How Did American And British Accents Diverge?

Common ancestry surprises are not just for species:


The answer surprised me.




First, let’s be clear: the terms “British accent” and “American accent” are oversimplifications; there were, and still are, many constantly-evolving regional British and American accents. What many Americans think of as “the British accent” is the standardized Received Pronunciation, also known as “BBC English.”

How this happened.

Your Thoughts?

About Daniel Fincke


  • http://sendaianonymous.wordpress.com Sendai

    I thought it was pretty much common knowledge? It isn’t?

    (I should go out moar ^^;;;;;;;;;)

  • NakkiNyan

    From what I understand it is because of our immigrants. A lot of the immigrants are like the ones today, they don’t learn to speak the language they mimicked it. With them mimicking the language and passing it on to their kids where they may have later gone to schools and used the same accent as their parents the language stopped changing it’s accent.

    It wasn’t until later that we really started getting our own now we have the poorly named southern accent which is from about the northern half of Ohio going south until mid Florida and from that point all the way west to parts of AZ, California and Washington state.New York state headed east and everything north of it stayed pretty much the same. There are pockets of “odd” accents (Ex: Jersey accent) restricted often to single cities or multiple close cities and foreign accents like the southern 1/4 of FL has spanish and Haitian accents. Louisiana with the sometimes unintelligible accent and some different words it is almost diverging into is’s own language like the mexicans speak spanish but the mexicans and spaniards can’t understand each other very well even though they are considered to both be speaking “Spanish”. That said, Ohio and parts of Michigan are really starting to be taken over with the southern accent, I see it in my cousins who started changing their accents when they moved to North Carolina when they were around 9 and 11, it is odd though if you call them down there they have a moderate southern accent but as soon as their plane lands in OH it is gone, weird, must be something in the air :P

  • efrique

    Yeah, I’ve known about this for a couple of decades…

    And hardly anyone in the UK uses received pronunciation these days.

    Actually, a lot of the UK regional accents seem to be more or less dying off, as well as RP.