Tags
Accents, American English, British English, English Language, Language, Linguistics, Sociolinguistics
Thursday’s posts look at sociolinguistics or child language acquisition: accents, stereotypes and how children learn to speak.
American English and British English are fundamentally different in one main point: accents.
I’m not talking about differences between accents, I’m talking about the sheer numbers of them, and differentiation between them.
Allow me to explain.
Language variation occurs much more frequently in British English than in American English.
Compare, for instance, a Scouse accent, a Geordie accent, a Glaswegian accent, an Essex accent, a Northern Irish accent and Received Pronunciation.
(WARNING: Some of these videos have swearing. A lot of swearing.)
There is a lot more difference between these accents – especially given the size of the UK.
Why is this?
English accents developed not as accents but as dialects.
The four main dialects were Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish and West Saxon. These dialects were allowed to develop in different directions, and within each dialect there were distinct variations between different areas. With no standard English, and with transport being slow, these developments continued until accents from towns a few miles from one another would have many differences, and dialects from different ends of the country were virtually unrecognisable.
This all ended when the printing press was introduced into the UK, creating, in time, a standard written English. Other technological developments, such as faster means of transport and the publication of the King James Bible, had a hand in this too.
While many attributes of the different accents and dialects died after these developments, not all of them did. The result is a country still rife with different accents and dialects – something which makes the British Isles beautiful, in my opinion.
American English developed in a completely different manner.
People from all over the British Isles emigrated to North America. The Highland clearances meant a lot were Scottish, and the potato famine meant a lot were Irish, but there were people from all over the UK with a wide variety of accents.
What happened when they got there was that they discovered they couldn’t understand one another. The point of language is, after all communication, so it’s understandable that people started to drop their regional distinctions.
With a lot of Scots and Irish, the accents that developed maintained some of the attributes of these accents: raised vowels, for instance.
One generation down the line, children are picking up accents in school. They try to sound like one another, trying to be easily understood, and so more and more of what we call accent levelling occurred. This is when regional variations are dropped and distinctions between different accents minimised.
The fact that transport was a lot better than it had been when British accents were developing meant the effect of accent levelling spread much further afield. People miles apart had an effect on one another’s accents.
The result at this point was a large country all talking very similarly. Obviously there were – and still are – distinctions, coming from, for instance, what the prevailing accent was in the area. How many settlers with a certain accent there were in an area of USA made a big difference, but also which accents were prestigious out of the settlers’ accents. If wealthy people settled from Liverpool while poorer people settled from Ireland, the Scouse accent was likely to “win”.
Once accents had been largely levelled, they began to develop in their own directions. A couple of generations on from the original settlers arriving in New England, these accents were few and far between. The only people who still spoke with British English influences were very old, and there’s a vast ocean cutting off anyone else.
And so the accents began to develop on its own. Certain attributes were accentuated, and some picked up from elsewhere, from other languages such as Dutch or native languages.
By the time American accents began to filter back to the UK – in TV channels or on the radio, for example – the accents were unrecognisable from when they left the UK.
Anglophonism 
I find this post quite interesting as you give us a quick preview on the history on accent differentiation ( I do not exactly know how you linguists call that, but hopefully you get my point). This interests me because of the obnoxious thing happening right now in the call center industry happening here right now in the Philippines.
I worked once in a call center firm where we cater to American consumers. During training, and almost all throughout my tenure, the trainers and supervisors annoyingly imposing an American accent rule. I totally understand what they want to do, but then again, the way they want me to talk is really really funny.
I am very much confident with my English and I know my customers understand me. But they criticize it merely because I do not talk in their annoying pretentious accents. Trust me you will be annoyed on how they speak English given the nature of our language.
Surely people can tell you’re putting on an accent? That’s quite amusing…
What I find funny is that there aren’t many call centres in Liverpool, but there are a lot in Newcastle, based on perceptions of Scouse and Geordie accents.
they can get really really annoying to the point that they give themselves moral ascendancy over us who choose to speak English as naturally as one should have been speaking it.
For starters, I found this video. This is the prescribed accent they impose. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozqy0xf8iwc
I love this. It’s a subject that really fascinates me. I’m from the UK and spent the first 25 years of my life there kind of taking for granted that you only have to travel 20 miles in any given direction more or less to get a change in accent. That change is sometimes really prominent like Liverpudlian (aka Scouse) and Mancunian – completely different accents but two cities only about 30 miles apart.
I then moved to Australia where there is pretty much just one accent! There may be some slight variations (such as long ‘a’ sounds in some places versus short in others – dance versus “darnce”), but it’s pretty much all the same across one country the size of Europe!
Any country where English was introduced will have a much narrower range of accents. South African English was a favourite to study, but I find them all fascinating.
I’m kind of curious as to the huge void between “The West” and “The North” accents in the US on the dialect region map.
Unfortunately, this was the best I could get for the purpose.
The same occurs on the UK map; for some reason, there are no accents in Central England, except Brummy, and none in North East, except Geordie.
There are very few people who live in the huge void on the map, there is maybe only a handful of towns with more than 50,000 people in the area.
This is a fascinating post! Being an American who grew up in Southern California, moved as a teenager to the Mid-South, and married into an English family (with a variety of accents of its own), I’ve always been fascinated by the differences within and between American accents and English accents. One strange little quirk: I have sometimes overheard American Southerners talking and thought, for the first few words of their conversation, that they were English (something like Estuary or London, I think). I’ve always assumed this is because the South was settled largely by Brits, but maybe it’s my brain being weird. I do have one quibble with your American linguistic map, however. To my ears, there is far more variation in accents than is depicted. I’m curious as to the criteria used to draw the map.
I got that from my Sociolinguistic textbook. To be honest, there is much more variation on the UK map too, this is just how they are categorised in the text book.
I have a Fife accent, but to anyone South of the Scottish-English border – and many in Scotland – it’s a Scottish accent.
I have had students from almost every English speaking area of the world. The most difficult for me to understand are the Scottish accents. When I teach in Australia, most of the students are originally from somewhere else. Usually England, Scotland or South Africa.
I also teach a lot of engineers who do not have English as their first language. I can easily tell if they learned from a UK or American source.
According to the map above I have a Midland Accent. It is very neutral, and is what broadcaster usually strive for as it is best understood.
I grew up around Pittsburgh, where people are proud of their regional speech and unique vocabulary — eastern and western Pennsylvania are very different in how they talk. Now I’m in northern California, and I don’t hear anyone using that classic “Valley Girl” twang here — anyone remember that Nick Cage movie, or the Frank Zappa song? I think the map is missing a lot of variation across California and on into Oregon. I’m just not a scholar with any evidence beyond my own ears.
I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t employed this map, as it seems to be a point of contention for a lot of readers.
Both maps are missing variation, in many areas, it was just to illustrate my point that there is more variation in the UK than the US.
This is such an interesting topic. I had wondered why there are so many different accents in such a relatively small country as the UK but so few in the US. I might not have the most sophisticated ear for accents, but I’ve traveled quite a bit throughout the US, and in most places I don’t notice that people speak with an accent that’s very different from mine. If I’m in a touristy area, I usually can’t tell which part of the country people are from.
This is such an informative post, thank you!
Thank you!
I’ve always found the range of accents in the UK and US fascinating. Probably because I’m Australian – a place where there is less variation in accents.
The main differences in Australia does seem to be the length of certain vowel sounds. I’m a Queenslander and my husband was born in England (Peterborough to be exact) but grew up in South Australia and we only disagree about the pronunciation of “pool”. When he says it, to me it sounds like “pull” – we use a much longer “oo” in Queensland.
“Outback” Aussies have a much “rougher / broader” accent and city-dwellers, especially those from Sydney and Melbourne can be quite posh. I’m no linguist so excuse my amateur descriptions.
One little quirk of the locals where we live now (the Burdekin Shire in North Queensland) is that they end some sentences with “ay”, e.g. “Thanks ay”. A bit like Canadians! It seems to be specific to this shire. An hour north in Townsville, they don’t do it. The settlers of this area were a mix of Italians and Scots (predominantly) but Bundaberg (where I grew up) was also settled by Italians, Scots and Germans around the same time and the “ay” isn’t down there. I would love to know how it came about.
In the last few years, I have noticed the “levelling” you spoke about, particularly amongst news broadcasters. We watch a lot of international news channels and I recently thought to myself that they all sound the same!
I was actually just reading about vowel length in my textbook – but it went over my head a bit; I’ll write a post about it when I have a better understanding.
That’s actually really interesting – the Fife accent, which is from a county just North of Edinburgh, in Scotland, has an “ay” at the end of sentences, especially questions. It’s very localised to Fife, which is where I’m from.
I’ve never looked into it, but if I find anything interesting, it may appear on here in the future!
I saw an incredibly documentary in an Oral Rhetoric class about American accents once. The gist of the argument was that accents didn’t cross rivers which is why cities with lots of water (Boston, NYC, Philly, etc.) have distinct pockets of identifiable neighborhood accents. The Midwest, land of plenty but not as many aquatic inlets, has a more standardized way of speaking. Still, anyone with a good ear and enough exposure to the varieties can suss out where people are from.
That makes sense – area will be cut apart by boundaries such as rivers, meaning accents and dialects will develop differently.
I’ve never heard this theory before!
Great article. It would be nice to see some examples of how language has changed as people move around the world.
Something dawned on me last week while I was reading ‘Empire’, written by one of your fellow countrymen, Niall Ferguson. The book notes the emigration of Scots (or is that Jocks?) to Canada which I thought might explain the oo sounding of ‘about’ as most Canadians pronounce it.
Can you shed any light on this?
Once again, great post! Thanks.
That’s something I’m planning on focusing on in future articles. I’m not much of an expert on non-British Englishes, but if I find anything out about this I’ll include it in a future post.
Thanks :)