American English is actually older Of course, these people were posh and everyone wanted to copy them, so this new way of speaking – which British people now refer to as Received Pronunciation – spread across the rest of the south of England.
In some ways, however, modern American English is older than modern British English. It's all down to an R. When the first English settlers arrived in America, they used rhotic speech where 'r' is pronounced in words, whereas in Britain, the soft 'r' of received pronunciation was being born.
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.
Is American English more original than British English?
American English has evolved much less than British English since the Founding Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock; so it retains many elements of Early Modern English (Fall for Autumn, Gotten as a past participle, Digged in many American dialects).
The history of American English began in the seventeenth century when the first wave of English-speaking settlers arrived in the Americas. Over time, they developed their unique vocabulary and pronunciation, borrowing from the native tongues of the American Indians, the earlier Spanish settlers, and even the French.
American Shocked by ENGLISH from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales l Can You Understand?
How old is British English?
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands.
By the 1500s, the first Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun establishing settlements in what would become the United States. In 1607, the English founded their first permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.
Much of our modern alphabet comes directly from the Greek alphabet, including a letter, that looked just like our “Z,” that the Greeks called “zeta.” “Zeta” evolved into the French “zede,” which in turn gave us “zed” as English was shaped by Romance languages like French.
Old English – the earliest form of the English language – was spoken and written in Anglo-Saxon Britain from c. 450 CE until c. 1150 (thus it continued to be used for some decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066).
How did American English evolve from British English?
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.
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.
“People think accents are sexy if they admire the country,” says Lynne Murphy, author of “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English.” “It's about British people being familiar — not that different from us — but they're a bit exotic because they're not from here,” she adds.
Whether it be India with its longstanding connection to British colonialism or Sweden with its fascination for all things English, these nations have embraced the allure of this captivating way of speaking. Other countries like China, Pakistan, Italy, and Finland have also fallen under the spell of the British accent.
English originated in England and is the dominant language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
Therefore, the English were not the first to settle in America. The Vikings had a settlement in eastern Canada around the year 1050. The Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch also colonized parts of America before and at the same time as the English.
I wouldn't say the scenery in one place is nicer than the other. Both the US and the UK have areas that are beautiful and areas that are less than impressive to look at. In terms of natural scenery we do have more variety in the U.S. because we have so much area. We are almost (97%) the size of Europe.
However, the original Germanic language was born in the 1st millennium BC, when the first Germanic Sound Shift occurred, commonly referred to as Grimm's Law. From then on, the evolution of the Germanic language was shaped by major historical events.
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.
Old English (Englisċ, pronounced [ˈeŋɡliʃ]), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages.
Perhaps the lack of communication between the UK and USA coupled with the varied linguistic backgrounds of the settlers in America caused a divergence in the language evolution so 'mama' turned to 'mum' in the UK and 'mom' in the USA.
And zed is closer to other languages' spelling and pronunciation of the letter; for instance, the French say zède, German speakers say zet, and Spanish speakers say zeta.
The UK version is more logical. Math is an abbreviation of mathematics, which is a count noun in British English because there are different types of maths (geometry, algebra, calculus, etc.)
In the decade from 1845 to 1855, more than a million Germans fled to the United States to escape economic hardship. They also sought to escape the political unrest caused by riots, rebellion and eventually a revolution in 1848.
Spain and Portugal were the first two European nations to colonize anywhere within the New World. Spain focused on what is now Central America, Florida, and into the central United States.
