Accent

Americans didn’t lose their British accent – rather they kept the accents the arrived with and the British accent evolved differently. Today’s Americans probably sound more like the British of the past than do today's Brits.

It's thought that Received Pronunciation - the traditional "cut-glass" English accent - only emerged relatively recently, in the 19th century.  Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally "neutral" and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.

American elites, actors, and announcers in the 1920s were taught to speak in this iconic, "all-treble" accent, the era's preferred pronunciation for topics of high society and culture.

The Transatlantic accent was developed mainly in private independent preparatory schools especially in the American Northeast and in acting schools during the 1930s and 1940s. Although it became fashionable in Hollywood and related media, the accent's overall usage declined following World War II.

The stereotypical American southern accent is an aristocratic British accent with a southern lilt.

William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, the radio traitor was captured because of his ‘Jairmany calling’ accent. Passing two British Army officers who were gathering sticks in a wood near the German border, Joyce remarked that he too often collected firewood there. One officer said: "You’re William Joyce — I’d know your voice anywhere."

Wilfred Pickles was a northern English BBC newsreader during the Second World War. Because of his strong Yorkshire accent, he was chosen for the job as "a deliberate attempt to make it more difficult for Nazis to impersonate BBC broadcasters".

Dick Van Dyke was unaware of his horrifically bad Cockney accent in the 1964 film Mary Poppins. None of his fellow actors said a word about it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his own role in Terminator in German, as his accent is considered very rural by German/Austrian standards and it would be too ridiculous to have a death machine from the future come back in time and sound like a hillbilly.

Before his success, the actor James Franco would practice different accents on the customers he served at McDonald's.

Many languages are split into regional dialects. Accents in Britain change noticeably every 25 miles.

Singers with accents (e.g British accent) sing with an "American" or "neutral" accent because it is simply the easiest way to sing. Words are drawn out and more powerfully pronounced making the accents "neutral". It's not done intentionally.

A study by researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich found that researchers who spent the winter at the British Antarctic Survey Halley Research Station started to develop a new accent. The study found that the researchers' accents changed in a number of ways, including:

They started to pronounce their vowels longer.

They started to pronounce the "ou" sound in words like "flow" and "disco" from the front of their mouth, as opposed to the back of their throats.

They started to use different intonation patterns.

In real life, the dwarves from J.R.R Tolkien's books would have Arabic or Hebrew accents, since he based their speech on Semitic languages.

Babies have accents, which they pick up in the womb. For example, a French infant's cry will end with a rising note, while German bundles of joy have a dropping note at the end of theirs.

Cats have accents. Phonetics researchers have suggested that cats and their humans develop a "pidgin language" together to communicate, which may influence regional variations in cat vocalizations.

Cows have different 'moo' accents depending on what region in the world they live in.