People from all over Europe settled in North America in the 17th century, so how and when did the North American accent develop?
Pat French
Telford, Shropshire, UK
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There isn’t a North American accent. There is a collection of accents. As well as those of European origin, there are those of East Asian and African-Caribbean origin and many more. There is a mixture across the countries of North America and they are constantly changing. There isn’t even a universal Indigenous accent in North America. The Hopi and Apache peoples have different accents and languages than the Ojibwe and Métis peoples, for example.
Peter Trudgill,
Author of The Long Journey of English Norwich, UK
Since people from England left for the Americas, linguistic changes have occurred in the UK that haven’t occurred in North America. The usage of the glottal stop as a pronunciation of “t” between vowels, as in “be’er” (better), is a 19th-century innovation typical of British English, but not of North American English.
Since the arrival of English from England, linguistic changes have taken place in the Americas that haven’t occurred in the UK. The usage of a d-like sound as the pronunciation of “t” between vowels, as in “bedder” (better), is typical of US English but not British English.
From the beginning, American English was subject to processes associated with contact between different dialects. Although the geographical and social origins of settlers were different in each location, none of the early anglophone settlements on the east coast of what is now the US was settled from a single location in England. So, very early on, contact between different British dialects occurred in the settlements, and this led to the appearance of new, mixed dialects not precisely like any of those spoken in their homeland.
The modern regional variation in accent along the east coast of the US is explained not only in terms of different linguistic changes having taken place in different areas during the past 400 years, but also by the fact that the initial mixtures – and, therefore, the outcomes of these mixtures – were different in different places.
Guy Cox
Sydney, Australia
Your correspondent is asking the wrong question. The evidence suggests that 17th-century English people spoke with what we would now regard as a US accent. The classic example is how the site of the “Old Gate” of Oxford, UK, may have become “Aldates”. Quite how it then became canonised to St. Aldates is another matter. The real question is where the English accent came from: I suspect the 18th-century linguistic reformers, who worked to standardise the language and its spelling.
Alan Phillips
Wairarapa, New Zealand
When teaching for the first time in Devon, UK, I mistakenly thought that one of my class was from the US, not a native speaking in a Devonian accent.
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