THEY DO! Shortly after the Revolutionary War, Upper Class British started using non-rhotic speech (they drop their R's), and it slowly trickled into the speech patterns of every day citizens. The British accent as we know it now is simply different now than it was then. The Boston accent is a good example of non-rhotic. Try saying "Park the car in Harvard yard" in a Boston accent and then again in a British accent, you'll hear the similarities. The more nasal and clipped way we speak is probably due to German influence, add in Native American Speech patterns, plus a wave of immigrants from all over the world, and new American accent was born, as well as a whole lot of regional ones!
The same applies for France and Quebec — the French pronunciation of Louis XIV's time was very different from "standard" French pronunciation today. Furthermore, just as many Quebecers came from outside Paris and spoke regional dialects (especially those of Brittany and Normandy), many North America anglophones came from outside London and spoke regional dialects from across the British Isles.
@RickiTarr When my mother-in-law was in graduate school, her English professor used to ask her to read Chaucer out loud to the class because her South Carolina lowcountry accent is one of the most similar to old English!
@RickiTarr I often hear quite a bit of my own North of Ireland, Scots-Irish accent in American accents.
Certainly there were a lot of important figures in American History who came from those immigrants: Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, Chester A Arthur, James Buchanan etc.
I also found my accent is very well-understood in eg New York, unlike that of my English-born wife. I’ve also been mistaken for an American by people not familiar with North Irish accents.
@RickiTarr With the qualification that everybody is actually related to everybody, Wikipedia lists 20/46 US presidents as having Scots-Irish ancestry, up to and including Barack Obama. So they’re bound to have had some influence on the language.
I've done no research on this, so I'm just making it up, but it seems to me like a lot of the slang and speech patterns that many Americans think of as Southern fit nicely with Britishisms.
I've heard some historians argue that what we know as the "British" accent today was actually a slow response towards the colonies to differentiate themselves from colonists - their accent got stronger over time.
I mean it's probably a little column A, little column B.
It's not even that old. Apparently that progression apart was much slower, until it suddenly sped up A LOT.
Really what most Brits use today is a bastardized form of the fake, pageant English used by the middle and upper class only as recently as the 1940s and '50s, coinciding with the dawn of common transatlantic media.
As with all things British, the Queen played a fairly major role apparently.
@Itty53@RickiTarr And while plenty of American spelling ("color") was taken from British practice at the time which has similarly chalged, AIUI Noah Webster was keen that the US should have a distinct language from the mother country and therefore canonicalised a lot of divergent spellings which weren't otherwise in common use.
@RickiTarr Riffing on that a bit. I remember being intrigued as a 1980s student at a New England boarding school by a distinct generational line—among people from identical backgrounds—between those who spoke with a quasi-English mid-Atlantic accent and those who didn’t. Above a certain age, almost everyone still sounded like rich people from 1930s movies. Everyone my age sounded Californian like me. Which is when I learned they stopped TEACHING it at boarding schools in the 1960s haha.
@RickiTarr That's fascinating, thank you! I have heard (completely apocryphal) that the distinctive Texas twang is due to an influx of Scots who came over to Galveston after the Civil War. No idea if this is true or not but 1. I understand the thickest Glaswegian accent without trying and 2. my great-great-grandad came over with a herd of black Angus cattle. He also abandoned his US family just after the WW1 armistice was signed and went back to Skye, it's a family scandal...
@RickiTarr I saw something a while ago that posited that the accent of Shakespeare's London was probably closer to the "flat" American accent than modern British accents.
I suppose, in the first half of the XXth century, actors were still heavily influenced by the norms for theatre, where clarity of speech is of paramount importance.
I also suppose, that the new medium tried to be seen as a serious art form, and hence dialogues were expected to be given in "proper" (i.e. posh) speech.
There is no way that any Boston lad or lass could be announcing the news on BBC ...and be understood by the majority of the English speaking world. come on!
@RickiTarr There are lots of pre-C20 things where Americans preserved the original formats, while Britain vapidly tried to be trendy and keep up with the neighbours.
And there are lots of things where innovations rose to the top of the melting-pot until they were Americanised for polite Eastern society.
ymmv hugely, of course. And all bets are off once C20 mass media kick in. ...
@RickiTarr
Actually some Americans speak with a British accent after a stroke or brain damage, which perhaps is all you need to know about the people with a British accent. 😏
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