Why are British and American Accents Different? It’s all about Power, the Radio, and TV

Why are the British and American accents different? Or, to put it another way: When did the Americans stop speaking with a British accent?

History would lead us to assume easily that American accents developed from British accents. Oddly enough, though, linguists suggest the opposite: British people gradually ceased to speak like Am ericans.

There were no sound recorders back in the 1700s (the oldest known recording of a human voice was made in 1860). But one can imagine American patriots in 1776 sounding much like their modern-day descendants, as they said and wrote dictums like, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. They would have pronounced all the ‘r’s, for instance (linguists call this a rhotic accent). And the patriots’ British contemporaries probably spoke in a very similar way — only in the 19th century did non-rhotic accents become more common in England, with the ‘r’ going silent in words like “liberty” and “pursuit”.

What is widely thought of today as the standard British accent evolved quite recently, as languages go. It developed in the 1800s among the upper class in Southern England, and was first called “public school pronunciation”. This distinctive accent was often heard among students from the privileged and ruling classes, who were educated at exclusive boarding schools such as Winchester, Eton, Harrow and Rugby and at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Through these students, this manner of speech grew to be used by the southern upper classes in general, and soon became associated with wealth and prestige, particularly among the middle classes in London.

“It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed,” wrote A. Burrell in his Handbook for Teachers in Public Elementary School, 1891. And indeed, the public school accent was only loosely based on the speech of the south-east Midlands, and conveyed no clues about the speaker’s region of origin. It did however indicate the speaker’s social status and educational background, in Victorian England.

At this time, many people of low birth rank were growing wealthier as a result of the industrial revolution, and they wished…