Did British-English once sound American? An amateur YouTube linguist answers the question

Fun fact also….English Ebonics/slang was invented by whites

I refuse to believe that any member of the British royalty ever sounded like someone from modern day Backwoods Alabama.

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the British accent is entirely fake

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What do you mean by this?

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I refuse to believe that any member of the British royalty ever sounded like someone from modern day Backwoods Alabama.

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An old southern accent is as close to a British accent as anything in America ever has been

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An old southern accent is as close to a British accent as anything in America ever has been

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It's pretty well known that Brit actors find the Southern Accent to be the easiest to transition into

It is not well known but Appalachian English is the closest living dialect in the world today to queens English. It is not an exact duplicate but it is closer to any English dialect is to actual English.

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I refuse to believe that any member of the British royalty ever sounded like someone from modern day Backwoods Alabama.

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It sounded more like a pirate than modern American English. That being said, the royals largely spoke French amongst themselves until the 1800s*

ETA: I was off by about 400 years...

I never thought I had an accent until I lived un MN for a while and they all told me I did. They all thought it was Southern. I still don't hear it.

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Check out High Tider accents from the Outer Banks. Weird mashup of Southern and English...guessing that's pretty close to the OG accent of the settlers there.

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Sad that these regional accents are quickly dying out. We're all going to sound like we're from fricking Ohio within a couple more generations.

The received pronunciation (RP) is considered proper British speech (what some people call "posh"). I think we all know what that sounds like (pretty much like the Queen or most British actors/TV presenters).

No one talked like that when America was settled because it didn't really exist. Remember, America was settled from 1600-1780 or so. (After the Revolution, Brits more or less stopped migrating here, so our dialects began diverging at about that point. We started taking on Germans and Irish as our main immigrant source in the 1800's).

In the 1950's some British researchers did a dialect study in rural parts of England. They found elderly people (because the elderly will have the oldest accents) and interviewed them. Most of them were born between the 1870's-1890's. There was one man who sounded like he was from the American south. Another old lady sounded like she was almost from Appalachia. And these were people who had never been to the U.S. and never were exposed to American media. They didn't sound exactly like southerners, but you can definitely tell that the southern accent was from England and didn't just crop up here out of nowhere.

There are people in the "Outer Banks" of NC and on Tangier Island who still speak old dialects. If you listen, all of them have Canadian raising (despite being a long way from Canada). They say aboot and hoose. This means that those kinds of vowel shifts were likely widespread in the US and England back in those days. Another thing they do is they pronounce words like "side" or "hide" as "soid" or "hoid." They pronounce all their R's just like all Americans. In fact, their R's are really enunciated hard to the point that they sound like Pirates.

So colonial Americans probably sounded like a mix of Pirates and Appalachia, depending on where you settled.