I have a question: I’m reading an ARC set in, I believe, the Regency or close to it, and I’m confused about linguistics.
When did the American English dialect and pronunciation remove itself from any similarity to British English such that Englishmen might complain about an American woman’s “grating accent?”
Wikipedia puts the split at about 1725 so it would make sense that a book set in the Regency or shortly before or thereafter could conceivably feature remarks to linguistic difference. Continued searches of the Wiki reveal that there’s plenty to say about the differences between Brit English and US English – and Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Scottish, Asian, Caribbean, South African, Liberian, and Jamaican English, but not a great deal of detail that I found about WHY and WHEN these differences occured.
It’s been many years since I studied the history of the English language, so I’m rusty on my history – and I’m not even sure we covered the why of the split, so maybe it’s another linguistic unknown, like the direct cause of the Great Vowel Shift.
So I could be wrong in thinking the dialectical difference might not be so great, and that a character could realistically complain about the way an American sounds when in a ballroom in London. And I’m not one of the historical sticklers who is going to pitch a fit about such things; I’m just curious.
But on a related note, it does make me wonder – have there been any historical misfits in your fiction? Or, things that you thought were wrong that turned out to be correct?
I’m from Dublin, and I’m sorry to say that every romance novel I’ve ever picked up that was written by an American and set in Ireland (and I mean every single one) has made me cringe with its inaccurate awfulness. I don’t even know where to start – the painful attempts to transcribe some sort of Irish accent (no one seems to realise that there is a big range of accents in Ireland, and that the differences between even a working-class Dublin accent and a middle-class Dublin accent – let alone a rural Kerry accent – are enormous), the whimsical drunken locals holding céilÃs and playing uillean pipes, Irish being called “Gaelic”, the ridiculously inauthentic character names, the general depiction of Ireland as some fairy tale land untouched by the 21st (or indeed 20th) century… and then there are the historicals!
As for Irish accents being incomprehensible, well, when I was a kid I had a friend whose dad came from the depths of west Cork and I couldn’t understand a word he said! But I’d like to flatter myself that my generic middle-class Dublin accent (think Bono, who along with his bandmates all went to school just a mile from where I grew up) isn’t too bewildering – although I could be wrong…
Reminds me of the time my cockney friend told me he just loved the twang in my voice. I live in Georgia now, but I was born and raised on the west coast.
Like one of the other posters, I’m willing to overlook some things in exchange for a good story. But here is one of the things that makes me laugh or causes me to do a “heeeyyy, waitaminnit” double take.
Time travel stories where the traveler is a 20th or 21st century person who goes back to say 12th century France or 8th century Scotland and there is someone there who can speak modern English or in the case of the French story—the traveler was “fluent in French” and all of the people were able to understand her modern French.
and on the topic of regional accents and pronunciations: I was reading a book that was written and published in England about the history of Virginia—there was a note that the people in Shakespeare’s time pronounced that name as vir-GIN-ya, and I thought “but that’s how it’s pronounced…” (born and raised in SE vir-GIN-ya :-)) I also had a friend from England inform me that “diaper” was also a very old English word from Elizabethean times or older and it meant a scarf or small bit of linen cloth.