Myths about American and British English
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- Опубліковано 3 лип 2024
- Polyglot and phonetician Dave Huxtable busts myths about American and British English. Did 16th century English live on in the USA. Do Americans speak like Shakespeare? Was the British accent invented in the 1800s? Find the answers to these and other questions, with a unique blend of facts and humor/humour.
00:00 Scope of myths
00:56 Senseless Americanisms
02:22 American inventiveness and flexibility
03:22 American English is fossilised 16th century English
04:04 Where did the first settlers come from?
06:13 Factors that accelerate language change
06:34 Dialect levelling
08:28 Charleston and an African majority
08:47 Ulster Scots
10:12 Benjamin Franklin's accent
11:33 R sounds
11:51 R-loss in 15C
13:38 The Queen's ban
14:29 Is US English lazy?
15:00 Simplified English
16:39 Not an accent
18:06 General American
19:16 New England Elite accent
19:28 William McKinley
20:24 Theodore Roosevelt
21:55 Transatlantic accent in Hollywood
22:30 Taft
25:05 The ascendency of General American
26:25 Was UK English deliberately changed?
28:49 Generic brand names
31:32 AE is informal
32:44 RP artificially created
37:04 How do Brits speak when noone else is around?
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Listening to the accents change effortlessly when talking about different groups was seriously impressive.
0:47 "Talk weird when someone is listening", now that's an accurate job description of a news anchor.
I like it!
I’m a news anchor, and you’re right!!
Talk weirdly
@@gmcoates63 you kids today, with your proper English….🤣🤣
Some bad preachers also do this.
I was born in Birmingham, England. I spoke thick Brummy. (From Bromwicham, the old name for Birmingham,) When I went to Grammar School, Received English was drummed into me. Then I went to Exeter University, where most of the inmates seemed to be from London, but my landlord and his wife spoke thick Devonian. My accent became mixed up. What was evident when I was at school is that people varied their accents depending on whom they were talking to.
I later married a girl from Nebraska, and later still we moved to California, where I've been living for the last 44 years. I soon learned at work that speaking in a local accent didn't work. Somebody mentioned that I was comprehensible most of the time, but then I would receive a telephone call from England and my voice changed, as if I were speaking a different language, just as when I received a call from France I would change languages. My wife reckoned that each time I flew the Atlantic my speech would change half way across.
Nowadays I'm perceived as English in California, and American in English, but I only have to spend a couple of weeks in Birmingham to become a Brummy again.
One of the things that disturbs me is the way the subjunctive is almost gone in Britain, but heavily used in the USA. Whilst an English person would say, "It's important that it's done", and American will almost always say, "It's important that it be done". There is, of course, a big difference. "It's important that it's done" infers that it actually has been done, and the fact that it has been done is important.
At one time I was living in Berkeley, California, not far from the university. A couple of students came to the door with pamphlets, and said, "What do you know about Proposition 8 ?" "Nuffink", said I. "What part of Birmingham do you come from?" they responded. I was impressed by their being able to recognise where I came from from just one word !
@@alanfbrookes9771 I was checking out in Home Depot in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, and the check out guy said "Yorkshire". I asked him how he knew and he said he shared an apartment with a Yorkshire guy.. I thought I was neutral ! Been in the US 20 years.. When I visit Yorkshire I am (automatically), broader than the natives. Before I emigrated, I used to visit London all the time.... (investing 100 million), and I automatically spoke neutral English. Her indoors is Milwaukee. She is educated and doesn't say stuff like "Should of went"... Ignorant speech like that in the US is mostly south of the Mason Dixon line
General American is the guy who won the Vietnam War against the Taliban in Panama.
As I South African, I almost laughed when a black lady told me that "we" including her and I, don't have an accent! I have an Afrikaans accent, and she had an accent which was influenced by her home language and Zulu!
I love it. Maybe Zulu-influenced Afrikaans is the true English accent after all.
No wonder.
If you live near someone but don't interact very much you see the other person as a separate person in their own right.
Creaky Blinder (and every other Welsh person) would beg to differ.
That joke about the accent before the assassination have made my day!
Thanks for an unusually fact-based and hilarious video. Fun fact: in my hometown of Milwaukee, we're so German-influenced that we just say, "I'm coming over by you."
Glad you liked it. And thanks for the fun fact about Milwaukee.
Another interesting and entertaining video, thanks Dave. Love the humour you put in too.
Glad you enjoyed it
This is the first of your videos that I’ve seen, and I’m looking forward to watching more, since this one was so informative and entertaining. I loved your RP pusher! You also do very good American accents.
Really great video, fascinating stuff.
Thank you!
It's funny... when you said, "Port cities in North America remained in regular contact with England...", I was reminded that the phenomenon isn't gone and forgotten even lately. My dad was in the Royal Canadian Navy, sailing out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and quite often visited Britain in the 70s. Canadian sailors were constantly picking up new music from their travels there, mainly in southern England, and bringing it back with them, where it frequently wound up on local radio stations like CFDR and CJCH. There was a scrumpy band in Bristol, called The Wurzels, that enjoyed notable local popularity in Halifax-Dartmouth at the time. :)
Katharine Hepburn is an interesting example of the “fake” mid-Atlantic accent, because she actually was an upper-class New Englander, and that was very likely her actual accent. There were certainly many other actors who did “fake it,” though, like Joan Crawford, who grew up in Texas
Then there's the reverse TA accent of Cary Grant, an Englishman who made himself sound more American.
TA accent ua-cam.com/video/IL2MJ8rQ12E/v-deo.html
I think he was saying the whole "Mid-Atlantic Accent" was fake in a sense because it wasn't a natural accent formulated from the environment, but actually "taught".
@@GenerationNextNextNextI would describe such a dialect as 'cultivated' rather than 'fake'
In The Philadelphia Story Hepburn was trying to sound like a stuffy old-money Philadelphian. She couldn't entirely shake her Boston Brahman accent. She makes the same error in Stage Door where she's trying to sound Midwestern but doesn't get much farther west than Wellesley. For me, the classic Mid-Atlantic accent is Vincent Price, who actually grew up in Connecticut. Many people thought he was British.
What I love about English is, in this modern era, that we have constant contact with each other, and we evolve together. We learn some things from each other’s dialect, we copy each other’s expressions, and I am fully confident that we will have our individual Accents in the future, but we will continue to be connected and mutually intelligible.
I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the recordings of McKinley et al. as well your analysis of them. Well done!
Many thanks!
I enjoyed every second of this. Thanks.
Glad you enjoyed it and nice to hear from you.
I'm in New Zealand, and before an American visitor or expat speaks six words or less you already know his or her country of origin. Everyone has an accent! I was especially enlightened by your expose of the British royal family's true accent. They have obviously been going to extraordinary efforts to disguise it.
Certain Americans give away their State of origin without even speaking... I remember years ago taking an H2S Alive course to work on an oil and gas site. There were two Texans in the course with us. Nice people but you could tell without even speaking to them. They held their bodies like their spines were solid bars of steel and their clothes were ironed and tucked in.
All the Canadians in the course were messy and relaxed. But this makes sense as body language gives away a lot as well.
How do you distinguish if they are American or Canadian though? They speak the same dialect and the accents are supposed to be indistinguishable to the untrained ear
@@NoNumbersAtTheEnding The regional variance across North America is very striking. Even within individual States or Provinces. For example the stereotypical "Canadian Accent" often depicted in US ans UK television is actually limited to Southern Ontario. The Martimes have there own and so does Newfoundland. Even in Alberta there are variations with a region commonly referred too as the "Borscht Belt" being distinct as there is a heavy influence of Eastern European, French Canadian, and Indigenous... they are known for using a slower tempo being soft spoken and struggling with th sounds often saying "dis une dat" rather than "this and that".
With only minimal exposure to Americans and Canadians you can quickly pick it out.
That said I would expect that many Kiwis would mistake my Alberta accent as American. Much like how my Kiwi father gets mistaken for Austrialia, British, or even South African by Canadians.
Mute folk don't have an accent.
“After not singlehandedly winning WWII, the United States…”😂
Always gotta capture the urine from us Yanks 😂
@@davissae I do it every night coz her indoors is Milwaukee. She has immense "patriotism" and the US cannot be criticized... They are the übermensch and all foreigners are untermensch... (except trumputin who is 50% British)..
This is interesting thanks. My family comes from Bristol UK. The older generation like my Grandmother born in the eighteen hundreds had a thick accent with many unique Bristolian words. I was surprised in the seventies to meet someone from Newfoundland who sounded Bristolian and even used some of the Bristolian slang. While the Bristolian accent is still identifiable the edges have been knocked off by the BBC.
I particularly like the pronunciation of licence that some people in Bristol use, where the "i" sound at the start is instead a "oi" sound.
I have enjoyed this video. I do think our modern communication has wiped out some of the odd accents I heard as a teenager, particularly in rural parts of the US. It is both inevitable and a bit of a shame.
It is sad when accents are lost. New ones are being created too though.
I agree. Linguistic evolution will never disappear but I think that isolation is what allows for a lot of divergence in language and of course the internet has made isolation ever more difficult.
But you can't stop the march of time and I don't think it's useful to want to
The English that the English speak is called English, not British English. You can call it Standard English to distinguish it from the other dialects of English, which include for example Northumbrian English or US or Jamaican English or Californian English. British English is a misnomer: Scotland and Wales have their own languages, but use a variant of English as the main language. You could call it Scots English or Welsh English if it’s distinct from Standard English - otherwise just call it English. We don’t say “French French” or “Spanish Spanish” to distinguish the home language from variants used in other countries.
Idk bro.. Spanish Spanish sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to differentiate the variants of Spanish..
What would you call it then - standard Spanish?
Isn’t standard Spanish called Castilian?
@@johngreen1176 Well, here in the UK, my Learn to speak Spanish book calls it Spanish, my Spanish friends call it Spanish (when they’re speaking English to an English speaker), language teachers call it Spanish and even Wikipedia calls it Spanish. There are a variety of languages in Spain, but the official language is (in English) Spanish. In Spanish it’s called Espanol, I believe (with a diacritical tilde above the n, which I can’t find on my iPad keyboard!). It’s hardly ever called Castilian by English speakers.
@@adamzain6770 No, you're right, the language is Spanish. I was only saying that the type of Spanish specific to peninsular Spain, as opposed to Mexico or other such places, that is, "Spanish Spanish," might be called Castilian. I am making no reference to Catalan, Galician, Portuguese or any of the other Iberian languages.
Loved it! Great video, Dave. Thanks
Glad to hear it.
I have a very distinct West Coast American Accent--which, because of American movies and TV sounds 'neutral' to many Americans and ... American to everyone else.
I really liked your historic reproductions of phonetics, especially that bit with Franklin. Bravo.
We don't have accents😂
Nah, I can spot West coast Americans, you guys always drag your vowels Okaaaaay instead of O-Kay, and many other words.
You think you sound like "Baseline TV accent.........but so do New Yorkers, and we know that's BS!!!!
@@Cougar139tweakyea I’m from NY and when I studied abroad they told me “wow you talk exactly like they do on TV”
I was raised on the West Coast and used to think the same thing, but it's not the case. I've lived in NH, FL, TX, and CA and even if everyone is speaking phonetically neutrally, they all have their region's way of emphasizing certain vowels at certain speeds in certain 'arcs'. I'm in New England now and most people here say they can hear I'm from Texas (or some sort of southern) just because of the canter and flow of my speech.
I really appreciated this video! Thanks a lot!🎉 The ending is hilarious!
Another solid video, Dave - great stuff! Making language engaging for all :)
Thank you!
Thanks for the good information and subtle humor. 🙂
Not sure I'd call the humor "subtle". Quite a hoot, if you ask me.
Nicely done Dave!
Thanks!
I get that a lot of people haven't had opportunities to travel but the fantasy world you need to live in to think you 'don't have an accent' is amazing. And thinking that unfamiliar ones are made up? These people are being failed by basic education.
I remember, as a primary school child in Wagga Wagga NSW Australia, saying to my mother sometime in the late 1960s, “I hear all these people on the TV with accents. Why don’t we have an accent?” My mother told me that other people tell us we DO have an accent. I just shrugged and wandered off.
The level of discourse on UA-cam comments is usually about as low as you can get. There are certainly people who believe it is possible to "not have an accent" though sadly
I was born and raised in the USA. I was very fortunate to have parents that loved to travel and this was back when simple two lane roads were the norm, before massive interstates.
We met many people all over the USA that had far too many regional accents, even per state, to count. We have many more, in this day and age . Sometimes, understanding the USA, accents and other countries and cultures comes down to having the means to travel and meet many different people and cultures. My parents were highly frugal people of The great depression/WWII era. Therefore, they managed every penny, extremely well.
Traveling was the very best education they could have given me and my two sisters.
This is the first of your videos I’ve seen. I’m looking forward to seeing more. This is very informative and highly entertaining. I loved the RP pusher! And you did a very good job with the American accents.
Awesome, thank you!
This video is great and is both funny and enlightening. I liked the D-iD segment!
excellent ... thanks for posting this
Of course, rhymes often give evidence of changes in pronunciation. For example, some of the lines in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas no longer rhyme because some of the a's remained "flat" while others "broadened." My favorite example is "Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes (broad a); bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow ye masses (still flat). I wonder if the "broad" a was a slightly later development or whether it just spread to new words afterwards. (There is, of course, variation today in some words (e.g., "gather," "lather" and "mask").
Loved this video, Dave!
Glad to hear it.
Long but informative video. Definitely worth the reveal at the end!
Glad you liked it!
Brilliant as usual!
Very informative and you got quite a few laughs out of me. Bravo!
Thanks for another interesting and fun and funny video. Thanks for all the weird points of view you quoted. Keep up the excellent work xxx
What annoys me most is calling a toilet a bathroom when there's no bloody bath in it.
I heard a story on the radio a few years ago where this American women asked to use the bathroom. She was directed to a bathroom that just had a bath and washhand basin. Not wanting to explore or ask she attempted to pee in the washhand basin. She pulled it off the wall and hit her head. Not sure if true.
And then there is "washroom". I don't want to wash anything, just get rid of something.
@@johnclements6614 I suppose the person who directed her learned a very important lesson about provincial cheek as they cleaned up a bunch of urine, blood and water before the plumber arrived to install a new sink.
It’s an ironic euphemism. We don’t refer directly to the locus of stool. It’s a very traditional Brit example
Principal bathrooms in North American homes do, in fact, have baths or showers in them. Smaller ones don't and are frequently called "half baths".
You make this highly intense educational video and then put a cherry like that at the very end. Bless you so much. I loved it.
Very informative and entertaining. Thanks
Glad you found it so. Thank you!
28:58 - I should note that this is not merely a linguistic difference but an allusion to a specific satellite system. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the USA’s government-owned and operated satellite navigation system, while “satnav” is just an abbreviation for the generic term “satellite navigation system”. It’s similar to the Xerox/Band-aid/Jello example you give a bit later, but referring specifically to the system only used in the US.
ehh, the [US operated] GPS constellation is used by more than just the US;
some modern "satnav" devices can listen to GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, etc. as well as GPS to get a better fix
This was thoroughly entertaining and informative. I am a South African from the city of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. The British established a fort there in the late 1700s, but the White population were mostly Afrikaans-speaking. (I'm calling it Afrikaans because the language had already significantly diverged from Dutch) in 1820, a large group of mostly working class British settlers arrived there. I have noticed similarities between your reconstructed working class English accent form the 18th century, Simon Roper's upper-class London accent from the early 1800s, and the current local South African English in Port Elizabeth.
Fascinating! I’d love to come and check it out some day.
wonderful presentation
Great video with awesome information, and so funny!
Thank you!
This was splendid! Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I’ve always found the assertion that everyone’s singing accent is American to be ridiculous. No American sings with the accent in which they speak. It’s so silly how people convince themselves that they do.
the one thing i’d add is about how most UK singers lose their accents when singing because they’re trained to, to appease an america centric market.
as an aside bro doing the accents he’s talking about is a surprisingly helpful learning tool
And it's amazing how well he can do so many of them. I'm horrific at emulating any accent but my own
I enjoyed this video very much. Excellent work.
Glad you enjoyed it
I love the animations! Lol!
This is your best yet! Hilarious what some people think 😂 I especially like the AI bits with the British soldiers and the King and Queen. Well done.
Wow. Thank you!
Surprise surprise. Things are more complicated than they at first appear. Very interesting- Thank you for your effort!
I so loved this discourse. I was reminded of my father who ostensibly had what was called a "Standard Midwestern Radio Accent." As the eldest of a multilingual family, I continue to have an inadvertently mimicking ear (caught myself with an Irish intonation after listening to a long audiobook, for instance). But I digress. My father said that one day he looked up from his breakfast newspaper to wonder how his daughters came to sound like Black children. Indeed AAVE must have made its way from our ears to our mouths. When I spend any time with my S. Carolina sister, I revert to that time, say my Canadian friends, though, to my American friends, I sound Canadian. My French grand-mère defended me from my maman's lamentations over a blooming Joual accent.
I used to pick up accents in a flash. Someone told me-- that's a talent! Cultivate it, work at it, and you can use it in Community Theater!
@@ruthmiale1239
apparently we Australians have a "neutral palate" and thus find accents easy ...
@@ruthmiale1239 Similar with me. Born in Liverpool, brought up largely in Yorkshire, lived in France and Wales and find that, depending on which of these locations I'm in, my accent changes. Not deliberately or consciously, but simply because I sort of 'tune in' to whatever I'm hearing and find myself mirroring accent and intonation.
@@reprapmlp That's amazing...
@@robinholland1136 You have such a good way of putting it. I've had to stand up in an auditorium of so-called scholars to defend an artist (who was featured in a film) who derided him for ostensibly "putting on" the speech of his original Appalachian village after having "adapted" a more urban pronunciation and syntax. Most of them unilingual, inexperienced, and probably triggered by another aspect of his work without the courage to address it.
Very well done video. Happy I found your channel. I am from NYC. We nearly have our own version of English.
Great video. People will argue about anything and everything.
Glad you like it.
FABULOUS video: fascinating AND a hoot! 👍👍
Glad you enjoyed it
Thank you!
Quite enjoyable indeed. 😉
Glad I found your channel. Also happy you mentioned children. I remember as a boy asking my mother why we were the only ones who didn't have an accent. I also, as a boy in the USA watched my favorites, Laurel and Hardy. I didn't realize until I was an adult that Laurel was from England and had an English accent. I'm still not sure about Hardy's accent. It sounds Northern to me even though he was from Georgia. In fact he pronounced words like "first" sounding like "foist". At least in his comedies.
Absolutely enjoy your accents and the historical background. Just fascinating and so interesting. Thanks very much. Some of mom’s family came from Dorset.
The Bard must have been a very naughty boy, inventing all those newfangled words.
Well, he did incorporate several jokes about rape in his accent.
amazing video, gonna have to rewatch this several times to learn everything! also, those comments sure do make people's ignorance evident! LOL
Glad you enjoyed it.
Great video. The myth that "American English is 17th century British English" seems to be based solely on rhoticity, as if that was the only difference between modern General American and RP/most modern accents of England. Despite the fact that modern General American pronounced without postvocalic /r/ still wouldn't sound like anything remotely resembling any modern British accent.
And the fact that there are still plenty of rhotic accents in Britain, which don't sound anything like modern American English.
There are recordings available online of the Survey of English dialects that was done in the 1950s of elderly rural speakers born in the late 19th century, many with rhotic accents in places where you wouldn't here them today, like Kent. They don't sound anything like modern General American.
Are you pushing to get "hear" replaced with "here"? What are we going to use for "in this place"? I don't think I want to say that every time.
I love the way language moves and changes to take on new concepts and new cultural phenomena.
The "standard" American accent, as I've been told, originated in radio, imposing a national standard for broadcasting. Most people don't talk in that accent. I'm glad you mentioned the "TransAtlantic" accent, which I've sometimes seen called (incorrectly) a "mid-Atlantic" accent. (Mid-Atlantic, to folk in the US, means that area of the Atlantic seaboard from New York to Delaware or Maryland.)
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there were efforts towards what is now called "accent neutralization" in government schools. The idea was to replace or minimize regional accents (such as the "flat 'a'" in New York City regional accents) and alternative pronunciations (such as the fricative "f" in place of the interdental unvoiced "th" used in AAVE and also in some English accents - you'll hear this when the Duke of Sussex speaks). It had us 10- and 11-year-olds making fun of the Speech teacher, who - based on what I've learned since - was trying to mold us into that "TransAtlantic" accent as opposed to the "General American" that, depending on whose story you're listening to, may have derived from Iowa or from California...
Given your ease with replicating accents, I'm pretty sure your daughter was just echoing back what she heard as being appropriate for her age. I grew up on Long Island and went to uni in the Boston area. New York metro area students quickly learned to adopt Boston-area accents and lingo to avoid being discriminated against by the natives, as the Boston-area economy of the time was largely dependent upon the university population, whose demand for goods and services hiked up prices and decreased availability of goods and services for the native population (I have since been calling it a "tourist economy", as it is similar to the love-hate relationship tourist area residents have with the tourists who bring in money but cause prices to rise)... I cannot replicate an accent "on demand", but put me in an area for more than a few minutes and I'm echoing back that accent... without intention, since I don't want to be perceived of as "making fun" of a local accent, and as I tell anyone who'll listen, I can be caught out in a trice by my unfamiliarity with local terminology.
To British people, a 'transatlantic' accent would be 'across' the Atlantic [trans=across in Latin], i.e. an American accent. A hybrid, half and half accent with elements from both sides of the ocean (e.g. Katharine Hepburn or Cary Grant) is thus (to the British) logically called a mid-Atlantic accent. Unfortunately, as you say, Americans already use the term mid-Atlantic for something else. So the term is definitely not incorrect in Britain, but is in the USA. Just one of those transatlantic differences :)
Wonderful again.
Thank you!
that redcoat sketch really caught me off guard 😂
Great video. I love your accent work here!
My dad was 13 when he came to America from Egypt with his parents and younger brothers (12 and 3) in 1962.
My dad strove to be American so much, he almost completely lost his Arabic accent.
My uncle, who was 15 months younger than my dad, eventually studied political science, embracing his multinational linguistic heritage, combining Egyptian Arabic, French, and Armenian with American English, into what I describe as "Posh British".
It's quite fantastic, actually, how differently they spoke, and how interesting that we're able to change accents after decades of speaking a certain way.
Top job.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a lot of the gripe with American English is the fact that it seen as taking over without giving anything back. This is largely since TV and films became mainstream, and especially since the internet as we know it became mainstream. Makes sense seeing as the majority of people speaking English on these platforms are American either by design or by chance. Naturally, kids spending a lot of time watching TV and being online will pick up more on American English, rather than the British English their parents speak.
By itself, people don't find an issue. The bigger issue (as some see it) is that American English seems to take over, yet does not seem to adopt any quirks of British English in return.
Well what quirks would you suggest?
@@TerryMcKennaFineArt I wasn't especially advocating whether or not it was a bad thing that US English encroaches into UK English. All I was saying is that it is seen by some that US English "infiltrates" UK English (e.g. by replacing words like biscuit for cookie, or adopting US spellings) while at the same time, I can't off hand think of any UK expressions or words that have caught on across the pond.
As to your question, I really couldn't say. At the end of the day, language should evolve organically by the natural mixing of cultures, and not because certain words and phrases are foisted upon people.
@@Dave5400 Some UK words that have “infiltrated” US English that come to mind are “spot-on”, “dodgy”, “one-off”, and “ginormous”.
British English is still definitely receiving more American English words than American English is receiving British English words though
@@Dave5400America barely ever created any words. Essentially all of the words they use are words that predate the colonization of the usa. Not that many conpletely new words have been created in the last 100 years. The word meme was created by richard dawkins so thats one. And I think internet was aswell.
@@Dave5400I cant think of almost any words created in the usa at all.
Finally a real life Huxtable. The first time I heard the surname Huxtable was in the 1980s when I was watching Cosby Show. The Huxtables were an upper middle class family of seven. A mother, a father and their five children living in Brooklyn. The father was an obstetrician and the mother was an attorney. The reason why the show was ground breaking was due to the family being of African descent and the show was a positive spin of the African descendant family.
It is curious that the way Roosevelt pronounces "T" reminds me of the way that people of India pronounce it .
That’s true.
Similarity: Lack of aspiration
Difference: Indians' T's and D's are retroflex
Similarity: Lack of aspiration
Difference: Indians' T's and D's are retroflex.
Audrey Hepburn used unaspirated T and P. I thought it made her speech sound constricted.
That was very interesting, thank you. I live in the US and I am a sort of an English Geek and it was my college major. I live in the south and there is a lot of R dropping going on. I love our language, its beauty, history and anything else interesting. What does it matter what an accent is like or what we do with the letter R, as long as we can and do understand each other, enjoy reading each other's books and consume media and TV shows. However North America is the big boy on the block with hundreds of millions of American/Canadian accents going on. Love how English is lingua franca
Fantastic accents ! Talented !
I love this topic, but overall I find it strange that anyone is surprised that a different dialect of English formed in America. How could anything else have happened?
You said you would do it and you did it! I loved the ending lol. 👁️ 🦎
Looks like you are in SoCal. Would be nice to lunch with you if you’re ever in L.A.
My treat
This is such a cool video
Thank you!
Hilarious ending 😂
Great video! Minor tangential question: at 34:26, you say “[RP is] clearly very closely related to the local accents of university cities like London, Oxford and Cambridge”, but the relation seems a bit less clear to me. For example, many of the characteristics of modern Cambridge(shire) speech derive from Cockney (similarly to modern Essex and Kent speech), but presumably this influence only came after the RP that Jones described, so I'm a bit fuzzy on how people in Cambridge would have spoken at the time (my guess is something close to what we think of as an East Anglian “farmer” accent today). Also, to suggest that universities were relevant to the development of RP would seem to suggest either 18- to 22-year-old students picking up features from porters and shopkeepers and so on in their brief time there, or the relatively small number of academics and their families having huge influence over RP-speakers (after having themselves picked up local features). I think what's clear is that RP shares a lot of features with local south-eastern English varieties; the specific association with university towns is less clear.
Stephen Fry has a Cambridge University acccent, and I've known several Cantabrigian scholars over the years with the exact same way of speaking. Locals in Cambridgeshire (I live there, in exile from Norfolk!) to me have a very defined Suffolk pronunciation mixed in with a bit of London and even sometimes I detect a Midland intonation in the mix too. To someone with tin ears, certain people from the area sound almost Australian.
In Canada, I find both US and UK English to be quirky. Because of immigration patterns in English speaking areas, migrants came from the US first, UK later and other parts of Europe and the rest of the world, we bias towards American English for some things and UK English for other items and both are acceptable. It makes it challenging to keep writing internally consistent.
Easy my guy. Love the video. First time watching. I'm from West Yorkshire, and not sure most people outside of WY could tell, but Its kinda easy to tell what part of WY someone is from. I'm from Halifax, and can seriously distinguish a Bradford accent from ours. And HX folk living super west of the county, Hebden Bridge/ Todmorden, for example, actually speak with both Yorkshire and Lancashire accents. Not sure what is it like nowadays, but the Yorkshire and Lanc accent would be separated and would change at one row of houses between HB and Tod. Despite being in Yorkshire, the Lanc accent very much starts in Yorkshire. A good way before the Yorks/Lanc border. And speaking of accents, I really can't place you. Obvs south of Yorkshire. I can almost hear a West Midlands twang from time to time. Great video brother. Peace out from HXWY
Another great video. Your Benjamin Franklin sounds really Scottish/ Welsh. Is that really what he would have sounded like? Maybe he would have ? Just surprised me. I expected him to sound more east Anglian or west country. But I believe your interpretation.
Interesting subject, has always fascinated me. And I think from the music angle, even English people sing with an ameriçan accent because it is so rounded, making the words smoother and easier to understand. Only on a few occasions is singing such as folk music ? Better with an English accent.
What a fab video, Dave, a true delight! -- thanks so much! How's this for a thought experiment? Queen Elizabeth I spoke with what sounds, to our ears, like a West Country accent. Today that's an accent with 'exotic' associations to some people. How might 2024 RP (whether Colin Firth or Keira Knightley) have struck upper-class Londoners in 1600? With more non-rhotic r's, fewer broad vowels, and less H-dropping, would it have come across as less lively? Perhaps more inhibited, more buttoned-down? (As a speaker of the world's most monochromatic accent, Standard Canadian English, I find other anglophone accents endlessly fascinating!)
So glad you liked it. An interesting scenario indeed.
The way Benjamin Franklin spoke reminds me of the spoken part of the song Atlantis by Donovan.
I’ve recently found myself following Jimmy Carr to 8 Out of Ten Cats and from there I’ve broadened my interests in the various British (born or transplanted) comics. The various accents blow my mind. Listening to Henning Wehn’s German accent applied to English terms, some of which actually sound more English accent influenced in cases that the pronunciations are noticeably different from American English, always catch my ear. Not directly connected except by UA-cam algorithm, Scottish comic Larry Dean has an amazing ability to bounce between accents.
Great ending!
Thank you!
A PBS show, form the 60s, The Story of English, has a film of kids talking that are in high class school in England and then compares to the same school with kids from the 60s and there is a big change in accents and word usage.
I believe that one of those regional dialect polls available on the net shows that "Will you come with?" is considered acceptable in the Upper Midwest, where German and Scandinavian immigration dominated, but not so much in the rest of the US. The recordings of US Presidents from around the turn of the 20th century were very interesting. I don't believe I've heard any audio of Presidents prior to Franklin Roosevelt, who spoke distinctly with a mid-Atlantic accent. I was raised in Minnesota, then attended graduate school in New Jersey, and was struck by how British the older faculty who grew up in the northeast sounded. Although most of my professors were of foreign origin, with corresponding accents. Only the department secretary had the stereotypical Joisy accent.
A bluff is not s riverbank. It is akin to a very low cliff and does not necessarily overhang a river. Thank you for a delightful learning experience.
Flippin ek that Charles went all lizard like scared me so much.
Im an American who descended from English settlers. I love this sort of video. Im homesick for England even though I've never been.
Of
Something that always jars with me is the seeming excessive use of “of” in US English. All too often, I find I can take a passage (anything from a phrase to a tome) in US English and remove at least 50% of the occurrences of “of” rendering it much more acceptable, and being able to do that without loss of meaning.
How big a problem is it?
How big of a problem is it?
But leaving it in some constructions:
How much of a problem is it?
Obviously that applies to the ear-offending “off of” though that is just a particular example.
My personal rule is always to check use of “of”. If it is not absolutely necessary, remove it. Mind, after so many years I rarely use an excess “of” to start with.
Medicine Trade Names
The USA seems always to use the brand name, the trade mark name of medicines. One example is Cytomel - the first USA medicine based on the active ingredient liothyronine. Everywhere in US language they refer to Cytomel - whether the branded product or a generic. Just occasionally you see “the generic for Cytomel”. More often leaving it undefined which they are referring to.
In the UK, at almost exactly the same time, we got Tertroxin - also the trade mark for a make of liothyronine. But use of that brand name had faded even while Tertroxin was the only branded product available in the UK. Now there are several generic products, and Tertroxin was debranded a few years ago, the name is hardly ever seen. Liothyronine is pretty much universal.
But it doesn’t seem to only be marketing. Nor the advent of widespread generic prescribing. Nor even the worldwide adoption of recommended internal non-proprietary names. It always looks as if in the UK we are more aware of the brand name being applicable only to that company’s product.
Excellent video. Really enjoyed it. To me as an Englishman Taft sounded American whilst Roosevelt and McKinley didn’t particularly. I notice things like Americans not much using the ‘I’ ‘a’ and ‘o’ sounds as we do in England in say, Iran, bag, otter; also the yod dropping; Toosday, Noos etc. and the pronouncing of ‘T’ as ‘’D’ as in ledder, budder, wadder, etc. I’m told I speak RP but I think it’s more Standard Southern English, mixed with Surrey Home Counties.
I'm Canadian in the Niagara region of southern Ontario, right on the border of Western New York, so when u were talking about the American Northeastern accent, I knew exactly what u meant. Back in 2006 I had been working for a local newspaper, and then we were laid off and our dept shut down, and w no jobs in graphic design, I ended up at a call center taking calls for US cable, internet, and phone company Cox Communications. We did billing, and general customer service. The reason the call center had this contract, and another w US Capitol One activating cards, was bc here in Niagara we sound like Americans. My husb and I have been told this as well by Canadians from across the country. As soon as u hit Toronto though, and surrounding GTA (Greater Toronto Area) cities, it's very different and they're only an hr from here.
The most interesting, and nearly impossible accent to understand here in Canada, is that of Newfies (ppl from the east coast province of Newfoundland). It's actually called Newfoundland English, and aka Newfinese, bc it's not anything spoken anywhere else on the continent including neighboring Nova Scotia, and PEI (Prince-Edward-Island). A few quotes from Wikipedia article "Newfoundland English":
_Newfoundland English is any of several accents and dialects of Atlantic Canadian English found in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Most of these differ substantially from the English commonly spoken elsewhere in Canada and North America._
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_Much of Newfoundland’s English has been influenced by the languages and dialects of European settlers of the past, such as those who were British, Irish, or French. Also, Indigenous languages prevailed on the island, with some of their influence remains today._
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_Historically, Newfoundland English was first recognized as a separate dialect in the late 18th century when George Cartwright published a glossary of Newfoundland words._
My husb is a licensed heavy equipment technician in the mining division of the equipment company he works for. He's sent all over the country to various mine sites to maintain and repair equipment the mine owns, and has worked w ppl from coast-to-coast. Just before the events of 2020 kicked off, he was sent to Newfoundland. He said he absolutely loved it, gorgeous province, but he could barely understand the Newfies sober, let alone after they'd had a few, and he's very good at understanding English spoken by ppl in which English is their 2nd language.
33:50 made me laugh soooo hard, best video yet!
Simon Roper has done some really amazing videos that explain how both British and US accents evolved over time.
Simon and I are talking about doing a video together.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguageswhat will the video be about.
GREAT ENDING!!!!! 😂
Glad you liked it.
I found episode 171 of "The History of English Podcast" very informative and entertaining. It talks about the original pronunciation of Shakespearian English.
Could you post a link to that?
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages I tried, but the comments disappeared. I might have replied on the wrong thread, or maybe UA-cam doesn't like comments with external links.
@@ODashbo UA-cam does tend to remove comments that contain links.
@@ODashbo Thanks so much for trying. I’ll Google it.
Interesting video👍I cringe when people say singing makes all accents converge to general American
Voice Recording of Americans Born Every Year (1807-1932)
ua-cam.com/play/PLiz_edXKXxtqQ8ZB0jULReuwa_d5F_iTJ.html
That's interesting. I never thought of GPS as SatNav at all, but maybe it's because I've never used SatNav in my comings or goings, and if I did I'd probably rely on the GPS on my phone (cell lol).
Luvverlee!