It is the standard British accent that has drastically changed in the past two centuries, while the typical American accent has changed only subtly.
In all reality, the standard British accent was the one that changed significantly in the last two centuries while the American accent stayed more or less the same. During the American Revolution, the English language started to change in Britain.
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.
At first, English speakers in the colonies and England used a rhotic accent. But after the Revolutionary War, upper-class and upper-middle-class citizens in England began using non-rhotic speech as a way to show their social status.
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent traditionally regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English.
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.
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.
The West Country includes the counties of Gloucestershire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, and the dialect is the closest to the old British language of Anglo-Saxon, which was rooted in Germanic languages – so, true West Country speakers say I be instead of I am, and Thou bist instead of You are, which is very ...
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.
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).
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.
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.
The main influence is usually believed to be the various London accents. Australian rhyming slang is Cockney rhyming slang (again from part of London).
We can definitively say that English and Scots are very similar because they both developed from Old English (Anglo-Saxon). Because of the political divide, Scots was the primary language of Scotland until the union of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707.
Geordie. As the oldest English dialect still spoken, Geordie normally refers to both the people and dialect of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in Northeast England.
If you find the British accent difficult to understand, it's likely you'll find the Aussie accent even harder to grasp as, for the most part, Australia is a melting pot of all the different regional dialects of British English.
Let's face it, most of us are suckers for a sexy accent. According to a recent survey conducted by the popular dating website MissTravel.com, over 2000 American men and women regard Australian accents as one of the sexiest in the world.
An Australian accent is still quite distinctive and discernible when heard overseas away from Australia. We still shorten our words and use “ie” at the end of some words, e.g. sickie (taking sick leave from work), breakie (breakfast). But the real Australian slang is vanishing.
British accent has been rated as the most attractive English accent in the world, according to a new survey by the CEOWORLD magazine. The results were revealed in a global study, which questioned 96,398 people across 32 countries worldwide to list “most attractive English accents” other than their own.
The Cornish accent is apparently not everyone's cup of tea and was recently voted the least sexy accent in the UK. A poll, which aimed to find the UK's sexiest accent, was carried out by the dating app Match. Outrageously, 87% of the 2,300 participants voted that the Cornish accent is not sexy.
"The basis of our accent is Southern British. Americans, in particular, often confuse us. They think the cockney accent is the Australian accent."
The most widely accepted theory to why Australians have the accent they do is that the first Australian born children (of the colonizers, not the natives obviously) simply created the first trace of the recognizable accent amongst themselves naturally.