Most movies and shows set in the past e.g. 1700s, 1600s etc will include some sort of accent. How do we know if people actually spoke in those accents?
Edit: this came up is because I was watching the CBS show Ghosts. In it, there are two ghosts from the American Revolution. The British Revolutionary and the American Revolutionary have distinctly different accents and it made me question how we actually know what they sounded like.
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Although there is no way to know for sure, there are some clues that allow us to make educated guesses. Long before audio recordings there were attempts to document how words were pronounced, and researchers more recently have been able to use recordings to observe the ways pronunciation changes over time. Some kinds of changes are observed to happen frequently under some conditions, so we can assume similar changes probably happened in the past. By extrapolating backwards we can guess how things used to be said. And by reading what people in the past wrote about pronunciation, we can confirm or reject those guesses.
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