When Did Americans Lose the British Accent? transcript

Maybe you've never thought of it this way, but colonial Americans spoke and behaved far closer to British than to American. Many early Americans still considered themselves British in the colonial days, hence patriots versus loyalists. But when did the American brand actually start? When did we stop bowing, start shaking hands, and stop speaking British? Let's address a myth first. The American accent isn't some sort of new invention.

It's actually an old one. In the 1700s, British English was not the Queen's English that we think of now. Foot qua- yeah, what you know, the the British sounds, right? I'm sorry. Uh anyway, instead, British English was rhotic, meaning they pronounced the R in words like hard, bar, and car. At the back end of the American Revolution, around the mid to late 1700s, the London elites began practicing non-rhoticity to sound more sophisticated and avoid association with the ungrateful younger brothers overseas.

Yes, but mostly to distance themselves from the poor, lowborn people around them. And this is really neat. The Americans were new and demanding independence, so you'd think they would be the ones to quickly change the way they speak, but that's just not the case. Americans didn't develop a new accent. We just kept the one we had and gradually changed it while England moved on considerably sooner and far more intentionally.

Put another way, before and during the Revolution, the average redcoat and the average patriot were speaking with similar accents. So, in practice, the American accent kind of froze many of the English sounds of the 1700s. King George the III of back then probably sounded a lot more American than King Char- ooh ooh. Somebody please give me a good explanation as to why this portrait looks the way it does. We stayed Elizabethan and they went posh.

And this is really important as far as class and national themes. In the US, liberty and equality were massive virtues and still are now. I'm not saying that those virtues are not present in the UK today, but there's a clear discrepancy in that birthright hierarchy still stands a major recognized institution. And we can't skip over the demographic changes here, either, as the early American West, for example, was a melting pot of German, Irish, and Scandinavian influences, while Great Britain just remained far more homogeneous for much longer.

But there's more here. With speech changes comes reading and writing changes. Have you ever wondered why Americans and Brits- ooh ooh God, Americans and Brits, there we go, have different spellings for words like color? Well, of course you have. Look, I'm in your brain already, which I'm sure is massive and juicy. Lots of wrinkles, yeah, yeah. For this spelling thing, we can thank Noah Webster. Yes, that Webster. He thought that as long as Americans used British spelling, they were still mentally enslaved to the crown.

He wanted an American language that was as lean and efficient as the people. And many of his suggestions gained massive traction in the late 18th century and stuck around till today. He chopped the U out of honor. He flipped the R E in theater to theatre. These seem perfectly normal to the average American nowadays, but get this, there were more rejected changes than accepted ones. I'll show you a few. I think you'll really like this.

He wanted to change tongue to tong. Believe to believe. Machine to machine. Soup to soup. Daughter to doter. Head to head. And my personal favorite, women to wimmen. And I really like this one. But because first it's just funny, all right? And secondly, it cleans up that weird pronunciation dilemma we have with the singular and plural sounding nearly identical when read literally, which was a problem even back then. Webster's solution was practical.

And guess what? Most Americans still vocalize women just as Webster had it spelled. But his superior spelling was ultimately rejected because people found the spelling to be, uh too ugly. Let me know in the comments, which alternative Webster spelling should we reintroduce today? And tell me how we should fix this women problem. Oh man, that sounds bad. But you you know what I mean. The point here is that the speech changing along with the spelling was an attempt at a psychological breakaway from the British, and it worked.

Sooner or later, Webster [music] was able to rewire the American brain to see Britishness as an extra, unnecessary piece of baggage. By 1790, acting British was socially dangerous. If you carried yourself like a duke, people assumed you wanted the redcoats back. They thought you were, you know, a bit posh, perhaps bougie. Being practical, common, maybe even a bit plain was valuable both for the theme of equality as well as distance from Brittany.

I just made that common noun up, but funny how you know exactly what I mean. Take a handshake, for example. In London, a bow was a physical map of who was above whom. But in Philadelphia, the handshake became the law of the land. It was a radical, metaphorical middle finger to the class system. You look a man in the eye and grip his hand. A display that we overlook now, but directly respects the language from the Declaration against Great Britain that all men are created equal.

Benjamin Franklin was really good at this. He would show up to important events dressed humbly, even showing up to the French court in a raccoon hat and plain brown suit. Everyone else was in powdered wigs and silk stockings, even the men. It seems unserious, but this representation of the American public [music] as simple, somewhat rugged, was effective in securing French alliance against the British. >> [music] >> I have a whole video on why Benjamin Franklin wasn't a president and really was just a goofy guy, if you're interested.

Now, you think this trend from Franklin of being distinctly rustic and specifically anti-posh [music] to contrast against the British would have translated to other founding fathers and early presidents, but it just didn't happen, not for a while. In fact, for the first 40 years, US presidents were still Virginia gentlemen, if you will. They spoke with a refined, >> [music] >> rhythmic cadence. Then came 1828 and this absolute menace of a man became the seventh president, Andrew Jackson.

He ran on and embraced the persona of the regular man and woman. And while he wasn't the most morally upstanding figure, to say the least, he was dedicated to the average person. He may have been the only true common man president that the US has ever had. Let me know if you agree with that statement. I mean, just think, when's the last time we had a regular guy be president? >> I hit 17 straight three-pointers. Probably for the better, right?

Anyway, Jackson's inauguration was closer to a riot than a ceremony that we're used to now. No, really, it was an actual riot. Thousands of common people flooded the White House. They tracked mud on the expensive rugs. They broke fine China and they forced the president to escape through a side door while the staff lured the mob outside with tubs of spiked punch. And now we close our eyes and visualize what they may have looked like.

Look, guys, leave the president alone. Look, there's alcohol outside. And that's all it took. Man, we used to be a country, man. We used to be, you know. >> [laughter] >> To British observers, presumably with their noses upturned, this must have been the end of days. To Americans, it was the birth of the frontier identity. This is the moment we traded the salon for the saloon. We stopped trying to be refined and started being authentic.

This is where the American voice gets faster, louder, and more utilitarian. Something interesting though we should note here, specifically with with accents, is that we kind of went backwards. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, wealthy Americans got accent envy again, let's say. This created the Mid-Atlantic accent, that weird, half-British voice you hear in old movies or or from Franklin D. Roosevelt's a good example of this, that weird like fake accent.

Some schools even taught it to make Americans just sound better, more upper class, so to speak. But this ultimately failed. Why? Because the pioneer identity was just too strong already. After World War II, the Mid-Atlantic accent died. Trying to sound elite just wasn't cool. It was very un-American. There's definitely some subtext with that one. So, when did we stop acting British, speaking British? It wasn't a single day.

Nothing in history is that fast. [music] Instead, it was a 50-year slow fade from the halls of Parliament to the mud of the Tennessee frontier. Early American history gets skipped over and it sucks because there's a lot of cool stuff. I like showing off the weird parts and answering [music] the burning questions. Click here to see why America abruptly stopped expanding its borders. If you learned something new, drop me a like. >> [music] >> Become a member if you want to support me and I'll see you there.