Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 19, 2015

That’s perfectly fine, Caulfield, as long as it doesn’t become chronic avoidance. Heck, what am I talking about? Wonder on, lad. Enjoy your youth!

There were multiple English accents and drift happened in both locations. Sadly i forget which portion of England was referred to, but i have read that some of the Northeastern accents were or are thought to be closer to some English ones of centuries ago than the accents currently in those portions of England. The reason i said “were” is that many accents are being lost here, too, in the last half century give or take a few decades. For example, Suffolk County, NY on Long Island had very a different accent before so many people from the city moved there. People born there who grew up in my cohort have markedly less NYC accent drift than people who grew up in my sister’s cohort just five years later. We have almost identical voices, but completely different accents even today.

And north Americans still think they speak English!

SukieCrandall: There still are many English accents, but they are probably dying out as people move homes more for work etc.

Cauldfield could also ponder on why Americans still use Imperial units e.g. BTUs, when Britain has gone mostly metric (i.e. using kW).

♬And I wonderI wah-wah-wah-wah-wonderWhyWhy, why, why, why, why♫

the folks on the mayflower came from the midlands. if you want something to wonder, do a youtube search for “brummie accent” and wonder how THAT morphed into ANY of the US accents :-)

There was a piece in The Linguist a few years ago claiming that 1600s English was on average closer to what we hear in rural Mid-Atlantic states than to anything you now hear in England. Accents change faster in populated areas. Plus, what most of us Yanks know as the English accent evolved among London-area upper classes in the early 1800s. England had many accents already, but not that one.

It’s pretty normal for accents and dialects to evolve faster in the home country. Another example: French in Quebec is far closer to 1600s French than is the language spoken in France.

British accent, please. Not everyone was English. Besides, the region counted more than the country. Middlesex and Lancashire does not even now have the same accent.

If memory serves, during last half of 20th Century, several universities conducted language acquisition studies in communities along the Appalachian Mountain chain, from NY to SC and GA. They found there were pockets of people where enunciation and vocabulary were very close to the original Elizabethan English spoken during the 16th century. Accents are as much a function of learning to talk (usage) as they are of the hearing accuracy of the learner and the shape of sound production parts of the mouth and throat. No way to accurately account for either, no matter where they occur.

I wonder, wonder who wrote the book of love.

I swear I heard an elderly Vermonter who must have learned to speak before the great vowel shift. It was an history of the English language course and he was less intelligible to me than the Gullahs.

This is truly the most interesting comment thread ever. Frazz has the BEST readers!

I’ve wondered about that, too. A co-worker was from England. He has been in the states since 1968. I could never understand anything he said.

the fact that we have the energy to wonder about such things means that over all, we are doing pretty well for ourselves. This is no small wonder

I had a teacher in HS tell me there were 22 distinct accents in England. I recall reading a Readers Digest Humor In Uniform story about a ship in WWII—the Captain was a New Englandah, the crew all Southern, and the Exec had to translate both ways.

esobocinskiI had a French professor who was bemused by Quebecois and Cajun referring to a dinner fork as le fouche instead of fouchette, conveying it was a pitchfork or manure spreader instead of an eating implement. .TheSkulkerI lived in Canada during metrication, and there was the usual resistance to change. In conversation, I suggested that the first step should be to normalize the US and Imperial quart to something in the middle, since we had to read the fine print to determining which it was on a grocery can. This was met with enthusiastic support whenever I mentioned it. Then I said, “and we can call it a litre” – sputtering all around.

My brother once went on a trip to Scotland with a college group. They claimed that his group of rural Pennsylvanians had the least accent of anyone they’d heard.

The accent that Americans typically think of as English is the Received Pronounciation (BBC) accent. It reflects a number of 19th century changes from the common accents of the 17th century: dropped or softened R in certain parts of words (also found in US southern and Maine accents), and the “trap/bath” split where many short a sounds become aaahh sounds.

That second panel is a love letter to all the joyless pedants out there.

He wondered as he wandered

Night-Gaunt49I once auditioned at WRR, the Dallas classical FM station. After reading the prescribed script, the auditioner came out and said, “Where are you from? The accent is strange.” I replied, “I was born and raised in Dallas, where are you from?” He wouldn’t answer. For the record, my mother grew up in Denison (due north of Dallas) and my father Springdale, AR, but lived in the Dallas area for nine years before I was born, so that had negligible effect. . .In Vancouver, one person pegged it as Dallas. I told jhim he had a good ear. He said he had a friend from Dallas and I sounded just like him. Whatever works.

I read something recently that explained what happened to the divergent accents. Centuries a go, the English spoke more like Americans do now, but the aristocracy softened their “Rs” and dropped the “Hs.” The rest of England copied that way of speaking, but the colonists in North America continued speaking the way we do today. Of course we have regional accents of our own, and as well in Great Brittan.