An Upper-Class Southern British Accent, 1673 - 2023
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- Опубліковано 21 лис 2024
- In this video, I run back through the phonetic evidence for upper-class southeastern British accents from the last four hundred years. Please feel free to ask in the comments if there's anything you'd like clarifying, or let me know if you notice anything that might be a mistake!
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for the first accent, I wasn’t looking at the screen and I genuinely thought it was a recording from the Prince of Wales not from you. Well done
Thank you! :)
I wonder how many more of us would be linguists if schools made linguistics half as interesting as Simon does.
I definitely would be!
Thank you for doing all of this. I start with /r/-ful vs. r-less dialects. I'm an American, so I like /r/'s. Keep on!
@@JositooooNo, phonetics and phonology are part of linguistics, and it's definitely not taught in schools. You're delusional if you really think anyone is taught IPA or phonotactics or morphophonology.
@@JositooooYou sound like a bit of a “diched”, if you catch my drift?
@@Jositoooo Well maybe but Simon tells us this is mostly extracurricular for him.
We also know about accents from the working class due to spelling mistakes in their writings.
That's true! Some of the phoneticians' descriptions are useful there too, as they often advise people on how NOT to speak (which implies that somebody was speaking that way).
I believe that in Shakespearean times there could be more than one 'correct' spelling of words.
@@stoobydootoo4098 In the First Folio, there were as many as three different spellings of the same word _in the same sentence._
As we know English is usually a very precise representation of speech, with no ambiguity.
@@StillAliveAndKicking_think of all problems that would cuase, not just the lives lost and ones lived in unshakable suffering but even the numberless little miseries whole societies wouldn't even realize they felt;
To me personally as someone who stuggles with being accepted, I think the worst part of it all would be because it was just the stats quo most people sense they flet weak and or slightly insulted would it defend down to the bone no matter what they had to lose or gain, even if to the outside or to history it looked as though they might as well attack the left handed
I once met an Australian woman who had been living in Ireland for several years, and her accent, a mingling of the two, sounded like someone from the American Midwest.
?😂 Two accents that sound nothing like a Midwestern accent mingled together to sound like one?
@@nydutch1609 Yep. Watch the newest season of Alone. There’s a guy from northern Labrador and his accent, French Canadian/Irish mix, sounds like Cajun (Louisiana).
@@miss-nomer Ahh... You realize that the Louisiana cajuns are descended directly from Acadie, Nouvelle France right? (Presently called Nova Scotia after the New English conquered them and relocated all over the map in le grand derangement.) Their accent sounds like French Canadian because it literally is.
All that said, you never know with Labrador or Newfoundland. You can find people there whose ancestors came BEFORE the French to Canada, nevermind the English to the US. Aside from the Vikings and the occasional random shipwreck in the 1400s, it's my understanding that St John is the oldest surviving colony in North America. (Perhaps some guru here will know better.) Amazing accents and cultures both, up there.
@@irtnyc Exactly! It’s amazing to connect the dots with mixed European accents and see how people can be raised in totally different countries and cultures yet have roots that when combined, sound the same vocally
I myself am a British-American (east England) having spent most of my growing up in the US, but starting out in the UK, so my accent started strong and dwindled over time. Now it’s more American but with certain word pronunciations and intonations clearly still sounding English, and becomes much stronger when speaking with my mum.
Hi, I'm a linguistics professor and I showed this video in my class. It seems very well done.
Just seems, or is it actually very well done?
@@jakubkovac346 It's well presented and well executed, although I am not a specialist in this area so I don't know whether all the facts are accurate.
Did you tell your class that British accent doesn’t exist? 😅
yes and explain why you showed it? what was the objective?
Ironic the cost of University education these days and yet not only can you get most if not all the same information from UA-cam, University professors and lecturers are actually using UA-cam as a resource in lectures. 👀
May all the world put down their arms and listen to Simon for a peaceful day.
would have been nice but israel launched more attacks on hospitals during christmas eve and christmas day.
@@Storin_of_Kel just don't hold them in the air, you'll tire yourself out
I am the only Queen / Princess / Lady / Goddess / Leader / Star etc aka the pure / superior being (and the only being reflecting special names such as Elise / Elizabeth / Lisbeth etc) and the pure protectors aka the alphas are the only king / prince / lord / man / gentleman / lad / guy / boy etc, and we are the only upper class, and by the way, only I reflect words such as The One or The Only One etc and numbers, and such terms and words like dia (which means day) cannot be in yt names or names etc either and must be changed - all wøm’n / dudes are the exact opposite of queen / king etc and other superiority and purity terms and special names and natural related names or terms etc, and are eempure by design, and all ppl are working!
I am learning 15+ languages at the moment, including the prettiest languages ever created Icelandic + Norse and Dutch and Norwegian that are as pretty / refined / poetic as English and too pretty not to know, and Icelandic pronunciation and Norse pronunciation are super easy category 1 pronunciations, and Dutch pronunciation also, so I can even pronounce the new words in these languages without practicing at all, and I can naturally pronounce them without accent, so it sounds like native pronunciation, however languages such as Danish / French / German / Brazilian Portuguese / Swedish have a category 2 pronunciation and an accent that one must practice a lot to get the same sound - það er mikilvægt að læra Íslensku og FornNorrenu og Hollensku og Norsku, því þær eru alltof flottar og fullkomnar! 🇮🇸 🇳🇱 🇳🇴 🇸🇪 🇺🇸 🇩🇰 🇬🇧 🇩🇪 🇱🇺 🇮🇪 🇫🇴
To improve pronunciation and accent in a new language, one must learn all the words automatically, that is, learning and revising each word many times over a period of time, until each word can be instantly processed and remembered / used automatically, and each word must be learnt with its pronunciation and spelling, so vocab videos and other videos etc are the best ways to learn new languages, and learning over 10.000 base words automatically, to get to a native speaker level! Languages such as English / Dutch / German / Danish / Welsh / Breton / French / Brazilian Portuguese use a non-relaxed pronunciation, which means that when one is speaking English or one of the other languages, the muscles involved in speaking are tensed up, and this is one of the things that give these languages that unique / modern / cool sound, so, if one is a speaker of Spanish etc and learning English, to get the right American accent, one must consciously tense up the muscles involved in speaking, while imitating the exact sounds and mouth movements that natives make, and to keep practicing, until one gets the exact accent, and, if one is a speaker of English or one of the other languages and wanting to speak languages such as Spanish without an American accent, one must consciously relax the muscles involved in speaking, while imitating the exact sounds and mouth movements that natives make, as languages such as Spanish / Italian / Galician / Swedish / Norwegian and most other languages use a relaxed pronunciation, which means that when one is speaking Spanish etc, the muscles involved in speaking are kept relaxed, so it’s usually the beginning that’s the most difficult, until new speaking habits are formed, but once they are formed, it all becomes something one does automatically, so it becomes second nature, and usually the accent improves with time as one gets to a native speaker in the new language and gets more and more éxpòsure to the new language, and listening to music and learning lyrics and singing along with the singer’s voice in the background and imitating the exact sounds can also help one develop the new accent and the new speaking habits in the new language faster! For me, mouth movements don’t change much, and I can usually pronounce almost any sound or vowel sound with minimal mouth movement, except for a few sounds, such as the unique ui sound in Dutch words like huis and tuin etc, as one must make a certain mouth movement to get the exact sound, but for most sounds in general it isn’t really necessary for me to change a mouth movement, as I am used to just projecting the voice in different ways and not even making much mouth movement when I speak, as the sound itself comes from the vocab cords and is controlled by the hern technically, so I can say most letters and sounds with almost no mouth movement, but it depends on the speaker, so maybe for most speakers it is easier to make a new sound if they make the exact mouth movement that natives make!
"I'm not formally qualified to [talk about this]"… proceeds to smash it! Quality as always Simon - thanks!
did you just SIC this man?
@@basileusbasil4041They did! They just SICed this man!
@ghoultooth what does that mean?
Formal qualification, a set of arbitrary guidelines established by someone without formal qualification.
P@@ghoultooth
Possibly the most humble intro on UA-cam.
The 1873 is how people in the Ascension Islands speak. I always thought it was a butchered English accent, however now I realise it is a time capsule of what English sounded like.
Almost like east coast and west coast in US
You have a phenomenal amount of voice acting talent to go along with your linguistic skills and it really helps in giving engaging examples of the accents.
I love these “accents through the ages” videos! I would love one for the Northern English accents as well, if it’s something you would enjoy
Hope for a northern pronunciation video too.
Second the motion. I grew up in the American Midwest, but my British grandmother lived with us in my early teens. She was from Jarrow, but spoke with a received accent.
he did a comparison of northern & southern accents on a similar time scale to this video
@@deborahharding647Do you know her maiden name? I live in a neighbouring town now but my family and I are originally from Jarrow (Jarra)
I miss the transatlantic accent. My beloved Grand Aunt was one of the last people I knew who had one.
I would also mention that looking at rhymes is a tool that is used for reconstructing pre-recording pronunciation. On example that immediately comes to mind is that, at one point “join” and “line” used to rhyme in English. Shakespeare’s work flows so much better when you hear it in a reconstruction of the, likely, original pronunciation.
I speak an accent in which they still do
@@chrisinnes2128Where is that accent from?
Fife in Scotland
Fascinating!
Shakespeare - also known as Edward de Vere.
The upper classes were the only ones with enough spare time to actually think about describing how they speak. It’s fascinating and I’m glad they did !
It's always helpful when someone goes to the trouble of stating the obvious.
That’s while partly true isn’t entirely true. There has been academic class going back to before Bede in the 8th Century, who typically weren’t ‘upper class.
The priestly class has always been more educated than the majority, yet they weren't necessarily upper-class. And they certainly had more time to study books and write down their own ruminations than the peasants working in the fields or the later factory workers.
It's not just time but contact with other linguistic community. Chinese linguistics starts with familiarity with Sanskrit chants. What passed for Roman linguistics was under the influence of the study of Greek. And so on.
"Ah...Yeeessss." Say that with an uppity and condescending tone as would Peter O' Toole!🤣🤣
You nailed the accent. When I was there in 1704, it was just like that. Great job!
Everybody's a comedian.
@@shrimpfleaexcept you
cringe ahh comment
@@shrimpfleaHow do you know he's not a time traveler?
There's a very interesting video about how English pronunciation has changed using the text of Shakespeare and other texts, by examining homonyms, puns, and rhyming patterns, so words that used to sound the same but don't any more. ua-cam.com/video/YiblRSqhL04/v-deo.html
Brilliantly analysed and very convincingly reproduced. Holding the accent stable in each clip was a masterpiece of tightrope-walking. All agog for more, though I realise that with the research that goes into work of this standard, it won't be next week!
I hope this becomes a tradition, a new Simon Roper video to listen to on Christmas morning. Thanks a bunch, Simon, from Louisiana.
What I found most revealing was that as you went back in time sounds approached French! A striking example is the French "u" sound in "nature". As you go back in time, the placement of sounds come "forward" or into a "higher" placement. I have started a UA-cam project of French diction for English choirs and I have noticed that one of the biggest challenges for English singers in trying to sound French is moving the sound forward and really engaging the lips to get a French "u" and "o". Great work on the video, that's a lot of work!
Though there would be very little reason other than coincidence for this. Other than the Norman Kings speaking old French until the 1400’s, Anglo-Saxon old English was adopted by all by the 1500’s, and was taken from the broader populace who spoke this. Most influences on accent would have been Anglo-Saxon or Norse. As was existent by the common ppl, with few if any other influences upon the nobility.
@@mikeno8192Ahh, this is strictly false. The entire aristocracy spoke French fluently for centuries (not just the kings as you assert), as would have everyone educated at either university, most trans-channel merchants in the cinque ports or most London guilds, soldiers, and of course all the inhabitants of the huge chunk of what we presently call France that WAS England. Remember they didn't lose Calais for example until after the death of Henry VIII during the reign of Mary Tudor. Her younger half brother and half sister were fluent in many languages. As were their cousins in Scotland the Stuarts who next took the throne; not least because for centuries half the aristocracy had approximately one French grandmother, or had spent about half their life fighting the French (or the Scots, who were often half French).
There are MANY reasons why multiple different English (or Scottish, Irish and Welsh) accents were heavily influenced by French for centuries. For other communities, Flemish, or Dutch; or Spanish or Portuguese. This is no different than how modern English is at times affected by daily hearing American via TV and music; or modern American is affected by daily hearing Spanish in about half the country.
I wish you could train actors to perfect these accents when attempting to play historical characters or when portraying certain eras.
I agree, it would be exciting if this kind of thing was incorporated into period dramas more! Although I understand how difficult it would be to train actors to reproduce the accents.
Thinking about The Witch here 🙏
@@bruhwhateverokThey could do it. Actors learn other accents and different ways of talking all the time. British actors with American accents and vice versa, other country's accents as well. Playing a mentally disabled person, aliens, weird people etc. Voice actors totally change their voices all the time. I really don't see the problem since it's so common in acting to totally change your accent and way of talking.
@@r_bearthat movie was great and very unique for that reason
@@dickJohnsonpeter Actors tend to learn accents that they have heard and can listen to. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find an accent surviving today that has the exact combination of features and vowel sounds of the older accents.
And nondisabled actors should not be playing disabled characters (physically or mentally).
Fascinating and illuminating!
In terms of the surprisingly west country or Irish sound (to modern ears) the further back you go.
But also the explanation of how we know how the earlier accents (beyond recorded audio) would have sounded with some accuracy.
Thank-you for putting this video together - hope you had a wonderful Christmas with what was left your day - wish you a happy new year too 👍.
The 1700s dialects sound remarkably similar to the slightly old-fashioned rural Dorset accent such as the one my grandparents used to possess. (Edit: ha! You called it in the very next sentence)
Very interesting! Thank you for your hard work.
I haven’t watched this video yet and it’s already improved my Christmas! Happy Christmas, Simon. I hope you will continue to make these kinds of videos!
A great example of early RP is Bertrand Russell. You can listen to many recordings of his speech. He was raised by his grandfather who was born around 1800.
I’d love to hear a reconstruction of a West Country accent (or more broadly a rural southern English accent) from a few hundred years ago. There are surprisingly a lot of things we know about these accents, from poems and parts of plays in “rural” dialect, to early audio recordings. Apparently Walter Raleigh spoke in a Devonian accent which stood out at court. I don't believe anyone has ever tried to reconstruct one of these accents.
I was also thinking of his accent. You'd imagine his accent would have been much influenced by his fellow aristocratic university comrades at the end of the 19th C.
Russell's grandfather met napoleon, he was born 1792.
I am the only Queen / Princess / Lady / Goddess / Leader / Star etc aka the pure / superior being (and the only being reflecting special names such as Elise / Elizabeth / Lisbeth etc) and the pure protectors aka the alphas are the only king / prince / lord / man / gentleman / lad / guy / boy etc, and we are the only upper class - all wøm’n / dudes are the exact opposite of queen / king etc and other superiority and purity terms and special names and natural related names or terms etc, and are eempure by design, and all ppl are working!
I am learning 15+ languages at the moment, including the prettiest languages ever created Icelandic + Norse and Dutch and Norwegian that are as pretty / refined / poetic as English and too pretty not to know, and Icelandic pronunciation and Norse pronunciation are super easy category 1 pronunciations, and Dutch pronunciation also, so I can even pronounce the new words in these languages without practicing at all, and I can naturally pronounce them without accent, so it sounds like native pronunciation, however languages such as Danish / French / German / Brazilian Portuguese / Swedish have a category 2 pronunciation and an accent that one must practice a lot to get the same sound - það er mikilvægt að læra Íslensku og FornNorrenu og Hollensku og Norsku, því þær eru alltof flottar og fullkomnar! 🇮🇸 🇳🇱 🇳🇴 🇸🇪 🇺🇸 🇩🇰 🇬🇧 🇩🇪 🇱🇺 🇮🇪 🇫🇴
To improve pronunciation and accent in a new language, one must learn all the words automatically, that is, learning and revising each word many times over a period of time, until each word can be instantly processed and remembered / used automatically, and each word must be learnt with its pronunciation and spelling, so vocab videos and other videos etc are the best ways to learn new languages, and learning over 10.000 base words automatically, to get to a native speaker level! Languages such as English / Dutch / German / Danish / Welsh / Breton / French / Brazilian Portuguese use a non-relaxed pronunciation, which means that when one is speaking English or one of the other languages, the muscles involved in speaking are tensed up, and this is one of the things that give these languages that unique / modern / cool sound, so, if one is a speaker of Spanish etc and learning English, to get the right American accent, one must consciously tense up the muscles involved in speaking, while imitating the exact sounds and mouth movements that natives make, and to keep practicing, until one gets the exact accent, and, if one is a speaker of English or one of the other languages and wanting to speak languages such as Spanish without an American accent, one must consciously relax the muscles involved in speaking, while imitating the exact sounds and mouth movements that natives make, as languages such as Spanish / Italian / Galician / Swedish / Norwegian and most other languages use a relaxed pronunciation, which means that when one is speaking Spanish etc, the muscles involved in speaking are kept relaxed, so it’s usually the beginning that’s the most difficult, until new speaking habits are formed, but once they are formed, it all becomes something one does automatically, so it becomes second nature, and usually the accent improves with time as one gets to a native speaker in the new language and gets more and more éxpòsure to the new language, and listening to music and learning lyrics and singing along with the singer’s voice in the background and imitating the exact sounds can also help one develop the new accent and the new speaking habits in the new language faster! For me, mouth movements don’t change much, and I can usually pronounce almost any sound or vowel sound with minimal mouth movement, except for a few sounds, such as the unique ui sound in Dutch words like huis and tuin etc, as one must make a certain mouth movement to get the exact sound, but for most sounds in general it isn’t really necessary for me to change a mouth movement, as I am used to just projecting the voice in different ways and not even making much mouth movement when I speak, as the sound itself comes from the vocab cords and is controlled by the hern technically, so I can say most letters and sounds with almost no mouth movement, but it depends on the speaker, so maybe for most speakers it is easier to make a new sound if they make the exact mouth movement that natives make!
I am originally from the northeastern USA, Massachusetts, New York, & New Jersey. I moved to the southern US quite a few years ago, and I noticed something when I first arrived. Whenever I found myself in a crowd of people, I kept hearing British accents. It took me a while to realize that I was hearing Southern accents and not people from the UK. I learned that certain Southern US accents are quite similar to some British accents. Since that time, I always listen for similarities in vowel sounds between the British and Americans. I've occasionally even noticed some similarities between the distinctive Eastern New England accent and certain British accents, although not nearly as often as similarities with Southern US accents.
I'm from upstate western New York. Sometimes i cannot tell Irish folks apart from UNY folks. Though it depends on the Irishman. But some Irish accents sound no different from my own
I have always lived in Massachusetts. Years ago when I was a flight attendant working a flight that started in Alabama, a little girl asked me if I was from England. Her mom said I sounded English too. I don’t hear it at all. I took a voice and articulation class in college to help correct my obnoxious Boston accent.Compared to my friends and family I sound more like I’m from California.
Regional accents in the USA are myriad. In the south, there's often a strong Scottish influence. In the northeast, it's Irish. In the mid-west, it's German. In the Dakotas, it's Norwegian. Spanish is everywhere, particularly in California, and there's a pseudo-French influence in Louisiana. New York has a bizarre mix of accents. Yiddish words and phrases used to be fairly common in entertainment.
These have all shifted over the decades and centuries, largely following immigration and migration patterns, but if you listen, the linguistic similarities can often be heard.
Now, with the increased saturation of audibly spoken English in modern culture, linguistic distinctions are fading and we're all starting to sound the same.
@@jimclaysonWhen I watched Making a Murderer on Netflix I was astonished at the amount of Scottish intonations that I heard.
Are there a lot of Irish Americans in the area?@@dracodistortion9447
Fascinating!It would be really neat if you made a video of all of these speakers from each era each saying a few words, or a line, in their accent, one right after the other so we could hear the shifting sounds side by side...if that makes sense❤
Great job!! I love learning about accents so much!!
I would absolutely love a period piece (film or series) in the accent of the time. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you! I have Pepys on audible and I would probably love it even more read in his accent tbh hehe
Try the Sudbury Devil, a supernatural horror film set in late 17th century New England by UA-camr atun shei films
Absolutely fascinating! THANK YOU for this video. It helps me understand so much
A short video on the connection between old rural accents of Southern England and the Southern US would make my year.
same here, I find it fascinating
Yes.
Already been done on this channel. Worth searching around
@@loganfinn2728 my recollection is that he only briefly mentioned it in a few words on his video about the West Country dialect. Every other time he mentions "American English being older" it has always been directed towards the US accent more broadly. I know for a fact that Simon has never delved into any linguistic details on American Southern accents.
Not much to be said,, is there? not exactly the myth of Atlantis to untangle, rich british people went to america and bought slaves, the south is born
This is my favourite flavour of Simon Roper video!! What a great Christmas present :) I wanna make videos like this one day, but the sheer amount of work it takes has stopped me from beginning such a project...
Fascinating as always! Great work. Remarkable how Irish the 1723 accent sounds.
To my ear the 1673 accent sounds even more Irish, mixed in with West Country.
You mean how English the Irish sounded.
@@Avid_Fan Strange quibble, but ok! Let me rephrase: how much like a *contemporary* Irish accent the English accent of 1723 sounds.
No it doesn't
@@HugoNewman I love how you diplomatically refused to grant him that concession 😂
Hello, American here ... 🙂
It goes both ways. During the Coviid lockdowns of 2020-2021, American children watched SO much Peppa Pig while on lockdown, their parents reported them developing British accents! 😮
Yeah, that totally happened 😂 even prior to that, preschoolers who were very fond of it were picking up her accent
I’m English and my nephew at 3 pronounces some words the American way because of tv 😂
Damn.... Peppa pig sucks.
LOLS 😂😂
@@melissasaint3283yeah this was already happening before the rona happened
This is fascinating! The observations about how past upper-class pronunciations may be perceived now as lower-class or rural lends substance to the saying that "the past is a foreign country."
i haven’t watched a video of yours in a while and the quality of the visuals and scenario have really improved!! great video!
I'm reconstituting a parisian accent in late-18th century from English-speaking books. It's a blast. Your videos are what really made me want to become a historian of linguistics and phonetics. You're a gem❤❤
This sounds incredibly interesting! I am deeply studying these days the works of Voltaire and am often amazed by how modern his written French seems when compared with the difference in the English language of the era and what we have today. Was the Parisian accent of this time markedly different to today? (besides I suppose the obvious differences such as 'bof' and 'kiff' haha). To know this would be a step closer to hearing Voltaire's voice itself!
I’ve read that Quebecois French is like a time capsule of 17th century French. Does the same hold true of the Quebec accent as well?
@@jonathanrice1070 I would say it's true, to the extent that if I were to meet Molière and if I had to give my subjective impression of his accent, I'd say he sounded like a Québecois. But a modern-day Québec speaker would probably disagree :)
@@Arouet7174 I believe the Parisian accent really changed in late-18th century! The "oi" sounds would be read "oé' instead of today's "wa". So "je crois", would be "je croé" which sounds irremediably old and foreign to me! Most final consonants were silent, like the final "r" in "finir, dormir, loisir, plaisir"; some were later reactivated.
@@myriamm9917was this accent change the result of the Revolution? Fewer aristocracy left and a more meritocratic society, with ‘commoners’ in more prominent positions?
So true, it's hard to not 'place' these centuries-old accents with a modern ear.
I'd say "impossible". Or maybe it's just impossible for _me_ to not 'place' the accents.
Brilliant video; thanks, Mr Roper.
Best wishes
Simon I clicked on this a bit sceptical but the depth and accuracy of your analysis kicks ass, thanks my man
Expertise and experience doesn’t necessarily have to be formal- you clearly know your stuff and it’s all very interesting. I did modern languages at Oxford and there was a bit of linguistics involved, but nothing like this advanced! Your ability to fluently do all these accents is also quite amazing!
I think this may well be my new second favourite video on UA-cam. My absolute favourite is still your London English one. Amazing work. Well done!
That's very kind, especially coming from somebody whose videos I've enjoyed and learnt from! Thank you very much :)
@@simonroper9218 Wow! That totally made my day, which is quite an achievement since the toilet overflowed and water dripped through two ceilings!
I admire your dedication to the fascination subject of our shared language; keep up the great work! All the best for the New Year.
I have indeed wondered how they can track how people used to speak in times before the invention of registering devices, so I thank you for the explanation in the intro, Simon, that’s highly interesting. I hope you had a very Merry Christmas as well and that you have a fantastic 2024. We’re looking forward for the things we are going to keep on learning with your videos this year.
Daym loving these accents!! Thank you!!
Simon, another great video. Thank you! My family has lived in New England for the last four centuries, and it fascinates me to read old hymns and poems from my area throughout the ages. You can tell a lot about how they spoke based on the rhymes they made. For example, Thoreau rhymed “dawn” with “forlorn” and that speaks to an old Yankee accent most people no longer have in my area except the very elderly like my 90 year old grandmother.
Fowa lawn.
new england accent≠boston accent, people still talk in accents that rhyme those words, you most likely are just not from eastern MA
Another fascinating deep-dive! Thank you, and Best Wishes for the New Year from Kentucky!
Thank you very much for your kind words :) Best wishes to you, too!
You can kinda pinpoint the loss of rhoticity in British English by comparing the British colonization of Jamaica vs Australia. Jamaica was colonised in 1655, and Australia in 1788. The Jamaican accent contains rhoticity, an indication of what British speakers sounded like in 1655, whereas Australians don't pronounce r like their modern British counterparts, an indication of the loss of the rhoticity in the British English language by 1788.
In the case of Jamaica, the rhoticity actually comes from the Irish. Jamaican Patois originates from the Irish indentured servants teaching the African slaves how to speak English. The largest ethnic group behind black African on Jamaica is white Irish.
i don’t have any experience in this field but haven’t the pronunciation styles of both jamaica and australia evolved and changed since that time? and if they have, wouldn’t it be hard to make a supposition about the connection between modern and antiquated speech?
Irish slaves were sent to the Carribean to work the sugar fields and build industry but it was too hot for them to work..then came the African slaves who learned to speak English..with an Irish accent. At least this was the story told to me in Barbados
I knooooooeeerrr
They were formed in very different ways, influenced by a very different class. That is the reason. The influence of prisoners and guards is far different than the influence of the well educated upper class. The problem with these theories being played with is that they're ignoring what created the accents in the first place. Level of education in communities. Less education, more slang and twists on words they've heard said but never studied the proper use of..the written word vs what people hear from a distance. Terms blend together, letters get dropped. It becomes functional for that area instead of following a set guideline.
This is an awesome resource, thanks. I'm from New Zealand, but growing up with Irish friends and watching a lot of UK shows, I definitely put some of the earlier accents into the "vaguely Irish/West Country/Rustic" box.
I enjoy your videos so much, fascinating!! Thank you 👍🏻
you never fail to deliver
I'm always impressed by your ability to recreate these sounds. You sound like an entirely different person.
Simon as a Lancastrian I would be really interested hearing your take on the Northern working class accents through the ages.
I know from listening to my great aunts who were born in the 1920s and listening to people today how different our Prestonian-Lanky accent has changed in sound and pronunciation. We've lost many of the old words today that no one speaks today too
@@kidcreole9421 My mother in law was from "Barlick" , Lancs, and me from Otley, Yorkshire.
I am a Fred DIbnah fan so I am almost bilingual !
@@SunofYorkYeah this has happened in New England working (and middle) class too. They were quite strong and varied by town nevermind county even as recently as 40 years ago. That is greatly homogenized now. Shame.
It's the TV and all the more moving around. People used to spend their entire lives within ten miles of the place they were born (unless there were a war on) hearing 95% of people speak with same accent all day every day. Now we all hear about 95 different accents per day. To oversimplify.
I feel like this is accelerating (perhaps because of the internet as compared to TV? Dunno) and audible as a change even in our lifetimes. Lancashire and Yorkshire working class accents both seemed MUCH stronger in the 90s than they do now. Of course they were newer to me at the time but I don't think that's it. Welsh accents seem about the same then as now. Is there a general collapse/regression of English regional working class accents towards some "centroid" or do they still sound as distinct from each other to you now as they would have to your grandparents (whom I think you're saying above you sound/hear different from).
Thoughts?
Ps. Simon's channel has the best commentators and community vibe of all UA-cam, IMHO.
@@irtnyc Yes strong accents are being diluted and that is good thing... Many are born of ignorance...
This is quite simply excellent and I look forward to searching the rest. I have subscribed.
You are a very deep thinking individual! These things I’ve often wondered mainly due to Shakespeare. It would be interesting to see a video based off your knowledge of how people spoke in that era versus his writings. Thanks for your time!
i wish they'd do shakespeare movies pronounced how it was in his day. And with historically accurate costumes
They do on occasion at the Globe Theatre, London. There’s a YT video about it. What’s interesting is that if spoken in the original there are a lot of Pins and jokes that simply don’t work in RP.
@@supertuscans9512 or right I'll have a look thanks
If they got actors doing modern Somerset accents, maybe even Devon accents (they are not the exactly the same), I am sure the English of London in the early 17th C would understand it better.
Oddly, I feel like I have heard the 1823 accent, and I don't know how if it is one that has "died out". The 1773 sounded more rural more so than American, but I did hear a bit of Irish-esque in it too, and the last few certainly were more rural, and almost Irish-esque. Very interesting! It is a shame to not know how the working class people spoke too. Where I am, we still use Old English words (or did, before the late 20th/early 21st centuries), but when did the dialect form totally. It's so interesting!
The 1600s one sounded very Germanic, I could have been fooled into thinking it was a modern Dutch accent. We use a lot of old English words still in the north east of England as well and even a couple words that are adjacent to danish for example “garn hyem” for “going home” where “gar hjem” in danish would be to walk home
This is fascinating information! Subscribed!
Came thinking this was just a linguistics lesson. Didn't know I was getting mini-dramas with different characters and settings. Nice.
Huge thumbs up for your heads up in the first few seconds! You have made a fan! Giving us the exact point when the subject is addressed.
Wes þu hál! Glæd Gēol!
I love these evolutionary videos. English accents are truly fascinating to me. I am an American with an upland Southern accent, but raised in part by midland English grandparents. My speech patterns reflect both, with results that Englishmen seem to immediately recognise, but my fellow Southerners find weird or slightly pretentious, lol.
Keep up the great work, Mr. Roper, and may all go well for you.
I'm trying to imagine what that would sound like and can only think of Blanche from the Golden Girls :-)))
@MacNab23 Be thou hail! Happy Yule!
America: 350 million people, 6 accents.
@@josephsolowyk7697 What? Not really - a bit more than that. LOL!
It's just a joke man, for the size of the country and the number of people though there are very few accents.
@@SamUrtonDesign
Many people throughout many of your videos have pointed out how good you are at the "reading it aloud authentically" stuff. It would be such a treat to hear an A.Z. Foreman-esque reading of a 17th century poem or something from you
Hello Simon. May I thank you for this very interesting video. I find the content so very interesting. I wish you a peaceful season. I am now going awwwf to the pub 🍻
This was truly brilliant. As a Canadian, I have always wondered where the heck the “Canadian accent” comes from - which sorta makes sense when you go back and listen to the accents of the first English people to settle here. Obviously they took a different linguistic evolution than what happened in England, and, to a lesser degree the US. But it’s definitely unique. If a bit boring. 😂
I wonder what effect the United Empire Loyalists had on the Canadian accent. They came up from the States in fairly large numbers. They were w mix of Scots, English, Germans and American born.
I remember in the 1990s when Rural Kentucky & West Virginia speakers used the same accent as inner city Los Angeles. The only difference was the pitch. My grandmother could decode their speech better than I could when watching TV, which I found fascinating at the time since she was in her late 70s. The people in LA used similar words and phrases as the WW2 generation in Rural Appalachia all be it at a lower pitch and less southern twang. It was so uncanny that they had to have sprung from the same area at some point. I know many families in Eastern Kentucky came to America as indentured servants like my family was until the civil war and left the south and settled in the Appalachian mountain areas after the war.
Wow, love these accents 😍! And great info. Cheers from the US, Simon.
I really like that 1923 accent. 😅 6:40
(That weird pronunciation of "Nature" sounds kinda like a modern norweigan person speaking english) 16:45
Cheers. Happy new year! 🥳🇺🇲
Three points: (1) Stefan Milo is working on a Bronze Age Transition project with linguistic aspects on top of his archaeology; I’d LOVE to see your two minds collaborating on this. (2) Can I Patreon you into doing an audiobook version of Tristram Shandy in this accent, published in monthly chapters or something? ❤️❤️❤️ (3) In my native Hungarian, I have a speech impediment: I CANNOT pronounce the rolled “r” (we have a normal rolled “r” and a geminated one, “rr”). I replace it with a voiced uvular trill, which is close to how the German-Hungarian aristocracy used to pronounce the sound. So yeah, what is “prestige” might become a speech impediment quickly. - You are still one of a handfull of people on YT who are not only teaching me stuff but also help maintain my mental and spiritual balance and health. That’s precious. Thank you! ❤
Swedish kings and aristocrats used to have a "French" r beginning with Gustav III and ending with Gustav V (I think). To most common Swedes this always sounded absurd, since most Swedish dialects have a rolled r. Only a few dialects in southern Sweden have anything similar.
Absolutely get Stefan Milo with Simon Roper
@ateesh762, Hungarian has so many vowel sounds that we don't have in English. I bet you can do all of them. My father was a Hungarian WWIi refugee. He did try to teach me some Hungarian bit was defeated by my pancake-flat Australian accent. I manage to mispronounce all of my 5 words in Hungarian. I can't trill my r's either. Merry Christmas!
I am SO IMPRESSED by the keenness of your analysis in sifting out the slightest variations in nuanced speech. I love the way you attribute each variable of vowel color to a specific mechanical cause. Bravo.
Interesting. I left the UK in 1974, and can place both of the first two accents, but they're clearly different with the progression of time. My mother still speaks in the early 70s dialect.
Audag Jiul Simon, jah bi god Niujer haban! Thanks for all that you've done and I hope for more Animals and Old English, so far it's really good.
Gleðileg jól!
Sama at Thu jah audag Niujer!@@OnkelPeters
What a wonderfully educational video! Thank you Simon 😊
I'm jealous we haven't got a Seimon Rhaffwr ( a Welsh version of yourself!). Interesting stuff. Nadolig Llawen / Merry Christmas.
Very interesting. Thank you for your channel. I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and for someone with a very distinct "Pittsburghese" accent - I find your channel worthwhile. I'm learning so much. Thank you.
I’m a linguist with a cognitive neuroscience PhD and I have no idea why this video ended up in my feed but I loved it.
Compelling and informative, as always!
So, now having watched from the beginning [and just now, seeing the examples AFTER writing, hehe], I wonder if there would be, as in 1723, a distinction between how people speak extemporaneously or how they read out loud, as in the words: person, nature, etc.
A literate person may speak as they read out loud, but in a situation where they are speaking extemporaneously, would some of the 1723 pronunciations not be as extreme?
This video is very intriguing! And helpful in terms of teaching English pronunciation for North American or British contexts. -- Thanks!
Find your videos very fascinating, Simon. Hello from New Zealand 🖐
This is really fascinating and well put together. Thank you!
gosh this throws poetry reading into a whole new light for me. With all these different sounds, no wonder its hard to find the rhyme sometimes! Cool!
Your 1923 accent reminded me a great deal of the RP I heard living in the Cotswolds during the 1970s.
Obviously not the "Ohh Arr" southwestern regional dialect of regular folk, but the RP speakers.
Too funny/accurate. You should hire yourself out as a voice actor. If you're not too busy.
Thanks Simon, and Merry Christmas.
I'm watching your video,and took my eyes off the screen, while you were playing a quote at timestamp about 11:30. Just as you were pronouncing the part of Canterbury, the voice reminded me of Earl Hamner, the narrator on the TV series the Waltons. It sounded so much like how he narrated the show. It was a story based on his life growing up in Schyler - Jefferson County VA in the 1930's.
Thank you so much for making this wonderful video!
That's amazing. I've noticed a few of the older vowel sounds you used when I talk to Amish people. Maybe their isolation has kept some of those sounds alive into today.
They speak a German dialect it's just an accent from german
@@Levi-2000 They're english doesn't sound like a modern German accent in emglish. Its got some features of midwestern "don't ya know" accent with hints of Appalachian and I know this is gonna sound wierd but New Foundland accent.
I heard a distinctive accent among folks in York PA . I dont really know if its closer to the Newfoundland accent or Appalachian. But this accent is distictive and the local German or polish or italian ancestry folk are incapable of it . Its likely only spoken by folk with a lineage to British Isles.
That was fascinating 😊 I thought the 1600s and 1700s accent would be a lot harder to understand. As for the tapped r, I'm Australian and I remember a few middle-aged teachers who used it in the 1980s, but I thought it was affectatious rather than working class! I don't know anyone who'd speak that way now.
It's basically the stereotypical pirate accent though, why would it be a lot harder to understand?
It’s easy to see how some people could get the impression of these older accents being more similar to American English and it makes sense because as you go back that far, you’re approaching the last common ancestor between American and English dialects, which should be fairly equidistant from modern English and American dialects. Of course it’s far, far more complicated than that, but close enough that you can imagine without much difficulty how modern varieties of English came about from the early ones here.
Much like how as you trace back the human family tree, you see something more and more chimpanzee-like, and as you go back the chimpanzee tree, you see something more and more like a human, until eventually you get a creature that somewhat resembles both species and also has some unique features of its own that didn’t survive in any descendants
Southern American accents sound to me to be closer to Irish than English accents, which I guess might make sense if a lot of the people there originally migrated from Ireland.
Yes my understanding is that when accent experts and phoneticians say the posh English accent is related to American english they're speaking specifically about the accent of the upper class from coastal Georgia and the Carolinas. As someone who grew up not far from that region, it's very rare to hear that accent. The common ancestor analogy is a good one. You'll catch some older folks with it, but even then it's more of an emphasis on certain words. The first well known person that comes to mind is the Senator Lindsay Graham. It's similar, but he doesn't quite have that super posh non-rhotic sound.
Perfectly put
@katrinabryce There wasn't much Irish immigration to the south, southerners mostly descend from the English and Ulster-Scots.
@@katrinabryce There wasn't a huge amount of Irish emigration to the south in comparison to the numbers of Scottish, Ulster Scots/Scots Irish and English folk who went there.
Even areas like Boston that had a huge number of Irish immigrants at a later date, I get the sense that they mostly assimilated to the local dialect that preceded them, such as is the norm with most immigrants to any new country over generations. The earlier settlement periods were different because there were no long established homogeneous dialects from region to region (not to mention differing languages)
Wow, this is so much more complicated than what I thought it'd be -- I'll have to return to it to give it my full attention, instead of cleaning up my computer's music section while this plays in the background.
What did manage to register was a curious absence of historical reasons for these changes -- given the level of detail, it's no wonder. It could be I'm simply not listening closely enough; I'll be rummaging around your channel's video section anyway. Thanks so much for putting so much time & effort into this, when I find channels like yours, I feel like I've won a lottery.
In 1978 I visited England for the first time. I was traveling with a friend. Both of us were born and raised in California. During one ride aboard the Tube, we found ourselves chatting with a group of students from Atlanta, Georgia. An English woman riding near us remarked that she just loved listening to our accent. Which one, we asked her. And discovered that she could not distinguish that we had markedly different accents.
Englishman here, all American accents sound the same to me apart from Texan and millennial girls from California are easy to recognise.
Yeah. To me it's either strong new York accent (cwwwoffee), Cali girls with the vocal fry "avarrrrcarrrrdoooowwwwwwwwww" or texan "working nine till five".
No other American accents exist to me.
The cali girls speak so slowly too is what I noticed. Takes 3 seconds for them to say Avocado @@radwald189
Yes, we have stupid people in Britain too... :P But that's rare. 30 years ago I could have told you the difference not only state to state, and big city to city, but even (and easily) the difference between Raleigh and Charlotte NC, or Macon and Atlanta Georgia. And I'd never set foot in America, and have no musical ear.
Now that I've seen half the world I think the inability to hear or notice is a measure of the level of comfort - the more comfortable and under control one's life is, the narrower the range of noticing anything. People in poorer countries with less comfortable lives are switched on to every detail. Dickens noticed this, so too Steinbeck and many others. I'm sure you've read Cannery Row - I fancy Mack and the boys would have noticed every detail of a situation that an affluent gentleman of those times would not have seen.
In the same way children - less regimented and so less able to predict their lives - are constantly alert to sound. I find hearing 'hearing' foreign languages much harder now simply because I don't have to - before everyone spoke English or had a translate app, we listened with far greater attention. Just as we navigated with far greater attention before Google maps. But affluent people of my experience never listened well, because they expected not to have to, the speaker would make the effort for them.
@@fiction8909really? State to state, big cities and even more specific regional accents? Despite never having set foot in the US at the time? You're gonna have to explain that one, because it sounds very questionable as-is.
They are massively different.
Would love to hear your readings of more works in their contemporary pronunciation! Austen, Carlyle, or De Quincey would be lovely in the 1820s one, as would (like you did with Tristram Shandy) Pope, Johnson, or Gibbon in the 18th century accent!
Yes good idea !!
That'd be awesome!
Also, with regards to the ending -in in place of -ing, I believe this is actually understood to descend from a variant Middle English form in -inde, -ende, as opposed to the more frequent one in -inge, -enge (note how German has endings -ung and -end still).
Some English accents say "ink" or even "it" or "ih". The Cockney "something" is pronounced "sum-ih".
In traditional Scots they still used the Old English -end/ -and as the gerundive suffix, rather than modern English -ing.
@@leod-sigefast Ah, interesting, I don't know very much about Scots, but I tend to think, hearing it, that it sounds much closer to our reconstructions of Middle English than the usual Modern Englishes do.
I've lived in Edinburgh and I haven't heard them say Summend or Summind for something, do you have any examples you have heard? @@leod-sigefast
@@ryuuakiyama3958 Isn't Middle English transitioning from Old English which is very German like ? And Scottish would be a Celtic origin ? or no - where I live the Irish Catholics look like brother and sister to the Scottish Protestants -more freckles and red hair type thing and that seems that shows a Gaelic or Celtic origin giving a whole weird accent if forced to adopt Germanic English - and what of the Viking influence ?
Fantastic accents! Must have been a lot of practice! ❤🎉
This is such a fascinating video. To hear the evolution of our language, not only in the pronunciation, but the structure of sentences and also the vocabulary.
Fascinating. Always enjoyed listening to old recordings/ news reels and trying to work out how the speakers arrived at their particular accent.
I have to say, as a non-native English speaker living in the US I don't really have the mental stereotypes you mentioned and it is very difficult for me to place the different accents. And I have no background in linguistics or phonetics either. I can hear most of the differences you go through but I'd be hard pressed to describe them if I had to. It was very interesting to watch and listen to you nonetheless.
Great reproductions-- I have no idea how accurate they are, but as an American listening to various British accents from people of various ages for the last ten years or so, they sound familiar for the ages you've presented in the middle to late 20th century and this century.
I wonder if William and Harry's (and even Charles') accents are so much different to their respective parents' because of their time in boarding schools. Spending time with their friends who likely have a much different accent to the royal family means they would adopt that style of speech. In contrast, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret spent much more time with their parents at home through WWII and so, I imagine, kept the accent closer to George V's. Just my thoughts.
Very true the Queen never went to a regular school although I think she was a girl guide and later in the land army but very much more restricted in her social circle compared to her children and grandchildren.
Also, William and Harry did more military service than their predecessors, enjoying greater interaction with 'ordinary' folk.
@@ChrisShute62 Great point! I had forgotten about that. 👍🏼
@@jen43072 Yes, and I imagine the armed forces have changed since the previous royals did their service. Many people near RAF Shawbury and RAF Valley will tell you of the times William and Harry called into local shops and pubs with minimal fuss, just like anyone else. It's a small step, perhaps, but significant because the old boundaries of class/rank/status were so diminished.
If you listen to Queen Elizabeth’s speeches from different parts of her reign you’ll find here accent changes quite a lot. To a middle class English it starts off sound very upper class, and changes to a much of an educated persons accent in latter years. Very poor description but I’m sure examples are easy to find these days. Edit - just found this video ua-cam.com/video/H3q_V-rzMqo/v-deo.htmlsi=TCxs1L0dj078EDf9
So my takeaway from this video is that Bristolspeak used to be considered posh.
In the past what we consider west country accents covered a much larger area
Also, what is a Bristol accent today most likely was influenced from the SE accent of yesteryear, like how London speech features ripple out across the country. I notice most young West Country folk speak more Estuary English now. Also, Cockney f-fronting is common across the whole of England now even being heard in young Scots speech. So, the Bristol accent in the 17th century was probably different to the stereotypical Bristol accent of today.
Thank you, Happy Christmas ⛄!
It's fascinating to listen to your breakdown of "posh" accent features 1870-present and realise I've heard them in comedy such as Monty Python (e.g. The Parrot Sketch) and Harry Enfield/Paul Whitehouse (Geyson and Mr. Cholmondley-Warner; Surgeons Charles and Sheridan).
Thank you so much for taking the time to demonstrate these accents for us! It must have been an incredibly difficult task because the differences in the pronunciations of vowels and consonants is so subtle. The final accent sounded like a combination of an American and an Irish accent. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!
It’s so interesting to see how a British accent changed over time and seeing how it started. I would love to see a movie with accents accurate to the time.
It would be a long movie because various parts of the UK have different accents.
Barry Lyndon
I think the 1923 accent is what most people today still think of as posh upper class British, because it's very old-fashioned, but we still have many recordings of it, also in movies. Her late Majesty the Queen may have already sounded a little different but it's close.
1923 one is called 'conservative RP' I believe. It's my favourite. It sounds so smooth, majestic and rich, like a strong wine or something.
Although we consider it posh upper class, it's not used nowadays. Posh upper class today are people like Prince William and Harry and also the cast of made in chelsea. None of them sound like that (unfortunately)
The late Queen's youthful accent was Edwardian. It was marked by contrasting vowel shapes in a word like "today", with "to-" almost a pout and "-day" a wide ey with abrupt closure. Ladies spoke in a high pitched and clipped manner, different from the later Queen. Modern upper and upper-middle class English accents have mid-Atlantic inflections (city = cidee).
@@borderlands6606 yes i thought it changed over time slightly.
@@borderlands6606 The Queen and many other people who did a lot of public speaking had voice training, which deliberately changed much of how they spoke. It wasn't all a natural progression in line with what they were hearing around them. For HM the big change came in the fall out from Lord Altrincham (John Grigg)'s strictures in 1957. He described her way of speaking as "a pain in the neck"and said she sounded like "a priggish schoolgirl."
I don't know how I ended up here but after the first 15 seconds of your introduction. You're just a great person.
I love your videos, the changes of language is such a brilliant hobby