American accent - Page 6 - Historum

**Frank81** · May 23rd, 2012, 06:53 AM

I wrote something but is lost.

In my opinion most of American accents share a certain intonation that put them together. The exception is New England english and some pockets along the eastern coast, which I find closer to Britain dialects than to other American dialects.

**dagul** · May 23rd, 2012, 07:54 AM

Having talked with English, Scottish, American, Australian, Irish, Canadian, and Europeans whose language is not English, but they talked in English, there is that thing in the way they talk that are distinctly of them, considering their accent.

Though, Americans have varying accent, yet, there is that. which is really American because it does not sound like the others. I don't know, maybe my ignorance, but that's the way I hear it.

**clement** · May 23rd, 2012, 09:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by infavilla

Using the modern dialect that linguistics call "General American" would be slightly incorrect, but it would be even more so to used Recieved Pronunciation in its place. In popular media of course RP is used as the standard for "antiquated" speech, but really the General American dialect is more conservative and would be more appropriate.

The majority of British English and colonial American English spoken 300-odd years ago would firstly retain rhotisism, that is most British speakers would pronounce the r's at the end of syllables like Americans, Canadians, and Irish still do today. Secondly the "trap-bath split" would have been rare; that is the vowel sounds of the words "trap" and "bath" would be the exact same, like in contemporary American speech.

So really it would not only be better for the Americans in such cinema to bear Americanesque accents, but the British as well because it's a slightly better approximation of their speech. Languages tend to change more rapidly in dense areas, that's why the worst English in the world is spoken in places like New York and London. The same goes for macro-accents: the more rural American accent has seen less phonetic change that the British dialects that would evolve into the Recieved Pronunciation.

It depends, the RP is pretty old too. It was the accent of an educated class, that of the lawyers etc. who had attended Oxford or Cambridge. Certainly it was not the accent of the majority of the population but among the southeastern elite, it might well have been widespread.

The same in French : in standard northern French, the Quebec accent was probably the most widespread in the 17th and 18th century among the people, but also among nobles. The modern French "parisian" pronunciation was mainly the accent of the lawyers, the professors, the priests and all the educated people who had to speak clearly (the French accent is more articulated, more sophisticated and easier to understand than the French canadian one).