The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant said "Mary"

[Barbara Need]

I don't remember the source (possibly Pyles and Algeo), but I do
remember reading that English visitors to the American Colonies and
the US early on were struck by the fairly uniform speech of Americans
of all classes (probably white Americans, but I could be wrong). I
have always thought it had to do with the limited number of regions
that colonists came from in England. That is, fewer dialects came over
than were present in Great Britain at the time.

Barbara

Barbara Need

On 10 Jun 2010, at 6:37 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> I wonder if there wasn't another influence in the 18th century
> towards making accents more uniform across the American colonies --
> that the elite emulated the British ("Anglicization").  And the
> middling classes emulated the upper.  There was much contact with
> Britain among the upper classes of the port cities -- Boston, New
> York, Charleston.
>
> At 6/10/2010 02:03 AM, Paul Johnston wrote:
>> Cultivated British English in Revolutionary times was definitely
>> rhotic (shown in Sheridan and Walker), though not all vernaculars
>> were.  Besides the North of England (read central and western
>> Yorkshire and surrounding areas to the north and south;
>> Northumberland and Cumberland were probably rhotic), East Anglia
>> might have been non-rhotic by 1750, and maybe Cockney too.  So
>> Bostonians (where East Anglians settled) might have been non-rhotic
>> too,
>
> I suspect most of the East Anglians who settled Boston had arrived by
> 1700.  But this is just a guess; the only immigration to the colonies
> I know a bit about is Palatine and Irish.
>
>> and maybe New Yorkers (Cockneys); not sure if anyone in the
>> South was, although I--anachronistically--think of Washington as a
>> Tidewater speaker, and therefore non-rhotic.  Probably totally wrong.

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