The fascinating tl;dr: The British lost their English accents around the turn of the 19th century. As far as rhotic r's go, Americans still mostly speak the way Brits and Americans did in the 18th century.
A Brit' here, most British dialects are heavy on the R's. Whether that's the rural accents ranging from the Cornish (south west) to Norfolk (south east). Then you have the harsher sounding dialects of the north east - who also seem quite rhotic (or at least, the thicker accents are). Then you have the Welsh and -as mentioned in the article- the Scottish and Irish who all also emphasise their R's (it's quite amusing when I hang out with some of my Scottish friends as they can't pronounce "Karl", so every time they call his name, my other friend "Carol" answers!)
The ironic thing is, the way the English are perceived to speak isn't the way how 99% of English (let alone British) people speak. Even in London and it's overspills (the neighbouring counties), which is where our dialects are the least rhotic, most people don't pronounce themselves in the same way as they do in American TV. But I can understand why the stereotyped accent is used; it's a slower and more clearly spoken - which is ideal for broadcasting where the actor needs to be heard and understood by the audience. Many of the northern accents are spoken with such speed that it can be difficult for an untrained ear; even for some of us English! It's also a sexier dialect (few sane people would fall in love with a Geordie accent, Brummie or even Cockney, if they weren't already brought up in that area.
If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to find youtube videos for some of the more distinct dialects.
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Just been chatting to my wife about this. She's from the north east of England, I'm from the south. It seems I've overstated the amount of emphasis the north east places on their R's.
I'm not sure if I'm alone about this, but the funny thing about pronunciation is the moment you're asked to think about the way you pronounce a word, you've instantly forgotten how you normally talk!
The Karl - Carol is probably caused also by the insertion of a schwa sound between some consonant clusters, it's a phenomenon known as Epenthesis; another typical is Film -> "Fil[uh]m"
I've only ever lived in North America, but I did have a good Scottish friend with whom I used to discuss linguistic differences between cultures and languages.
But I'm not sure, since in Canadian English, the 'a' in Karl would be pronounced as /ɑ/ and the one in Carol would be an open-mid front unrounded vowel (/ɛ/).
I think what laumars was referring to was the pronunciation of the first vowel in Karl and Carol.
In other words, both dialects have a schwa inserted (even in NA English), but the difference is that Scottish people do not differentiate between the 'a' in both Karl and Carol.
Put differently, Scottish people pronounce Karl and Carol the same way to an English speaker (from England).
What I'm saying is that to my Canadian ear, I could hear a difference between the few Scottish people I've spoken to in Canada. But come to think of it, they were probably Canadianised.
The thread started off about rhoticism ("[...]heavy on the R's [...]"), so I guess he reinterpreted the r+schwa as longer r.
However, the key player here is not laumars, but his friend Carol :-)
I mean, the interesting part is that she heard her name because
the epenthesis process transformed a monosyllabic word into disyllabic one, and that changed the shape of the word: kar(uh)l has the same rhythm as carol, and small vowel quality differences are probably less important that the rhythm when the word gets parsed by the brain.
Of course it's possible that the Irish pronunciation of film is not inserting a vowel sound, rather that the modern english spelling and pronunciation has removed one. It's possible that the Irish resembles the old english pronunciation more closely and it's the modern english pronunciation and spelling of film that has undergone the more significant change.
Unfortunately a google search of "philome" yields only pages about shakespeare pronounciation, especially by these two guys; I don't know what that means.
However, I think that thinking about the evolution of a language as a linear
progression is misleading.
Is certainly possible that modern Irish pronunciation stems from what was spoken at that time, and the modern "mainstream" english pronunciation evolved later from a slighly different root, and epenthesis acted only in one of the two branches.
Film derives from west germanic filminjan, which in turn comes from proto germanic fello(m), and proto indoeuropean pel-, with cognates in lating and greek, pella and pellis respectivly.
So it's possible that epenthesis was applied on top of filminjan in irish scottish accents (possibly due to pressure of the gaelic substrate), while the dialect which originated RP didn't have this change.
I'm sure somebody with better knowledge of the matter can be more precise about that, however, it's strange how little (and often more misleading than uncertain) information is there about one the most widely spoken languages.
(Sorry, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter comment :-) )
Please do! I'd be especially interested in some of the ones you mentioned: Geordie and Brummie. Also, some of the harder-to-understand ones. I can understand Yorkshire pretty well, but maybe some others would give me trouble.
This is taken from a British sitcom, 'Alan Partridge'. It features a Norfolk and a Geordie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSHHbfY6MVc It's actually a pretty good example of a Newcastle (Geordie) accent despite being a comedy show.
Finding a good example of a Brummie accent as proven more tricky as I'm either stumbling across paradises where they over accentuate the "twang", or TV personalities where the access is suppressed a little. Ozzy Osbourne is from that area and in his interviews you can sometimes hear the accent showing through. The pronunciation itself isn't hard to understand; I highlighted it because it's a unique accent. I think these days it's mellowed quite a bit though.
This video isn't work safe, but it's the best example of a Welsh accent I could find. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwUrMEZWj5o (this is also probably the accent I hate the most - I couldn't explain why, but it just grinds)
This is the Cornish (south west) accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jbxdZE3g80 It's probably the closest to the old Shakespearian English that someone linked to in these comments.
David Mitchell's character in this "Dying Wish" sketch from The Mitchell and Webb Look has a very good Welsh accent as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-BpLgVxLRY (It's not David's own, which is very much RP, but it's entirely believable.)
As some on coming from Birmingham Ozzie has lost most of his Noddy Holder (the lead singer in slade) has a stronger more black country accent (the rural brummie accent and how Sam Gamgee should have sounded like in the LOTR)
As well as the accent there is the question of the brummie dialect which can be much harder to decipher for a non native "yow" for "you" for example
You're omitting all the North-West accents, Mancunian (aka "the Noel Gallagher") being the most famous. The sounds change quite spectacularly as you go up the M6 and into deep Lancashire. Get some "roots" people from Blackpool, Chorley and Burnley in the same room, and their accents will be all over the place.
How representative is the typical accent you hear on Doctor Who of the average English accent? And in case I'm conflating a bunch of very different accents, I'll just go with Matt Smith's Doctor[0].
I'm from England, and his accent in that video sounds pretty neutral to me. It's got a bit of a "posh" or "well spoken" edge to it, but in terms of region, that's going to be somewhere around the south of England, excluding places like the south west and parts of London, which have distinct accents.
Occasionally you'll find extras which sound Welsh, because the show is filmed in Wales. But for the most part it's a very neutral accent. Even Amy Pond's accent isn't particularly strong.
Something that fascinated me while in the UK - subtitling accents. I mainly saw this (heard this?) with the Scottish, but other strong accents had this done also. It was the BBC I noticed this with.
This is very rare, I cannot recall seeing it in the last few years. Occasionally on news programmes. Most of the Scottish programmes are only shown there is BBC output is quite regional. You can get them online though now.
Welsh is subtitled but that's a different language...
I'm really interested to hear that. I've only ever noticed this on American shows and, until now, I always assumed it was added for American's benefit, but hard coded so they also appeared on UK airings. But now I'm wondering we're the ones adding it.
I've had a dig around, it was actually a lot harder than I was first anticipating (so you may have already found better examples than I). But the ones I did post are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5131264
Interesting maps - significant portions of England were still rhotic in the 1950ies.
Incidentally, it's fascinating how much accents and dialects can change in such a short distance in Europe. Within a few hours bicycling distance from Padova, people can tell that someone is from here and not whatever town they're in. Compare and contrast with my Oregon upbringing, which no one could place anywhere specific in the Western US with any degree of accuracy.
Another fascinating tidbit is New Mexican Spanish:
I live in Lincolnshire, a large county on the east coast of England, and after ten years of being here, I can distinguish a native of my town of Louth from one of Cleethorpes, 15 miles away. 35 miles south of here, in the original Boston, the local accent is rather different again.
Most Brits would not notice the difference as Lincolnshire accents are broadly unrecognized nationally, though any Brit (and, perhaps, many Americans?) could distinguish a Scouse (Liverpool) accent from a Mancunian (Manchester) one - only 27 miles apart. Think Beatles vs Oasis here.
Sadly, though, this does only work on true, thoroughbred natives - a small percentage of the population in most areas now due to the frequent movement of people around England.
It's funny how exact opposite Australia is. You can travel from Perth to Brisbane - 4 times the length of the UK - and even locals can't tell the accent apart from their own. There are differences, but they're not based on region.
"City" I'm in is within 10 miles of the next city and it's quite popular to make fun of each others different accents and propensity for certain dialect.
I do love it when you listen to someone talk and you can hear where they're from; occasionally I can do a Henry Higgins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady) and hear the overtones of where they moved on to as well. A strange delight.
The town where I grew up has a couple of dialect words that are only spoken by the working class in the environs. Fascinating stuff.
A few hours cycling is nothing - when I grew up in the North East of Scotland people from the coastal fishing villages had quite different accents to people from farms maybe 1 km or so inland.
[NB When the BBC did a TV series featuring fishermen from near where I grew up they had to give the show subtitles so it could be understood in the rest of the UK ;-)]
It's a sign of stability. The US was recently (in linguistic timescales) formed. There was also a lot of migration within it. The population of UK cities may have been (largely) stayed put for centuries.
Jared Diamond uses this a lot, when trying to unearth the history of populations. This isn't a new thing - the 1956 Kurgan hypothesis suggests that PIE (the language which everything from English to Indian languages descended from) is a sign of a large empire, or a dominant culture which expanded across Europe. It suggests PIE may come from the Russian steppes, and that their secret weapon was the domestication of horses (due to the prevalence of "horsey" words in PIE). Diamand uses similar logic to trace the expansion of other cultures.
For contrast, New Guinea has lots of of languages, as until recently it has been very divided culturally and politically. Many villages were pretty much their own state.
There's actually at least one place in the U.S. which is like this -- the Boston area. I once saw video of sixteen Bostonians speaking, each with a slightly different accent; a trained ear would be able to narrow the accents down to a neighborhood or even particular street, and make guesses as to the speaker's socioeconomic status.
Boston really is "closest to England" in a lot of ways.
Same here in The Netherlands, I can tell if someone's from one or two towns away by his/her accent. It's subtle, but definately noticeable providing they speak with an accent. A lot of dutchmen learn to speak accentless, or Standardized Dutch but resort to their native accent when in familiar surroundings.
IMO, no discussion about the loss of "British accents" in America can be complete without including Canada, Australia and South Africa in the mix. I always found it fascinating that the US and Australia have such dramatically different "standard" accents despite both being former British colonies.
Btw, anyone wanting to search for the "missing link" should visit Bermuda. Strange mix of GA and RP.
I'd say (in Australia), our English was influenced to an extent by the local population (ie: Aboriginal Australians) to a degree in addition to British English.
"Subtle" is a relative term here: I'm Italian, not particularly trained in languages, and I can easily tell NZ and Aussies apart. NZ vowels are even crazier than the already-bonkers Australian ones.
