I suppose you'll find this easy or not to answer
My question is where did the American accent come from? And why is it you do not have a Hotch potch of different accents with that many immigrants from umpteen countries
The same question applies to Australians How did their way of speaking come about Even though the majority came from UK shores
Saw this question posted in a UK newspaper and I did a bit of searching came up with little bar the Wagon trains , Immigrants arriving in New York ect

"And why is it you do not have a Hotch potch of different accents with that many immigrants from umpteen countries "

We do. Southerners can often tell what other southern state someone is from just by listening to their accent. I have been told that I have a southern accent, but I was told that by someone who lived in the northern teir of the states. Brooklynes and Long Islanders have very distinct accents, as do Bostonians and Chicagoans. The differences are not only in accents, byut in words themselves. New Yorkers waiting to by ticklets to a show stand on line. In the MidWest, where I live, people stand in line. I call drinks such as Coca Cola,7Up, and the like soda, yet people who live no more than 300 miles or so from me call it pop. It is not only in your and my country that these differences exist. In the movie "Moscow On the Hudson", Robin Williams (who did an excellent Russian accent) was identified as coming from Moscow (rather than another city in Russia) by his accent. But he was speaking English! The man who identified him was also a Russian, but apparently from another city in Russia. They were in a New York deli. I have often been able to identify some speakers as having Mexican ancestors just by their speech, yet these people have never spoken Spanish, and are third and fourth generation Americans. But I cannot fake that accent; I can only fake a Slavic one.

I hope JR sees this thread. He can add much to this subject.

By the way. In America, we say hodgepodge.

Interesting thread. DG, the other guy was from Leningrad. Great scene, as was the one in the coffee aisle.

It would take a book to answer your question on American English dialects. And not all linguists are in agreement. In brief, there are three basic dialects, to which variations occurred over time: Northern, Midlands, and Southern. Northern runs up the northeast coast to Maine. Many differences of course between Philly, NYC, and Bangor. They do have in common the palatalized /r/ which in some cases disappears altogether. Midlands started in So. NJ and went west. Southern is self-explanatory. In regard to the latter, one theory is that the drawl developed from the influence of African accents of slave "mammys" who raised white plantation children. Not all agree with this thesis, though.

As I said, this is the briefest of the brief explanations.

JR, you may like this.

In a restaurant I managed, I was walking around the dining room, checking tables to see that things were OK, when I heard two women speaking to each other. They were speaking English, but with an accent. I definitely recognized the accent. In Macedonian, I asked them if everything was OK. They both looked at me, jaws dropping and eyebrows lifting. They said it was fine, and proceeded to ask me, in Macedonian, if I was Macedonian. In English, I said that my grandfather was born there, and that I was at my limit in speaking Macedonian. It turned out that I knew the older woman's grandchildren.



Yes, that "Coffee! Coffee! Coffee!" scene was good, as was the scene in which he was mugged.

Bedstor, I have to agree with DG. We do have many distinctly different accents here in America, and we use different words too. Many moons ago on my first trip to Iowa I sometimes had difficulty understanding the locals. When the checkout person at a supermarket in Iowa asked me “do you want a sack” I said no because I really didn’t know what she meant, I thought maybe she was trying to sell me something. I figured out what she meant as I juggled the items I purchased to my car. We call it a bag here.

I also noticed that the folks out there had trouble understanding me too, especially the younger kids. Asides from my North Shore Long Island accent I talk fast, even for people that live around here and the area I live in is probably the speed talking capital of the world.

Speaking of my area, there are many different accents right in my own back yard! (Long Island, New York) While I am no linguist I can easily tell the different accents in people around here and beyond.

Just on Long Island alone there five distinctly different accents. The East End has sort of a New England accent while folks on the North Shore sound different than those on the South Shore. The people who live in Queens sound like they live in another country when compared to those that live in Brooklyn. Most Brooklyn raised people I know still have a problem if you tell them they live on Long Island. They say they live in the city. While they do live in one of the boroughs of New York City it is located on Long Island. (As is Queens ) That is a lot of accents for an island that is only about 170 miles long and 14 miles wide.

Once you head off the Island the accents change rapidly. Folks from Northern New Jersey have different accents than those in Central and Southern New Jersey. People from the Lower Hudson Valley (New York) have their own accent, and it changes by the time you get to New Paltz. Head North West from there and the folks in Central New York State sound different than those in Western, and Northern New York State.

What most people (That are not from around here) call a Long Island accent is the South Shore variety. I must admit I cringe whenever I hear that accent when interviewing a South Shore Long Islander on television. When Hollywood gets a hold of it, man it gets ugly!

And DG my Lung Eyelund accent aint’ too heavy.

This may be of interest: (registration required)

http://www.mouton-online.com/anae.php

Oh, THIS is cool.

Where did all those British accents come from? I work with a guy from the Yorkshire, (Northern?) England area. His voice sounds so proper to my ears. But listening to "Creature Comforts" over the weekend...wow! lots of different "Englishes" being spoken. Took me a while to pick up on the Scottish accent on "Velvet Soup" without the captioning being on. And what's this "Geordie" accent?

Last week I asked everyone what their "shed-u-al" would be for the next quarter and my co-worker yelled, "Damn! I've been trying for 20 years to assimilate my English with American and you come along and say THAT!" LOL (We pronounce it sked-chule.)

The people I have the most trouble understanding are those with a thick southern accent. The ones who say "ice" and it sounds like ass.

Yes Raku, Yorkshire is in the North . And some English people do say 'sked-yule'

Old American accents have their origin in just two local accents of England. The first permanent settlement, in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 was of people from the West Country ( the counties of Devon, Cornwall,Somerset and Dorset) and so had the characteristic burr of that region. This pattern of speech can still be heard in some communities of the Jamestown area, especially Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay.

The second settlement was 13 years later, when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at what is now Plymouth, Mass. That town is now named after a port in the West Country from which settlers sailed but these settlers were from East Anglia and the East of England generally. Their speech patterns reflected the speech of these places, different from those of the West.(Incidentally Cambridge and Boston are a city and a town of the East of England ) Their accents dominated what is now New England and their speech patterns are still the main influence in this area.

In Britain itself, and seemingly the world over, accents have developed within communities that are separate from others. This process can be quite swift, if subtle. A local travelling the coast of South Wales passes by the foot of valleys each of which has a different accent to the next; these are only a few miles apart but separated by high, impassable, hills. The population of each is there because of coal mining, a business not developed until the mid-C19, so the accents have evolved in a short time. (They sound pretty much the same to English ears, but are clearly different to locals )

Accents develop, says Professor Bob Ladd, Professor of Linguistics, Edinburgh University, for two reasons. One is simply social.People try to talk so as to be accepted by others around them and tailor their speech, consciously or unconsciously, to this end.One result is that the speech of different generations commonly sounds different from that of the one before ( this is notable even in the British Royal Family, where the Queen sounds different from her daughter Princess Anne who in turn sounds different from her daughter Zara Phillips).The other reason is simply phonetic.That is a kind of evolution of sounds that may happen gradually without any conscious effort on the part of any community and which explains how languages have words of common origin which have become new words through changes in vowel and consonants e.g Latin 'centum' is "kentum" but French 'centime' is "sentime" and Italian 'cento' is "chento". Taking Australia as his example,another linguist, Steve Tanner in New Scientist, says the Southern English of the C19 had the word 'bad' sounding more like 'bed' than it does in modern British 'standard' pronunciation.That's because in England the more open A sound was the sound of the North and Midlands areas which boomed demographically from the mid-C19,while the South stagnated. The result is that 'bad' as 'bed' was eventually only heard among 'posh' Southern English 'toffs' and in 1940s newsreels. Today it sounds quaint. However C19 Australian colonists were mostly Southern. They kept their 'bed' sound. Later arrivals from England, over ensuing decades, would try to be accepted and would use the same vowel sound, 'bad' sounding more like 'bed' than they had had it. Meanwhile, avoiding confusion with the word 'bed' itself meant gradually shifting the prounciation of 'bed' to a sound close to 'bid'. So we have an evolution of a basic Australian accent from an English one in the space of less than two hundred years. And, we may note, a combination of gradual phonetic change and of people deliberately adopting what they heard in others.

PS Raku: 'ass' and 'ice we don't have but I was amazed to hear a woman of only about 35 years old say " They are still in the hice" (meaning 'house'). It was like meeting a living example of an C18 lady ! There must be tiny enclaves of 'posh' people who are living fossils, somewhere in Berkshire or the other Home Counties, who emerge only for auctions in country houses (this was at a Sotheby's sale in Norfolk). Either that or they'd hired an actress to give 'authentic' colour

quote:

People try to talk so as to be accepted by others around them and tailor their speech, consciously or unconsciously, to this end.

Have to agree with this statement and I know in my case it's an unconscious act, which once I'm aware of what I'm doing, become a self-conscious act. Example- a co-worker from the Ukraine and I chat every day and the long we talk the more I fall into her way of speaking English. So I started studying Russian, her first language, and I understand her English much better. I understand where her syntax is coming from.

Visiting my hometown will leave me sounding more Southern Ohio/Northern Kentucky and my Spousal Dude will point that out though I don't hear myself until he does.

Now here's one for the ears- we went to a double feature a few years ago. The first film was "Oh, Brother Where Art Thou". Very twangy, country accents. The second feature was "Snatch". Can't even begin to describe Brad Pitt's speech in that, but my brain actually HURT for the first half hour of the film. Get the dvds and try this at home taking about a 15 minute break between the two movies. Try not to stop and scream. Then if you're really brave, dig up an Australian film like "Welcome to Whoop Whoop" and make it a triple feature.

I've always thought our language skills are acquired somewhere between Chomsky's black box theory and the behavorist theory. We do have some hard wiring, that can be rewired a bit, but we are certainly influenced and taught by what we hear (or see if you learn a sign language.) Anyone who signs in silence for a few hours will tell you it can be difficult to switch back to audio communication. I imagine that same might apply to anyone who is bilingual and spends hours in one language and then switches to another.