When did America lose the British Accent??

Question

What time interval or date in history did the US natives begin to lose the British accents?? How long did it take for them to lose it?? Do you know of any informative sites or places that would talk about it?

Answer 1

Only the USA lost the British accent, the correct pronunciation, the correct spelling, and anything that resembles English

Answer 2

They didn't The american accent is the way the British used to talk supplemented by the regional variations from Scotland, Ireland etc.
In Britain there is a wide variety of accents some of which are incomprehensible to other British people.
The accent that people think of as British is in fact a particular type of English accent called Received Pronunciation. This is the type of accent used by the upper classes and ,at one time, it was essential to imitate this if a person wanted to be accepted in polite society but is no longer a requirement.
Received Pronunciation is also called the Queen's English (or King's under other monarchs) and derives from the way english was spoken at the court of the German monarchs who ruled England from George I in the 18th century to the present day.
If you listen to the recordings of the present Queen when she first came to the throne in 1952 you will hear an extreme example of this. Over the years she has improved and toned down a bit.

Answer 3

You don't loose or gain an accent, English 101 University Of Minnesota 1968.
If you spoke, or say, your family spoke Polish, by the time you were seven years old you'll have a very good hand at the language but, not perfect.
You were moved into a household that was totally Americanized along with the language. At seven years old you'll already know one language, and, you'll start to pick up, bits and pieces of yet, another language, not perfect Polish but, not bad English, you'll have a completely different dialect, a marriage of the two. Using words from one to the other, a "bastardized" language.

It all depends how long you stay with each family but, you'll never have a good hand at either language.

Answer 4

I don't believe that you can point to an actual time or date when Americans lost thier English accent. With each wave of immigration, new accents were introduced into America, and as those immigrants learned to use the English language, the language changed. Today, american is more a description of the language used than English.
The American Language by H. L. Mencken's is a book about changes Americans had made to the English Language. The book discusses the beginnings of American variations from English, the spread of these variations, American names and slang. Try the site below...it gives some good instances of shifts in the language,

Answer 5

You are assuming that the way the British speak these days is the same way as they spoke hundreds of years ago. It's more likely that the British accents of colonial times were half way between present day American and British accents.

Answer 6

Second generation of Brits began to lose the accent-thankfully.

Answer 7

As soon as we possibly could. Brits (as a whole) are snobish arseholes that think that they're better in every possible way than Americans.