Over time, these different settlement patterns led to the emergence of distinct dialects of Old English (Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish and West Saxon), which in turn gave rise to different accents of British English (roughly Northern, Midlands, Southeastern and West Country).
It derives from a mixture of the Midlands and Southern dialects spoken in London in the early modern period. It is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners.
A diversity of earlier Southern dialects once existed: a consequence of the mix of English speakers from the British Isles (including largely English and Scots-Irish immigrants) who migrated to the American South in the 17th and 18th centuries, with particular 19th-century elements also borrowed from the London upper ...
Dialects and accents developed historically when groups of language users lived in relative isolation, without regular contact with other people using the same language. This was more pronounced in the past due to the lack of fast transport and mass media.
Geordie. As the oldest English dialect still spoken, Geordie normally refers to both the people and dialect of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in Northeast England.
Why Do Americans and Brits Have Different Accents?
Is English older than Irish?
As a language, Irish is older than English. It was first written 2,000 years ago. Irish Gaelic is a Celtic language, having come from somewhere in central Europe. The parts of Ireland where Irish is still spoken are called the Gaeltacht regions.
The Great Vowel Shift that occurred between 1350 and 1700 saw a great deal of phonetic changes occur, essentially leading to a condition where our spelling reflects a language that once didn't really need accent marks, but now probably really does.
The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the late 19th-century and early 20th-century American upper class and entertainment industry, which blended together features regarded as the most prestigious from both American and British English ( ...
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.
This isn't just a naive assumption – Britain really does have a richer variety of regional accents compared to the US. There are a bunch of complex reasons behind this, but it is largely tied to the longer history of English in the British Isles compared to North America.
Meanwhile, back in wealthy southern cities of the UK, people from the new higher classes wanted a way to distinguish themselves from everyone else, so they started changing their rhotic speech to a soft r sound, saying words like winter as “win-tuh” instead of “win-terr”.
In reality, there are almost 40 different dialects in the UK that sound totally different from each other, and in many cases use different spellings and word structure. In fact, there's pretty much one accent per county.
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.
In this short pronunciation video, we will look at how to pronounce "water" in American, British, and Australian English. American English speakers typically say "waw-ter," while British English speakers say "wot-er." Australian English speakers say "wadder."
It really depends on how much time you spend practicing. If you work with a dialect coach or use a dialect training course to teach yourself, you can probably pick it up in a few weeks with regular practice. You'll learn even faster if you spend a lot of time around people with real British accents!
To SOME extent, yes. Of course the original colonists around 400 years ago spoke English the way it was spoken then and continued speaking like that in America. Since then, American speech has evolved, but British speech has evolved more.
Also, add to the list Ben Franklin — yes, he likely had a British accent. In fact, most of the founding fathers probably had British accents because they were British subjects only a few generations removed from living in England. The British accent extended to much of the population of the United States at that time.
A Boston accent is a local accent of Eastern New England English, native specifically to the city of Boston and its suburbs. Northeastern New England English is classified as traditionally including New Hampshire, Maine, and all of eastern Massachusetts, though some uniquely local vocabulary appears only around Boston.
It's partly that many of the distinctive characteristics of an accent aren't reproduced well when you sing. Vowel sounds get stretched, and the precise articulation of the consonants is lost. The result is a neutral baseline accent that sounds vaguely American.
Generally speaking though, it can be said that the Welsh accent is probably closest to an Australian one. This is due to their similarities in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary choices – both Welsh and Australians tend to end words on a 'v' sound rather than an 'r' sound like other English speakers do.
The short answer is that the addition of an “r” sound at the end of a word like “soda” or “idea” is a regionalism and isn't considered a mispronunciation.
This split between rhotic and non-rhotic pronunciation has its origins in London in the 1850s. Working-class speakers began dropping the /r/ sound at the ends of words. Back then, this was considered lazy, vulgar and an undesirable way of speaking.
The United Kingdom is home to some 40 different dialects of the English language, but researchers have discovered that some of its most distinctive ones are rapidly becoming less common. Cockney and King's English were found to be in decline in a study of 18 to 33-year-olds in the South East of England.
Historians and linguists generally agree that Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian are the oldest languages with a clear written record. All three are extinct, meaning they are no longer used and do not have any living descendants that can carry the language to the next generation.
