Why do Americans speak differently?

[daib0]

Why do Americans speak differently? Just stumbled across this ... different words, or sometimes same words but different pronounciations

Move your mouse to-and-fro here:

http://www.languageguide.org/ingl%C3%A9 ... /escritura

Just wondered - why did the two English languages separate so much during the past couple of hundred years?

[Sniffer]

That passed 10 minutes with some linguistic scratching.
The change in the language comes from over 400 years of separation. Language develops and adapts at a fair lick. Shakespeare wrote in English 400 years ago and his work gives us problems. Chaucer's original text would flummox all but an Old English scholar and yet he was writing only 200 years before Shakespeare. As to the sound, US English is rhotic (ie they pronounce their Rs) much like the West Country where a lot of the migrants came from, but also, much of the English spoken here in the 16th/17th centuries was rhotic. It was only later in the 17th century that the Poshies developed their own way of talking and people started to tone down their inner pirate.

[Sniffer]

As for the Period/Full Stop conundrum I found this on Wiki.
"The name "period" is first attested (as the Latin loanword peridos) in Ælfric of Eynsham's Old English treatment on grammar. There, it is distinguished from the full stop (the distinctio) and continues the Greek "underdot"'s earlier function as a comma between phrases. It shifted its meaning to a dot marking a full stop in the works of the 16th-century grammarians. In 19th-century texts, both British English and American English were consistent in their usage of the terms "period" and "full stop". The word "period" was used as a name for what printers often called the "full point" or the punctuation mark that was a dot on the baseline and used in several situations. The phrase "full stop" was only used to refer to the punctuation mark when it was used to terminate a sentence. At some point during the 20th century, British usage diverged, adopting "full stop" as the more generic term, while American English continued to retain the traditional usage."
So we developed and they didn't. Or they are using the original English. Or...Or...Or...

[daib0]

very interesting indeed!

[Deleted User 728]

I like the way you can almost draw a map of overlapping accents, noting the similarities and differences between each region.

Hampshire is a good example because half the people sound like typical south-eastern mockneys, while the other half are the "Oooh-arr!" brigade, showing the influences of both London and the south-west on the local speech patterns.

I went to a posh school and have a flat, BBC-style accent but occasionally - maybe once a week - I'll let out a twang myself, usually on an ending like "-er" as in, say, "closer" when I'll sound like one of the Wurzels

It always shocks me, but not many other people notice it because they're all doing it all the time already.


If you look on a global scale, a lot of the east coast Americans with that "Noo Yoik" thing going on sound really close to Irish - anyone from the Boston/New York part is likely to be of Irish descent anyway, so that would explain it.
The actor Aidan Gillen illustrates this brilliantly in The Wire (based in Baltimore) with his accent for the region and then in Game Of Thrones when he reverts to his more normal Irish, but even then it's a kind of hybrid. You can clearly see how the sound would've developed over time.



As for the southern drawl though, I really don't know ..

[Sniffer]

Very true about Hampshire, Rigger. When I worked in Basingstoke there were 2 lads from Pompey: one was a livewire Mockney you could dress in a pearly suit while the other had a delightful 'Amshurr burr. And we had a visit, once, from a lad that worked a level crossing near Newbury and he sounded like a true Bristolian. I asked where he was from and he said "Basingstoke. Born and bred".

[johnh]

Its not so odd that Americans speak differently when you consider the number of dialects in the UK. Very broadly, the dialects break down by counties but there are a number of examples of different dialects within counties. eg
the Liverpool 'scouse' dialect is totally different to the 'woolyback' dialect further north in Lancashire. I find it far easier to understand the various American dialects than, for example, a broad Geordie.

[mapperleywhite]

,,,can't seem to access the article about why Americans speak differently.....

We all know about the potential confusion about individual words...chips/crisps....tap/faucet.....hood & trunk/bonnet & boot etc but having lived in the US for a while I discovered that no-one knew what the words penultimate or fortnight meant, and if they said their child was precocious this was a good thing; or if I said I was shattered, they thought I was upset rather than tired. And one or two even confided that they found British people rather intimidating because they frequently had a better command of the language and a wider vocabulary.

On a slightly different note I started my career at a company near Belper, north of Derby. Once a year a guy from HR in company HQ in Cleveland OH would come over and join in a meeting of the staff consultative committee. Representing the shop floor was one Jack Brentnall, who came from over the hill and down in the valley from a town called Wirksworth. An interpreter was always brought in to help the American understand what Jack said.

[daib0]

I'm told that when they first screened "Eastenders" in the US the Washington Post published daily a list of cockney words that they were going to encounter in the next episode!!!

[daib0]

A RR member originally from Henley-on-Thames writes:

"When my wife and I first got together back in 2004, one day we were working together, doing housework, decorating or gardening (I can't remember the exact details) and I said to her "whats to do", meaning what jobs were left to be done. She immediately blurted back, in a very firm voice "nothing, why?", like I'd said something awful. It turns out that in Lancashire that means there's something wrong.

The next time we were in Lancashire, she put it to the test for me and said "whats to do" to her Dad, and the response was exactly the same"