How did the American accent come about?

Question

Why isn't American English more similar to the English spoken in England? Is the American English accent a mixture of English and another language, like German or something?

Answer 1

The language evolved out of prolonged exposure to other cultures as they immigrated. England has a different accent due to the fact that their population is far more homogeneous.

Answer 2

British Isle's English has evolved too. Nobody in Shakespeare's age spoke the way anyone in the UK speaks today, Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Olivier notwithstanding. There are some linguists who, having done some research on accents in rural parts of England and Eastern North America, are convinced some pockets of Virginia have something closer to English as spoken in Elizabethan times than any other modern accent.

http://www.nrpe.org/profiles/profiles_vi_D_12_01.htm

Answer 3

Accents, as well as grammar and syntax, change and evolve from generation to generation (just look at Shakespeare). The American accents have changed just as much as the English ones. They were originally the same, but they each changed in different ways, because there wasn't that much contact between them.

If you were able to hear the accent of one of the first English people who emigrated to America, it wouldn't sound like the way English people speak today.

Answer 4

A Direct Quote from http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/accent.html

"When groups become distinct, the way they speak becomes distinct too. This happens socially and geographically, but is easiest to illustrate by geographical differences. If a single group splits into two (imagine that one half goes to Island A and one half to Island B), then once they have separated, their accents will change over time, but not in the same way, so that after just one generation the accent of Island A will be different from the accent of Island B. If they stay completely separated for centuries, their dialects may become so different that we will start wanting to say they are speaking two different languages."

Answer 5

When we left the Queen we left the Queens English. And there is certainly no one standard American Accent. My God, I live in the South and can never understand someone from the Northeast. Nor can they probably understand me.
Northerners seem to talk faster and less clear than Southerners. Southerners however are slower and lazier with their grammer.
Take for example Boomhauer on King of the Hill. Now that's just all wrong. People in Texas do not mumble that fast. He sounds like a Kennedy or something.

Answer 6

Well when you are that far apart from the country you are from you start to change the way you talk. The USA alone is so big it has different version of American English all over the country.

Answer 7

I don't know.