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.
Wolchover says the modern British accent is really only about 200 years old, initiated by nouveau riche South Londoners who, having become wealthy during the Industrial Revolution, wanted a linguistic way to distinguish themselves from commoners.
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain.
Most scholars have roughly located “split off” point between American and British English as the mid-18th-Century. There are some clear exceptions.
Geordie. As the oldest English dialect still spoken, Geordie normally refers to both the people and dialect of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in Northeast England.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.
Some people believe that RP (Received Pronunciation) is the most standard or general accent in British English. Many EFL (English as a Foreign Language) schools teach it because it is supposed to be the most “polished” pronunciation. It is typically referred to as “Queen's English” or “BBC English”.
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.
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.
American English is actually older
When the first settlers set sail from England to America, they took with them the common tongue at the time, which was based on something called rhotic speech (when you pronounce the r sound in a word).
English has its roots in the languages of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe.
The Anglo-Saxons bring English to England
Since the first two groups were the largest, the settlers came to be known collectively as Anglo-Saxons. They all brought with them distinct dialects of their native Germanic language, the language we today call Anglo-Saxon or Old English.
English is derived from a number of Germanic dialects brought to these shores roughly 1,500 years ago by settlers we now call Anglo-Saxons. The Saxons came from present-day northern Germany, and settled mainly in the south and West Country.
People tend to think a foreign accent is more interesting and more sexy, says Guy Winch, a psychotherapist from Britain who's long been based in the United States, “because in general we tend to value what's less common.” Americans associate a British accent with someone being “more intelligent, more sophisticated and ...
We know now that Columbus was among the last explorers to reach the Americas, not the first. Five hundred years before Columbus, a daring band of Vikings led by Leif Eriksson set foot in North America and established a settlement.
In the 1500s, Europeans began arriving in North America; they found a land with many natural resources and began to claim parts of it. While the French moved into the north and the Spanish settled in the south and west, the British founded colonies on the east coast.
Bloody. Don't worry, it's not a violent word… it has nothing to do with “blood”.”Bloody” is a common word to give more emphasis to the sentence, mostly used as an exclamation of surprise. Something may be “bloody marvellous” or “bloody awful“. Having said that, British people do sometimes use it when expressing anger…
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 American accents are forming, at a staggering rate — but as a reversal of previous trends, they are forming in inner-cities along class and economic lines, rather than in rural areas or along ethnic lines.
The Birmingham accent is considered the least attractive accent in the British Isles – and Southern Irish the most appealing. A quick analysis of English dialects shows that there are roughly as many in the British Isles as there are in the whole of North America – including Canada, Bermuda and Native American dialects ...
The British Accent
The Great British accent proved to be the most difficult of all the accents to imitate – along with the regional Yorkshire and Cockney pronunciations, in particular.