18c accents?

[Herbert Stahlke]

Wolfram and Schilling-Estes have an excellent summary
history of American English in Chapter 4 of their
American English (Blackwell 1998).  They indicate that
British English speakers were already complaining about
differences in American English in 1735 and that the
term "American English" appears in print in 1782.
Elsewhere I've read 1750 as a date by which English in
the Americas was recognized as distinct from British
English.

Herb Stahlke
Ball State University
> My wife has posed me a question I'm unable to answer: When did American
> pronunciation start becoming noticeably different from English
> pronunciation? E.g., is there any record from around the time of the
> American Revolution ("colonials speak oddly" sort of thing)?
>
> She was prompted to this question by listening to the CDs in a book
> called _Poetry Speaks_, featuring American and English poets reading
> their own works. The oldest are from circa 1888: Tennyson, Browning, and
> Whitman. T & B are, she says, "obviously British", though B, who
> traveled extensively in the US, is "less so". But Whitman "pretty much
> sounds the way you'd expect an educated mid-Atlantic person to sound;
> it's clearly not British, but an American accent, and pretty much the
> same you'd expect to hear today."
>
> She also comments that while it's very difficult to make out *what*
> they're saying -- the originals were on wax cylinders -- the accent and
> cadence are clearly distinguishable. I haven't listened to these yet.
>
> -- Mark A. Mandel
>    Linguist at Large