British ===> American English connections

[Michael Montgomery]

Dear ADS,

I'd like to respond briefly to Sergey Dubna's query last week about
"which regional accent of England became the basis of the American
pronunciation?"  This question cannot be answered in any simple
fashion because the English language has changed so much on both
sides of the Atlantic since the American colonial era.  The loss of
post-vocalic -r occurred largely after the early stage of American
English and was still expanding well into the 19th century in
England.  Thus, most colonists from the British Isles would have
been r-ful, with those coming from southeastern England to New
England in the 17th century being only variably so.  The scholar
who has addressed this issue most thoroughly and has much to say
about the loss of -r in particular is George Philip Krapp in _The
English Language in America_. 2 vols. New York: Ungar (1925).

The other fundamental contribution to the issue of trans-Atlantic
connections in pronunciation is Roger Lass' 1990 important essay,
"Where do extraterritorial Englishes come from? Dialect input and
recodification in transported Englishes" in S. Adamson (ed.)
_Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical
Linguistics_. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 245-80.  Lass deals with vowel
systems and mergers and has little to say about the loss of -r.  He
argues that American English and all other national varieties of
the language outwith Britain are offshoots of southern English in
pronunciation.

Dubna's query must be reformulated and, as Krapp shows, can be
addressed only by reconstructing 18th-century pronunciation
beforehand.  At that time West Country English was no more r-ful
than most varieties of English in England.

Michael Montgomery
Department of English
University of South Carolina
Columbia SC 29208