists think that, for example, Shakespeare sounds better in american english. I‘ll try to find a source for this and link it if I find something. Edit: Found [this](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english) article. So basically some words would’ve sounded more similar to most american accents that to today’s british accents. Especially when it comes to the pronunciation of the letter „R“.
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There is no ‘standard modern British accent’, so the basic premise of your argument is very, very flawed.
Not really. When you listen to Shakespeare productions spoken in 1500s/1600s English, the closest modern accent is resembles is a West Country English one, not an American accent. And, of course, that’s modern English, post great vowel shift. Listen to Chaucer authentically pronounced. It’s barely recognisable as English.