Over the past 250 years, since adopting the Declaration of Independence, American life has changed in many ways the founding fathers could not have foreseen, from massive medical and technical advances to major social changes. <\/p>\n
But what about the way Americans talk? How has our language changed since the Colonial period? What did we sound like in the days of yore? <\/p>\n
The early American tongue<\/p>\n
While the lack of audio recordings during this early history certainly makes listening in on America\u2019s ancestors tricky, numerous letters, diaries, journals, and even transcripts from early legal trials can help us \u201clisten in\u201d on speech from earlier eras. <\/p>\n
Spelling norms were more fluid during colonial and revolutionary times, and there are often clues to pronunciation in earlier writings, especially informal ones. For example, spellings like \u201cdafter\u201d for \u201cdaughter,\u201d \u201cSary\u201d for \u201cSarah,\u201d \u201cgit\u201d for \u201cget,\u201d and \u201cdeef\u201d for \u201cdeaf\u201d were common in the colonial period. <\/p>\n
The pronunciations these spellings hint at may now sound odd, but would not have been heard the same way then. In fact, several pronunciations that today might be heard as more rustic are relics of once commonly accepted forms that are no longer in widespread use, which is why we notice them.<\/p>\n
The coming of a revolution<\/p>\n
We also have a few clues to pronunciation from writings left behind by people like Noah Webster, who compiled the first truly American dictionary<\/a>, and Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers. Franklin even devised and used a phonetic alphabet, <\/a>which helps us understand how he and other people of the revolutionary era spoke. <\/p>\n From such sources, we can glean that the \u201ch\u201d sound originally heard at the beginning of words like \u201cwhich,\u201d \u201cwhen,\u201d and \u201cwhale\u201d was still pronounced during that time, as in \u201chuh-wich\u201d or \u201chuh-wen.\u201d Some Americans, for example, in the U.S. South, still use these pronunciations. <\/p>\n Likewise, the “t” sound that comes out more like \u201cd\u201d in American English in words like \u201cwater,\u201d \u201clater,\u201d \u201cpatty,\u201d or \u201catom\u201d were not yet regularly \u201cflapped,\u201d as linguists call it, meaning it would have been said like a \u201ct,\u201d as in \u201ca-tom\u201d rather than \u201ca-dom.\u201d<\/p>\n Tomay-to or tomah-to?<\/p>\n These consonant differences are fascinating, but most likely, a time traveler going back to 1776 would probably notice vowel differences the most. <\/p>\n In Colonial times, American vowels may have sounded more like what we hear in some of today\u2019s dialects from the British Isles, such as Irish English. For example, the \u201cey\u201d vowel (as in \u201cday\u201d) and the \u201coh\u201d vowel (as in \u201cno\u201d) were both shorter, simpler vowels at the time, sounding a bit more like \u201cdeh\u201d and \u201cgnaw.\u201d <\/p>\n There were also a number of vowel distinctions that most Americans no longer make today. <\/p>\n \u201cHorse\u201d and \u201choarse\u201d were pronounced differently then (hence, the different spellings), with \u201choarse\u201d sounding a bit more like \u201choe-erse.\u201d Similarly, the vowels in \u201cfir\u201d and \u201cfur\u201d were said as separate vowels by pretty much all speakers in that era. <\/p>\n And then there\u2019s \u201cmerry\u201d and \u201cmarry.\u201d Back then, most people in America would have said those words differently. Nowadays, the vowels in these words are merged together for many Americans, while some others keep them separate, for example, people in our nation\u2019s first capital, Philadelphia, as well as in New York.<\/p>\n Another notable difference is that the vowel in words like \u201cright\u201d or \u201clife\u201d would have sounded more like \u201coy,\u201d as in \u201croy-t\u201d or \u201cloy-f\u201d in that time. This pronunciation still lingers in some eastern coastal areas like Martha\u2019s Vineyard, Massachusetts, or Tangier Island, Virginia.<\/p>\n Finally, Americans would not have pronounced words like \u201caunt\u201d or \u201crather\u201d with an \u201cah\u201d at that time, but neither would many British speakers. The \u201cah\u201d we hear in Southern British \u201cahnt\u201d and \u201crah-ther\u201d didn\u2019t become popular in England until the late 18th or early 19th century, and so would not have been picked up in any American varieties quite yet.<\/p>\n A nation first united, then divided<\/p>\n In early colonial era writings, many observers noted that speech across the colonies was surprisingly uniform compared to the vast diversity of dialects heard back home in Britain. <\/p>\n But by the time of the Revolution, regional differences appeared to be growing. Noah Webster remarked that there was a bit of a nasal whine heard among New Englanders and also commented on the regional pronunciation of \u201cserve\u201d as \u201csarve.\u201d <\/p>\n Webster also noted a mid-Atlantic tendency to pronounce words like \u201coff\u201d and \u201cdrop\u201d more like \u201caff\u201d and \u201cdrap\u201d and notes that some rural Easterners say words with the \u201caw\u201d vowel (like \u201cpower\u201d or \u201cout\u201d) with an \u201cih\u201d sound first: \u201cpi-ower.\u201d <\/p>\n As for Southern states, Webster mentions that Virginians sometimes didn\u2019t pronounce all their \u201cr\u201d sounds (in words like \u201ccart\u201d), likely following the fledgling new fashion of dropping “r” sounds in London speech.<\/p>\n A nation united<\/p>\n Regional distinctions like this were viewed with concern by Noah Webster and the founding fathers, who felt a single American \u201clanguage\u201d would help mark independence from Britain and keep the states unified. <\/p>\n There was also great concern expressed in the post-Revolutionary era about the large number of non-English-speaking people in the U.S. Ben Franklin, for one, openly fretted about the negative influence languages like French and German, which were quite prevalent in the Colonial U.S., would have on American English.<\/p>\n What the American English of today attests, though, is that instead of decay or destruction from the passing of time and contact with other languages, American English has grown and thrived. Early American English arose as a blend of earlier British dialects and the languages of Continental Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, and it has since evolved to embrace linguistic influences from across the globe.<\/p>\n And nowadays, our rich array of American dialects, including both native and non-native varieties, is a reflection of the diversity out of which the strong fabric of our united nation is woven. \u201cOut of many, one\u201d is a perfect motto for our country\u2019s languages and dialects, just as it is for our people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past 250 years, since adopting the Declaration of Independence, American life has changed in many ways…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-663102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}