![]() He’s also transcribed Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander into OP. “We’ve always had this stigma in the UK that Shakespeare has to be posh… in his time, it was everyday speech,” says David Barrett, who conducted workshops in Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP) while preparing a thesis on the subject at the University of South Wales. That’s the other oft-forgotten complication of the concept: even if Americans do speak more like the Elizabethan English than today’s Brits themselves, that doesn’t mean they’re speaking a ‘posher’ version of the language. It’s a bit surprising that Shakespearean English has come to be associated with high status and education. Overall, however, “the Shakespeare myth reflects simplistic, popular views about the static nature of traditional folk cultures, especially those in out-of-the-way places.” These include terms like ‘afeard’, which famously appears in The Tempest. ![]() “Mountain speech has more archaisms than other types of American English, but that’s about it,” Montgomery writes. Turning this around – and claiming kinship with a Shakespearean way of speaking – was a way of bringing status and apparent classiness to a marginalised part of the country. This myth helped to counteract negative impressions of oft-maligned mountain people. Montgomery traced the idea back to an educator-clergyman who, around the turn of the 19th Century, spread the idea that mountain language was a remnant of a much older tradition. Linguist Michael Montgomery has written that the North Carolina tourism division used to issue a booklet called A Dictionary of the Queen’s English, which claimed that the English of Queen Elizabeth I could be found in pockets of the state. ![]() This has led some observers to claim a strong lineage from early Cornish settlers to the current Tangier dialect.īut linguist David Shores has noted that these claims are exaggerated, and that the island’s isolation, rather than any freezing of Elizabethan speech patterns, is responsible for its linguistic quirks.Īnother US area that’s been linked to 17th-Century British English is Appalachia, especially the mountainous regions of North Carolina. Some speech patterns, included rounded Os, seem like a dead ringer for the dialect of the West of England. The pronunciations of the early colonists (and their English counterparts), in contrast, have stuck around in the US: think ‘paath’ rather than ‘pahth’.Īt first glance, these colonial legacies of pronunciation seem especially apparent in certain remote areas of the US – hence the argument that some places in the US have preserved Shakespearean English.įor instance, Tangier Island in Virginia has an unusual dialect which can be unintelligible even to other Americans. So do Canadians west of Quebec – thanks to loyalists to the Crown fleeing north during the American Revolution.Īnother divergence between British and North American English has been a move toward broad As in words like ‘path’. So at least when it comes to their treatment of the 18th letter, Americans generally sound more like the Brits of several centuries ago. Why British English is full of silly-sounding words.How Americanisms are killing the English language.The tiny US island with a British accent.“The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.” “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. As a result, the theory goes, some Americans speak English with an accent more akin to Shakespeare’s than to modern-day Brits. That was particularly true in more isolated parts of the US, such as on islands and in mountains. It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from England to the Americas from the 17th Century, their speech patterns stuck in place.
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