History · 7 min read
Where did the American accent come from? How one accent became two
Where did the American accent come from? Neither accent is the original. See when British and American speech split, and how England changed the r and the 'ah'.
By Yusuf Tör ·
There is a story many people love to tell: that Americans still speak like Shakespeare, and the British are the ones who changed.
It is half right, which is why it lasts. So where did the American accent come from? It came from the English that settlers carried across the Atlantic in the 1600s, mixed together and then reshaped over four centuries. The real story also explains why a British accent sounds the way it does today.
The short answer
The American accent grew from the English that settlers brought from many parts of England and the British Isles, starting in the early 1600s. Their accents blended into new ways of speaking. Meanwhile, southern England kept changing: it stopped pronouncing the r after a vowel and gave words like bath a long “ah”. So neither accent is the original. Each one kept some old features and changed others.
Where the American accent came from
The first lasting English settlement in America was Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620. Over the next century and a half, settlers arrived from London and from many other regions of England, and later in large numbers from Ulster.
Each group brought its own accent, and in the colonies those accents met. Children grew up hearing a mixture, and the mixture became something new. By the mid-1700s, visitors from England were remarking on how alike colonial Americans sounded, wherever their families had come from. In 1770 one English visitor called the colonists’ speech “perfectly uniform”, as JSTOR Daily’s account of colonial speech records.
That is the first part of the answer. The American accent was not copied from one British accent. It was built from many of them.
Is the American accent the original British accent?
No, but you can see why people think so. Some features of American speech really are older than their British counterparts. The clearest is the r. Most Americans pronounce the r in car, park and water, and so did most English speakers in the 1600s. In southern England, that r later fell silent.
But American speech has changed as well, in its own ways. The t in water and better that sounds like a quick d in General American is one example, and the way many Americans now say cot and caught alike is another. As long ago as 1927, the American scholar George Philip Krapp published an essay challenging the idea that American English was a preserved form of older English. Neither accent is a frozen copy of the past. Both are modern, and both are descended from the same parent.
What changed in England
Two of the clearest sounds of a British accent today came from changes in southern England. Both became standard long after the first ships had sailed, and both are features you learn when you learn Modern RP.
The r after a vowel fell silent. Traces of r-dropping appear in English writing as early as the 1400s, but for centuries it was not accepted in careful speech. By the 1770s it was becoming common around London, even among educated speakers. By the early 1800s, the standard accent of southern England had dropped it.
In Modern RP, an r is pronounced only when a vowel follows it. Red and very keep their r, but car ends on a long “ah”. Linguists call an accent that keeps the r rhotic and one that drops it non-rhotic. The Wikipedia article on rhoticity in English sets out this history with its sources.
Some words took a long “ah”. In words like bath, grass, after and can’t, the short vowel of cat grew longer in southern England from the 1600s and in time became the “ah” of father. For a long time this was looked down on as a London habit. It was not until the late 1800s that it became part of the standard accent.
In Modern RP these words share the vowel of father. Words such as cat, gas and hand keep the short vowel, so the long “ah” is a list of words to learn rather than a rule the spelling gives you.
How to say it: for car, open your mouth for “ah”, hold it a little longer than feels natural, and stop. Don’t curl your tongue back. For bath, use the same “ah” and finish with your tongue lightly between your teeth for the th.
When did the American accent develop?
There is no single year, because an accent changes gradually. These are the points in the story that the evidence supports.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1607 and 1620 | English settlers found Jamestown and Plymouth. Most English speakers still pronounce the r after a vowel. |
| 1700s | Settlers from many regions mix, and visitors describe colonial speech as uniform. Large numbers of settlers arrive from Ulster. |
| 1770s | Dropping the r after a vowel becomes common around London, even in educated speech. |
| Early 1800s | The standard accent of southern England no longer pronounces the r after a vowel. |
| Late 1800s | The long “ah” in words like bath becomes part of the standard accent we now call RP. |
| After 1945 | Americans move decisively towards pronouncing every r, and r-dropping declines on the East Coast and in the South. |
The table shows something the myth leaves out. These two British features settled into standard speech after the American colonies had already been growing for well over a century.
Why Boston and New York dropped their r
If American English kept the r, why did the old Boston accent and the old New York accent drop it? The answer is contact and prestige.
In the 1700s, port cities such as Boston, New York, Charleston and Savannah stayed in close contact with England. As r-dropping became common in London, upper-class speakers in those cities took it up. Most other regions kept the r. The older Boston accent also had a long “ah” in some words, like southern England, as J. C. Wells describes in Accents of English.
For a time, dropping the r sounded prestigious in the East and the South. That began to change after the Civil War, and after the Second World War pronouncing the r became the prestige form across most of the country. In New York, the linguist William Labov saw the change at work in the early 1960s. He asked staff in three department stores, from the expensive Saks Fifth Avenue to the cheaper S. Klein, a question whose answer was “fourth floor”. Staff at Saks pronounced the r most often, and staff at S. Klein least often. The r had become a sign of status.
That is why most American accents today pronounce every r, and why r-dropping in Boston has been receding in recent generations.
What this means for your accent
If you are learning a British accent, this history is good news. The features that set Modern RP apart are not mysteries. They are a small number of changes, each with a known history, that real speakers made gradually and that you can make too.
One honest note. The accent you learn will not be the British accent of 1776, or the clipped accent of old films. It will be Modern RP, the standard British accent as it sounds today.
Start with the two changes from this article, the r and the long “ah”, in three short steps.
- Drop the r after a vowel. Say car park, more water and first floor with no r at all. In Modern RP, water is “WOR‑tuh (r silent)”.
- Bring the r back before a vowel. Say far away and more ice, and let the r join the two words.
- Learn the long “ah” words. Start with bath, after, can’t, ask and grass, and say each one beside cat to hear the difference.
Sterling is your AI-powered accent coach that teaches you how to speak English with a British accent confidently and clearly. For the six other differences between the two accents, read British vs American accent, and for a full plan, read how to do a British accent. Or take the free accent test to hear where your accent stands today.
Questions people ask
Do Americans have the original British accent?
No. Both accents grew from the English of the 1600s, and both have changed since. American speech kept some older features, such as the r after a vowel, while southern England kept others and changed in different ways. Neither accent is a time capsule.
Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?
No one can say exactly, because there are no recordings. What the written evidence shows is that the r-dropping heard in Modern RP was only then spreading in London speech and had not yet been accepted as standard. So the British accent of 1776 was not the British accent of today, and visitors were already describing colonial speech as its own, uniform way of talking.
Which came first, British or American English?
English was spoken in England for centuries before the first permanent English settlement in America, at Jamestown in 1607. American English grew from the English the settlers brought with them. From then on, the two developed side by side, and both kept changing.
Is American English closer to Old English?
No. Old English, the language of Beowulf, was spoken more than a thousand years ago, and an English speaker today needs to study it to read it. British and American English are both forms of modern English, and neither is meaningfully closer to Old English than the other.
Why don’t Americans have British accents?
Because accents change wherever people speak them, and the two countries changed in different ways. Settlers from many regions mixed in America and formed new ways of speaking, while southern England later took up features such as the silent r and the long “ah” in bath. The result is two accents that differ in a handful of clear sounds.