What did the original colonists sound like? - Big Questions - (Ep. 36)

Hi, I'm Craig. I'm an OC, original colonist. And this is Mental Floss on YouTube. Today

I'm going to answer Jacob Mitchell's big question. What did the original colonists sound like

Did they have a modern British accent? Let's get started. Every time I attempt a British accent, the commenters get angry. Don't get angry. So

it turns out that accents are pretty complicated things. Like when Jacob says, modern British

accent, he probably means what linguists call the Received Pronunciation, or RP

Or RP. There are a ton of different regional accents in the UK, but the Oxford English Dictionary

defines the RP as the standard accent of English as spoken in the south of England

And that's what Americans typically mean when they say British accent. But let's be honest, Americans never talk about other countries at all

There's a flip side to that too. Americans have tons of different accents, but the general American accent is what the

British person would call an American accent. They might not do this though

At that time, both accents were rhotic, like an American accent. Rhoticism means the letter

R is pronounced in words like hard and park. In received pronunciation, that R sound isn't

pronounced Should it be a pronunciation then Of course there aren any recordings from the 17th century so we can know for sure what British and American people sounded like But linguists are pretty sure that both are rhotic because the R exists in those words so it probably supposed to be pronounced

Experts have also observed that it wasn't until the late 18th century that British people started to write words like hard or park while omitting the R for time in shorthand notes

I mean, it takes time to write that R. It's all those curves. So where did the modern British accent come from

According to the Cambridge History of the English Language, received pronunciation emerged in southern England during the Industrial Revolution

People who were born into lower classes and then became wealthy developed the way of speaking so that they could set themselves apart from the social class they'd surpassed

The book states, London pronunciation became the prerogative of a new breed of specialists

ortho-opists, and teachers of elocution. The ortho-opists decided upon correct pronunciations, compiled pronouncing dictionaries, and in private

expensive tutoring sessions drilled enterprising citizens in fashionable articulation. So if you ever see a movie or play that takes place in Britain before the 18th century, those

characters should be speaking in American accents. Mind blown