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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As a very similar situation, we can look happened for the french part of North America, although Quebec and France originally spoke the same they are now very different, most seem explanation seem to be that france language evolved quicker than Quebec as Quebec still has a lot of similarity with old french, I think given some post in the thread that it’s similar with English from the US as well
That’s the fun part: it didn’t. Languages universally change over time.
The English spoken by colonial settlers was equally different from both the English spoken today in England, and The Americas. Everyone changed. Nobody “kept” that original accent.
It’s kinda like how Latin became French, Spanish, and Italian, but to a lesser extent (Latin took a lot more time than 500 years)
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I seem to remember reading somewhere that it’s the British accent that changed, and the American is actually closer to the older accent.
Edit: [Found it](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english)
Our accent became mixed with the others (Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish) as people started moving around more, but it is wrong to say that our accent specifically became a West Country (Somerset, Bristol) accent.
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.
Most English accents, at the time Britain was colonizing NA, were still *rhotic*, that is they didn’t include all the silent r’s in modern English accents, or rather, they *did* pronounce all their r’s, the way US accents tend to currently.
England didn’t start widely switching to non-rhotic dialects until the early 1800s.
So, US accents ARE primarily English accents, they just diverged from those in England before the English started dropping their Rs.
I also wondered this and when I looked into it the research said that the US actually has retained the original “British” accent; it’s the British accent that changed in the 1800s. The hard “r” that you hear in North American English was the original British accent. The soft/rolled “r” that you hear in British English now is a fairly recent development.
I really wish I had retained the resources where I learned about this.
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