how did all these accents begin?

Question

for instance...im pretty sure he first settlers of this country had a british accent......


so how did this thick southern hillbilly slang develop????

Answer 1

Regional (and class) variants in pronunciation can be found in all countries. Local accents develop when a country or community is relatively isolated, and gradual changes move into a different direction from changes in another part of the country. Sometimes immigrants bring changes, for example there are several features of American English which are quite similar to Irish English. Sometimes immigrants keep phonological features of their original language, e.g. /d/ or /t/ for the 'th' (as in 'think') that can be observed in Black Vernacular English. Another influence can be popular songs. Usually the more educated a person is, the closer to "standard English" their accent becomes.
Slang is not the same as accent, it is a term for non-standard use of language. And there is also dialect, which is identified by lexical and grammatical differences
Why is it that in Hollywood films the bad guy usually has a British accent?

Answer 2

Although you ask a simple question there are, ironically, no simple answers to it. Historically speaking, the English have always had many different accents based partly on the historical isolation of English villages from each other plus England's stratified class society.

The English settlers who came to America did not all speak with the same accents. For example, the Pilgrims and Puritans of Massachussets came mostly from East Anglia and their speech reflected that region. On the other hand, most of the English settlers of Virginia and Maryland came from western England and Cornwall and spoke what is called the "West Country" dialect (Sometimes called "Sommerset English" too). This was William Shakespeare's native dialect too.

Modern British English (an r-less or non-rhotic form of English) is based on the London dialect. In the late 18th century the London dialect began spreading to other parts of England affecting or eliminating regional accents and dialects that were spoken there, Today, the London or Standard British dialect is even beginning to replace Scots English in Scotland.

Some traces of the London accent are visible in the American English of Boston and New York because these cities had close commercial ties with England right p to the time of the American revolution. Most American English accents reflect accents which existed in England before the London dialect began spreading.

England was also a very class conscious society. People in the upper classes did not mingle or communicate much with people in the middle and lower classes, if at all. Lord Cornwallis refused to meet George Washington after the Battle of Yorktown (1783) because even planter / slave - owner George Washington wasn't high enough on the hierarchy to talk to an English lord. To an English nobleman, being a slave owner would have been like being an innkeeper. This led to the development of different Englishes within English society too.

The American South, especially Georgia, had been basically a prison colony. So most of the people the British settled there were debtors prisoners, landless peasants and convicts. From the beginning, they spoke colloquial, uneducated Englishes although still closer to the older English of Chaucer in many respects than standard British English. After the American Revolution, the British started sending these kinds of people to Australia instead.

There is some evidence that people hear differently too and that this might explain some accent differences, especially between American and British English. Even within single countries, like Italy, pronunciation differences exist. Standard Italian cantare and cannelloni pronounced gantare and gannelloni in some regions possibly due to hearing differences among the speakers. However, much more research still needs to be done on this subject.

Answer 3

Big question - too big to answer fully here.

1. There isn't a British accent - we have more accents per square mile than any other country.
2. Just as language develops with influence from outside sources, so accent develops in a similar way.
3. These days, fashion has a lot to do with it. In England, RP is gradually being replaced by Estuary English as the accepted 'norm.'
4. Can't help you with the Hillbilly slang. Preobably related to No. 3.

Answer 4

Read the Bible. It started at the Tower of Babble. God made it so that people could not understand each other, and they went separate ways. They had to stop building a tower to Heaven, because they could not understand each other.