Where did the people from the u.s.a get their accents?

Question:when the british came everyone had a british accent but how did we come to talk like we do today

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: when the british came everyone had a british accent but how did we come to talk like we do today

I remember once at a seminar, a man from Britain asked a question and the presenter of the seminar told him, "I really love your accent." He said, "Madam, I'm the only one here that doesn't have an accent."

In the South, the accents are different. In Texas they tend to be twangy. Most people in the South end their prayer using a short a (Ah men) like in England. Yankees use the long A (ayemen). Southerners only use the long A as slang, like in "Ayemen brother." Being Catholic the only time you will hear Amen with a long a is in Catholic Churches. In Latin, they used the short a, but once they went to English, they said it should be the long a. Of course, people in England would take exception. A man who was English prof at a local university and of the Southern Baptist faith said, "We've been praying in English all of our lives and we have always said Ahmen."

In Virginia they use the short a for potato etc. Some parts of Virginia have been influenced by Scottish accent. The word "about" sounds almost like "aboot."

In Georgia they pronounce the word water as waw ter like in England. The rest of the country says wah ter.

One of the things I have learned is that double meaning expression can be very different in England and its commonwealth nations and America. There was a woman from Australia that said she wanted to buy an eraser when she first came here. She went into a store and ask for a rubber. In the U. S., that means a condom. Finally, a sales clerk figured out what she wanted. She went home and told her husband and he told her never to ask for anything like that again.

Nuns from Ireland before they are turned loose on children are given a little course on things not to say. I was told if they were teaching high schoolers, particulary, they would wind up with kids rolling in the aisles.

Depends on where you live I think. In my State, we were one of the original 13 colonies and some of our weird sayings are directly taken from old english. I think that is pretty neat.

yeah we also evolved from monkeys. the world is just weird like that.

Language evolution. Do they have accents, I never thought so. It sounds perfectly normal to me.

Because people evolve differently. It's just like french canadians who have the "old" french accent!

From all over the world
The USA is a hodge podge of Nationalities
I am Irish Welsh/hillbilly , lol

dialect development

I'm not sure. I mean, where did the thick southern accent come from and who would want to talk like that?

Firstly, there is no 'British accent' - the accents in the UK vary widely from one area to another. So part of the answer to your question is that it depends on precisely where their ancestors came from. Then there is in introduction and intermixture of other languages and accents. Within regions, accents became more marked until today, you have dozens of different regional accents, just as they did in Britain.

You'll note that different areas of the country have different accents. It's based on who moved where. A combination of the different cultures that ended up in a particular region, etc.

it was the people in devon who did it!

they came over from britain (makes sense, they're on the south west of britain and travelled accross the sea and came to america)

if you listen to their accent they have 'arr' r's and if you say a sentence with a devonshire accent then say it in an american accent, you can hear how similar they are!

i dont know many people have accents. i have a boston accent people say.

Like, evolution in a way. The early Americans became more distant from Britain as time passed, and as generations developed, the language changed, just as new words are developed, and new ways to say them are too now-a-days

hahaha I knooowww!
Prolly the French had their way of speaking English, the Spanish, the Native Indians too, and so it just got mixed up, and that's how we got our accents.

I ono.

Accents, slang, and language change over time. I would imagine regional American accents formed partly because of the mixture of immigrant groups. The "General American" accent became so widespread due to mass communication, that is why regional accents in the U.S. are slowly dying out.

However, you would have to look up some information on how accents in general are created to get a more specific answer.

It all depends on where you were born, and broughtup in !! Also, it depends on where your mom and dad came from, and how they speak to you, since you were born!!! I live in California, and I never thought we had an accent, but I guess others think we do!! xoxoxo

hello. it does depend on where you are, I (in California 'sound' a bit Spanish in inflexure, although I am German of blood. My parents moved here from Ann Arbor, 1948, where French was/is a large influx. Many of my schoolmates in high school came from Korea, some from Japan, some from Mexico. We are from all over the place. good luck with your acceptance. : {

All over the place. Since we are country of immigrants.
Southern states- country accent
New york- I think is an italian acccent
New England- British
etc.

Check out the Irish accent, all rolling r's, flat vowels and rough edges, about 45% of them emigrated during the potato famine just as the standard American accent developed the same qualities. Bear in mind there are around 2000 different 'English' accents and the regions of Britain alone sometimes are so different they have trouble understanding each other. You can hear Irish and Scottish in all 4 distinct N. American accents, Canadian less so New England more so, what caused the North South split I don't know.

Human nature. In all sorts of ways, we behave like those we mix with. We are members of social groups, and within our social group we like to behave in similar ways and show that we belong. We do this in language as well as in other ways (e.g. what we wear, what we eat).
When groups become distinct, the way they speak becomes distinct too. This happens socially and geographically, but is easiest to illustrate by geographical differences. If a single group splits into two (imagine that one half goes to Island A and one half to Island B), then once they have separated, their accents will change over time, but not in the same way, so that after just one generation the accent of Island A will be different from the accent of Island B. If they stay completely separated for centuries, their dialects may become so different that we will start wanting to say they are speaking two different languages.

That's a very interesting question. In my cultural geography class, we watched a video entitled "American Tongues" which addressed the various accents across the US from Brooklyn, to Boston, Kentucky, Texas, South Carolina and so forth. According to the video and the lecture relating to accents our professor gave that day, the accents in the old colonial states have changed very little since the days English colonists first came to America. Also, people from Northern England tended to settle in the northern colonies and southern Englishmen tended to settle in the South. So in the days of Jamestown's founding, Virginians talked with an accent quite similar to that spoken in southern England. As time went by, the accents in Britain changed while the colonists' accents did not, mostly due to the fact that the colonists were more culturally and linguistically isolated from the "civilized" world of Europe. These accents are still very similar to what they were and serve as a sort of time capsule as to how people in Britain spoke in the 17th century. You might even say that a modern Virginian speaks with a more classic British accent than a modern Londoner, at least if they were being judged by the standards of King George.

In short, we started out talking similarly but they (the British) changed their accent while we (at least on the east coast) have not nearly as much.

For a light-hearted but informative read try Bill Bryson's “Made in America”

I think the longer colonists remained in the Americas, the more illiterate they became.