[Ads-l] Accents of the Civil War

[Jonathan Lighter]

This fifteen-minute clip may be of interest to dialectologists, because the
speaker was born in 1846.  He came from a wealthy family in southeastern
Virginia.

He may be enunciating for the microphone more carefully than usual:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfqIa4dDxrw

This man was born in rural Minnesota in 1850.  Unfortunately the sound
quality is very poor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1tk1Qc4tN4

These speakers (starting about 1:15 in) were only a few years younger.
Their accents sound perfectly ordinary to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfcc21c6Uo

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfcc21c6Uo>
The interesting question (which can't be answered from these clips) is how
much U.S. accents have changed in the past 160 years. A lot? A little? If
only a little, what about 100 years before that?

The question is probably too broad to be answered.

JL
-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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