Specifically I’m wondering how the typical English accent became the typical western accent (Which sounds relatively country), and how did that become the modern accents on the West Coast? What factor was added in that made cowboys start sounding like the modern day Californian.
I’m assuming the typical NY accent comes from Italians coming over.
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Bonus question: Why are there no places in the US at all that kept the English accents????
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One thing to keep in mind is that English is not the majority ancestry of most Americans, particularly not today. Maybe at some point in the past a huge % of Americans were English immigrants or direct descendants of English immigrants but that hasn’t been the case for a long time.
German, Irish, Italian, Polish, French, Scottish, Dutch, Scandinavian, and many other European countries have significant additions to the White European American population. And that’s just before you add in the significant part of the population that isn’t white European.
Melting pots of ethnicities and nationalities also means a melting pot of accents.
People only really develop strong accents when they spend all of their formative years hearing people speaking in that accent. If a couple moved from London to New York in the 1800s, it’s likely their children would grow up with a very different accent to their and their grandchildren’s accent would be completely different.
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