When the United States had just become independent, did Americans still eat British food and speak with British accents?
Posted by GrayRainfall@reddit | AskAnAmerican | View on Reddit | 44 comments
Here, “British accent” does not refer only to a modern accent from some particular part of Britain, but to any native accent spoken anywhere in the British Isles at that time.
ThrowawayMod1989@reddit
Some isolated pockets still sound more British.
Islander Brouge/ “Hoi Toiders
BullsOnParadeFloats@reddit
Linguists usually say that american accents (including canada) in certain isolated pockets are closer to their original European accents than the accents in most of those European countries. Most of the English accents are completely different than the ones of the 18th century, as many of the peasant class changed their speech patterns to imitate the royalty.
Also, the Jamaican accent closely resembles western Irish, as the British used Irish indentured servants to teach them English.
Acceptable_Tea3608@reddit
The British used Irish indentured people to work and not exclusively as tutors. There were British people living on the Island they could learn language from. The Irish worked where they were put--from servant to field.
IReplyWithLebowski@reddit
There’s similar isolates in the UK as well though.
Here’s a good answer about the development of American accents: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/OycvpxUnHD
BullsOnParadeFloats@reddit
Edited it to working class to be more accurate
Tbf, I did write that around 5:30am
Significant-Dance-43@reddit
Nah, we looked a lot like Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger. And, we spoke with the accents of Australians playing Americans.
Altruistic_Role_9329@reddit
The British changed their accent and food out of spite over the American Revolution.
ExplanationNo8603@reddit
You can't just change your account over night, and there were more then just British people here, but people from all over the world.
As for the food yes and no, as we didn't have access to all the British food and had access to different foods.
3Duder@reddit
A study showed that researchers in the antarctic begin to form a shared accent. So, not overnight but a lot quicker than most people assumed.
ReactionAble7945@reddit
This shouldnt be in ask american. This should probably be sent as an email to Smithsonian or at least ask a historian.
As I understand it... The usa at the time of the revolution had French, british, Germans, spanish, irish.... people in the Americas.
The accent was not consistent. If you grew up in France... If you grew up in Germany...
If you were in a small town of irish...your kids would sound Irish.
Same with food, but a lot of food is about what you have and making it taste the way you want. If you garden you know the fun of having a great harvest of something you really dont like a lot of.. so now what do you do to make it OK to eat.
RogerGoodell69420@reddit
Nope, we all started speaking like hillbillies and smoking briskets when the Declaration of Independence was signed!
TillPsychological351@reddit
There's at least one surviving letter of a Continental Army soldier from Connecticut where he complains that he can't understand the accents of soldiers from other colonies. So, not only did they keep their accents, even in what was becoming the US, they already spoke with distinct regional accents.
NedThomas@reddit
Most, if not all, of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence had British accents.
GlitterFallWar@reddit
According to an article I read years ago that I can't find or properly cite, if you want to hear Shakespeare performed the way his audiences would have heard it, go to rural West Virginia.
The Brits didn't start dropping their Rs until around 1810-1820, and they did so deliberately.
In the late 1700s, you ate what was regionally available, so London vs Philadelphia food might have used the same techniques but different ingredients.
JimBones31@reddit
They were still English and welsh and Irish and Dutch ethnically. They didn't lose their ethnicity when they declared their independence.
dragon-queen@reddit
We’re talking about their accents though. And when they declared their independence, many generations of people who had never been to England or Ireland had already been born in the U.S.
Pleasant_Studio9690@reddit
Exactly. The Mayflower had arrived over 150 years before. The majority of my own family tree traces their arrival to the 1620's and 30's.
OrcaFins@reddit
No one's accent changed when Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence.
JimBones31@reddit
The day the declaration was signed, they didn't all go to accent training.
allochthonous_debris@reddit
Accents can diverge fairly quickly, and the colonies began developing their own accents as soon as the native born population began outnumbering the British immigrant population. In An Account of Two Voyages To New England, published more than a century before the US declared it's independence, the author comments on how people from Boston were pronouncing words differently than people from England.
The diets of the colonists had also diverged from the typical British diet. The first colonists to arrive in the 1600s initially tried to replicate the food they were familiar with but they found it was easier to substitute local ingredients like corn (maize), squash, and beans. The colonists also had a higher level of meat consumption due to access to wild game than their contemporaries in Britain. They also adopted versions of indigenous foods into their diets like baked beans, maple syrup, and Indian pudding (a porridge made from corn meal and molasses).
ZaphodG@reddit
They spoke German in Pennsylvania.
Major-Assumption539@reddit
Early American food was basically a hodgepodge of British food, and new foods from the local areas of the colonies, including a good many Native American foods. Basically they took what they knew and adapted it to what was actually available locally.
I can’t speak as to when a distinct “American colonial” accent appeared that was entirely distinct from the accents found in Britain at the time but it’s been known by linguists for a while now that new accents spring up pretty quickly, so it’s safe to say that within a couple decades of the colonies founding you likely would find some speech patterns and accents that were entirely native to the colonies.
streetcar-cin@reddit
From linguistics I have heard ,us is closer to British revolution accent than modern uk
IReplyWithLebowski@reddit
That would be incorrect. Here’s a really good answer about the development of American accents: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/OycvpxUnHD
TLDR: both modern American and British accents retain elements of past British accents, but developed differently.
LeSkootch@reddit
Thanks for that link. That was a great read.
PhysicsCentrism@reddit
Taking what they know and adapting to locally available ingredients is also how the US got its own unique versions of other countries food. Like Chinese or Italian food in America.
skookumeyes@reddit
That’s more of a Regional and Generational adaptation. New York and Massachusetts had different immigration pathways. NY Older Americans at that time largely were educated in Europe (Dutch, French, German) but had lived under British rule for decades. Younger generations were often bilingual as speaking and writing English became more standardized institutionally. English with various regional accents would have better described how people sounded.
yellowdaisycoffee@reddit
This may be a better question for r/AskHistorians!
Ill-Butterscotch1337@reddit
Many people in the US still speak with a form of British accent that was common during those times. In fact, some people in the US, such as in Boston and NY, speak with a non-rhotic accent similar to the many modern British accents which was trendy at the time and thus exported to the major ports of the colonies.
jackofspades49@reddit
Our ancestors abandoend a lot of things back the.
Our accents.
The u in color and several other words.
Tea
Using "quite" as an insult
The h in herb.
But we gained so much more than we lost.
We could hear our vowels again.
We invented the hot dog and the concept of democracy.
The V8 engine.
The electric guitar solo
That all happeend the same year we left britain, and wouldn't have been possible if we'd remained.
All those grea tinventions and amazing progress is why we got elected by the united states of europe nd asis, but just the cool countries, to be the world police force and make sure everyone could be as cool as we were.
hobbes747@reddit
Benjamin Franklin invented the V6, not the V8. The V8 was a Confederacy based invention.
IReplyWithLebowski@reddit
Tell me the origin of the word “democracy”.
Revolutionary_Gas551@reddit
The reason coffee is so popular in America is that drinking it was considered a rebellion to the taxes England put on tea.
Push_the_button_Max@reddit
The Ancient Greeks created Democracy, not the U.S.
JimBones31@reddit
I think you responded to the wrong post?
Thelonius16@reddit
I guess those things instantly became American food and American accents.
I have read or heard that American accents today are more similar to British accents from back then. I’m sure someone here has the details.
Queasy-Ad-9930@reddit
Generally, the more isolated a group of people are, the LESS their language tends to change. So people living on islands (Tangier Island) and in rural or mountainous regions with little influx (Appalachia) tend to be the “best preserved” dialects of an older English.
That’s a bit of an intellectual disconnect because a lot of people often see those same groups of people as intellectually inferior and “backwards” while simultaneously believing that older English dialects were more “proper” or fancier.
JimBones31@reddit
There are pockets of more traditional accents. Tangier Island in Chesapeake is a good example.
therealdrewder@reddit
In 1600 both groups spoke an identical language. By 1776 they spoke related but distinct accents. Part of this is the fact that the British accent isn't really a thing, instead it is hundreds of distinct regional and class based accents. Americans mixed these accents and leveled them. Also Americans developed a lot of loan words from American Indians.
After 1776 there was significantly more isolation between the two societies. They both evolved separately and the Americans felt no obligation to follow the British lead. For example when the British dropped rhoticity, the use of the letter R in most contexts, the Americans largely retained it. A similar dynamic for many words like dropping the h in herb was originally universal but the British started pronouncing it.
A lot of these changes happened when the British upper class wanted to sound less lower class and they associated french with class and emulated it.
So to answer your question in 1776 the language divergence had already started but it accelerated after the revolution.
Cheap_Coffee@reddit
As soon as we declared independence our accents changed, yes.
vergilius_poeta@reddit
It's worse than that--British people spoke with American accents. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english
workswithpipe@reddit
Nope, the gig was up so they reverted back to their true form.
Hybrid487@reddit
They spoke the same accents they used the whole time. Accent's don't just change because you are somewhere new, they evolve over time. And I'm sure their food was influenced by what they grew up with but with being somewhere new, they ate and experimented with new foods too
bestray06@reddit
A good resource for this is Townsends on YouTube, they heavily cover the Americas during the 18th century from poor settler to soldier, to wealthy aristocrat