chapotraphouse

I was watching the Chinese movie eight hundred and I was thinking, how did people communicate with each other back then? Did most people even know mandarin?

Oh and americans speak like 17th century brits. The modern english accent is newer than the american one.

this is entirely incoherent.

americans do not speak like 17th century brits. which brits anyway?
there's no such thing as "the modern english accent". which one?
you cant have an accent that's newer than another, they've all changed with time, they're the same age.

this stupid meme comes from ONE feature of the accents. rhoticity. all english dialects used to be rhotic until a few hundred years ago, when non-rhoticity started spreading. it spread out from london and gradually covered most of england. wales, scotland and ireland are still rhotic.

it also spread into the american colonies, which is why the old new york accent is non-rhotic, as well as the boston accent and at least some of the southern accents. and of course AAVE. the rest of america retained its rhoticity.

but this is just one feature of the accents, not the whole thing. each accent is conservative and innovative in turn, keeping some old features that others lose, innovating some new feature that others lack.

The US is probably the outlier here with too few regional accents given the vast land mass. I would attribute it to the population growing alongside the successive innovations of rail, radio and television so that regional dialects blended into each other.

Americans speak a little like 17th-18th century Brits but honestly Devon or Cornwall is closest. Just talk literally like a pirate and you're mostly there. The John Adams tv series is painfully lib but gets that right.

Also if you go back to Henry Viii things start going Dutch/Frisian. which is concerning

If you want to make a British upset, tell them their accent is wrong and Americans are closer to Shakespeare's accent than they are.

I LOVE the early modern English dialect and accent. I use it sometimes as a gag when pretending to be olde timey and it turns out no one csn understand a word I'm saying. People really don't pay attention

I'm from the Canadian maritimes and a cape Breton accent and a Belfast accent are basically the same thing.

its nice when regional sterotypes are so easily identifiable, in the US it can take half a conversation before you get to make fun of where they're from

mmm bur scrumptious vittles