Do Americans Have the REAL English Accent? - History Helms Reaction

追加: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Welcome back everyone to another reaction video. Well, you know that I love to talk about accents and dialects and where they came from and even languages. I find it a fascinating topic and I think it's a cool lens through which to view parts of history. What if I told you that Americans are the speakers of the real English accent.

[00:00:21]Now, I understand that there are many different American accents. There are tons of different English accents. I find English accents fascinating. The fact that you can go from one city to the next and the accent completely changes even over a short area. I I think that's really cool. Uh and I got to experience a new one of those accents being in Northern England and hearing the Jordy accent in Newcastle and hearing kind of the northwestern English accent in places like Carile.

[00:00:48]Fascinating. I love learning about that kind of stuff. But there's an argument that has been made that when the American Revolution happened in the aftermath of independence, it was actually the English who changed their accent into what we hear today.

[00:01:06]Usually when people typically hear like think of an English accent, we're thinking of what we call received pronunciation, which uh is kind of like when you think of an American accent, what I what I speak, which is kind of the, you know, Ohio Midwestern kind of thing. That's typically what people kind of think of as the default American accent, even though everybody has different accents. Uh so the same is true with English. And that's what this video is about today. It's when did Americans lose the British accent? But when I read the uh the description, it says that people assume Americans developed a new accent after the Revolutionary War. The truth is actually the opposite. In this episode from this channel called History Helms that which has 7,000 subscribers right now, uh they're breaking down the linguistic split between the United States and Great Britain. Uh I think both accents have developed since then, but I'm curious to see what they have to say on this topic. So I'll put the link down in the description. And if you like what you see, uh, subscribe and maybe we can push him up over 10,000 subscribers today. Let's dive in.

[00:02:09]>> Maybe you've never thought of it this way, but colonial Americans spoke and behaved far closer to British than to American.

[00:02:17]>> Oh, yeah. I mean, that's true in a sense. Uh, they identified themselves as British, but we should understand that for a large number of these colonial Americans, they had never set foot in Britain. Uh, and by Britain, we're talking about England, Wales, Scotland.

[00:02:35]Um, yeah, that's the aisle of Great Britain. Uh, you know, there are several generations removed. And so, they're identity is very, you know, it's like if you grew up in Northeast Ohio and then you moved to Florida and you had kids and grandkids and great grandkids, those great grandkids are not going to think of themselves as Ohioans. They're going to think of themselves as Flidians. Uh so yeah they were British subjects but they were uniquely American British subjects.

[00:03:04]>> Many early Americans still considered themselves British in the colonial days.

[00:03:07]Hence patriots versus loyalists. But when did the American brand actually start? When did we stop bowing, start shaking hands, and stop speaking British? Let's address a myth first. The American accent isn't some sort of new invention. It's actually an old one. In the 1700s, British English was not the Queen's English that we think of now.

[00:03:29]Yeah. What? You know, the the British sounds, right?

[00:03:32]>> Yeah. Again, as I said at the top of this, I mean, what accent are we talking about? Because if you are talking to somebody who's got a cochney accent from London and then you go up to Birmingham and you hear the Brummy accent, well, that's a different thing. And then you go just outside of Birmingham a couple miles and you get to the Black Country, it's a different accent. and you go over to Newcastle, it's completely different.

[00:03:53]You go up to Scotland, another, you know, we're talking all the way up to Scotland, we're talking 4 hours by train from London, and it's a completely different language at that point. I mean, it really does sound completely different.

[00:04:04]>> All right. Anyway, instead, British English was rotic, meaning they pronounced the R in words like hard, bar, and car, >> which they don't now, right? You know, going to take my car to the bar. Uh, now you still hear some of that in American accents as well. Like in Massachusetts for example, or even when I lived in southern Indiana, we didn't say fire, we said far.

[00:04:27]>> Back end of the American Revolution around the mid to late 1700s, the London elites began practicing non-roticity to sound more sophisticated and avoid association with the ungrateful younger brothers overseas. Yes. But mostly the distance. I was going to say not just the ungrateful younger brothers overseas, but the people within England who had uh you know were poorer and of a different class >> from the poor lowborn people around them. And this is really neat. The Americans were new and demanding independence. So you'd think they would be the ones to quickly change the way they speak, but that's just not the case. Americans didn't develop a new accent. We just kept the one we had and gradually changed it while England moved on considerably sooner and far more intentionally.

[00:05:12]>> Put another way, before and during the revolution, the average red coat and the average patriot were speaking with similar accents.

[00:05:19]>> Uh, you want a interesting case study in this? Watch a show like Turn Washington Spies or John Adams. Uh, you'll hear a pretty unique accent you don't really hear anywhere. It almost sounds Irish.

[00:05:31]Uh, and some of that is based in what we believe to be how people spoke uh, at that time in North America. Uh, we don't know 100% for sure. We can only base it on what we what we have written down for us. We don't have recordings of those people. U, but especially in John Adams, I think they do a pretty good job of showing us what a uh, late 18th century American might have sounded like. So in practice, the American accent kind of froze many of the English sounds of the 1700s. King George III of back then probably sounded a lot more American than King Charoo. Somebody please give me a good explanation as to why this portrait looks the way it does.

[00:06:13]>> I don't know. It's kind of cool. I I I think it's kind of I I it's different, but I like it. I I think it's great.

[00:06:21]>> Somebody please give me a good explanation as to why this portrait looks the way it does. He He's right though. I I I would agree with him that George III probably sounded more like me than like Charles.

[00:06:33]>> We stayed Elizabethan and they went posh. And this is really important as far as class and national themes. In the US, liberty and equality were massive virtues and still are now. And not to say that those virtues are not present in the UK today, but >> right. And of course, liberty and equality only went so far, right? This is getting off the topic, but uh you know at the time of the American Revolution, you're talking about a different you I mean Americans still had aristocracy, right? We still had a landed gentry who was wealthy uh and who were the ones who could vote and had property rights and had a lot of rights that weren't given to women, weren't given to minorities, weren't giving given to your average poor white farmer.

[00:07:17]There's a clear discrepancy in that birthright hierarchy still stands as a major recognized institution. And we can't skip over the demographic changes here either, as the early American West, for example, was a melting pot of German, Irish, and Scandinavian influences, while Great Britain just remains, >> especially the northern American West, right? I mean, we're talking about the upper Midwest, Minnesota, Wisconsin, places like that. Even Ohio has a lot of German influence, but Scandinavian German, a lot of that up there. far more homogeneous for much longer. But there's more here. With speech changes comes reading and writing changes. Have you ever wondered why Americans and Brit Oh god. Americans and Brits, there we go.

[00:07:58]Have different spellings for words like color. Of course you have. Look, I'm in your brain already, which I'm sure is massive and juicy. Lots of wrinkles.

[00:08:05]Yeah. Yeah. For this spelling thing, we can thank Noah Webster.

[00:08:08]>> Wait, I need to know though. Is this the guy who's narrating this? Because if so, that's an awesome picture.

[00:08:13]>> Is massive and juicy. Lots of wrinkles.

[00:08:15]Yeah. Yeah. For this spelling thing, we can thank Noah Webster. Yes. That Webster.

[00:08:21]>> He thought that as long as Americans used British spelling, they were still mentally enslaved to the crown. And not only that, but it takes someone like a Noah Webster coming along to standardize language at a time when you still have a significant part of the population that doesn't read or write. Uh and you know it's different things over time like the Bible became one of the ways that language got standardized for people in different places. Uh so someone eventually comes along who helps make that happen. He wanted an American language that was as lean and efficient as the people and many of his suggestions gained massive traction in the late 18th century and stuck around till today. He chopped the U out of honor. He flipped the re in theater to theater. These seem perfectly normal to the average American nowadays. And center is another one. Hey, this is something that was covered, you know, in one of the all-time great Saturday Night Live sketches. Uh, the one with Nate Baretti playing George Washington. So good.

[00:09:22]>> Get this. There were more rejected changes than accepted ones. I'll show you a few and I think you'll really like this. He wanted to change tongue to tongue, believe to believe, machine to machine, soup to soup. Now, we laugh at these and think that they look ridiculous, but I'm sure that the people at the time thought that removing the the U from certain words was ridiculous, but they still did it.

[00:09:49]>> Daughter to daughter, head to head, and my personal favorite, women to women.

[00:09:56]And I really like this one because first it's just funny. All right. And secondly, it cleans up that weird pronunciation dilemma we have with the singular and plural sound nearly identical when read literally, which was a problem even back then. Webster solution was practical. And most Americans still vocalize women just as Webster had expelled. But his superiors, >> he actually makes a great point there. I mean, if women and woman, uh, you know, the the part that we're pronouncing differently is the beginning of the word, but that's not the part that we change the spelling of was ultimately rejected because people found the spelling to be too ugly. Let me know in the comments which alternative Webster spelling should we reintroduce today and tell me how we should fix.

[00:10:38]>> I want s for soup. I like that one.

[00:10:41]That's pretty cool.

[00:10:42]>> This women problem. Oh man, that sounds bad. But you you know what I mean. The point here is that the speech changing along with the spelling was >> ah my all-time favorite painting from early American history, the event that never took place where Thomas Jefferson is stomping on the toes of John Adams.

[00:11:01]So this is supposed to uh depict the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Obviously no such event happened. It actually it's it's cool in the TV show John Adams. this painting gets unveiled to John Adams and he just rips it to shreds saying that this never happened. We were coming and going and you know there was a threat and all this kind of stuff and we can see people like Benjamin Rush right there and uh who else we got? I mean with these this is the committee of five that put the declaration together. Uh but the just I always take an opportunity to do this.

[00:11:34]It's a complete aside here, but uh July 2nd, the uh the resolution to declare independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. On July 4th, the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, primarily written by Thomas Jefferson, but presented by a committee of five people. There's changes that Benjamin Franklin made, stuff like that. There's actually uh one of Thomas Jefferson's notes that has the corrections on it. Um, and then they ordered the embossed copy, the one that you see if you go to the National Archives and see the one with the signatures on it. They ordered that to be made. It was made and the first signatures were applied on August 2nd, but not everybody signed that day.

[00:12:18]Anyway, back to the video. An attempt at a psychological breakaway from the British, and it worked. Sooner or later, Webster was able to rewire the American brain to see Britishness as an extra unnecessary piece of baggage.

[00:12:33]By 1790, acting British was socially dangerous. If you carried yourself like a duke, people assumed you wanted the red coats back. This is a great point, and this this happens a lot in human history, right? When when people who once identified as something become something else, they tend to become more hostile to that thing than the average person. You know, just an example from religion. The people who tend to be the most hostile toward a particular religion or a particular belief system tend to be the people who used to adhere to that belief and no longer do. Right?

[00:13:10]So people who were formerly British who fought a war to break away from that system have kind of this knee-jerk backlash against it. Look at people like Alexander Hamilton who many of his political opponents used that against him. They argued that he wanted us to be British in our system of government and that was seen as a negative thing.

[00:13:33]>> They thought you were, you know, a bit posh, perhaps bougie. being practical, common, maybe even a bit plain was valuable both for the theme of equality as well as distance from Britany. I just made that common noun up, but funny how you know exactly what I mean. Take a handshake for example. In London, a bow was a physical map of who was above whom. But in Philadelphia, the handshake became the law of the land. It was a radical metaphorical middle finger to the class system. You look that's actually I never thought of it in that context that the handshake was meant to be a sign of equality whereas bowing meant one person was subservient to the other. Fascinating.

[00:14:13]>> Look a man in the eye and grip his hand.

[00:14:15]A display that we >> of course now we see the handshake to this day right we see for example Donald Trump uses the handshake as a way to try and assert dominance. he'll pull people in, but then you watch people like the king of the Netherlands or the king of or king Charles III who kind of like go in prepared for that and don't let him pull in look now but directly respects the language from the declaration against Great Britain that all men are created equal. Benjamin Franklin was really good at this. He would show up to important events dressed humbly, even showing up to the French court in a raccoon hat in plain brown suit.

[00:14:50]>> Everyone else was in powdered wigs and silk stockings. even the men. It seems unserious but this representation of the American public is simple somewhat >> right and he actually used that as part of the appeal of Americans right to like look at you know Ben Franklin he's like this he's so different and you know there's something exotic and interesting to the French court about this guy >> rugged was effective in securing French alliance against the British I have a whole video on why Benjamin Franklin wasn't a president and really was just a goofy guy if you're interested He was also really well up until recently way too old to be considered a candidate for president.

[00:15:28]>> This trend from Franklin of being distinctly rustic and specifically anti- posh to contrast against the British would have translated to other founding fathers and early presidents. But this just didn't happen. Not for a while. In fact, for the first 40 years, US presidents were still Virginia gentlemen.

[00:15:45]>> That's true.

[00:15:45]>> They spoke with a refined rhythmic cadence. Then came 1828 and this absolute menace of a man became the seventh president, Andrew Jackson. He ran on and embraced the persona of the regular man and woman. Yeah, he's really kind of in a lot of ways the first real populist president appealing to the everyman. The guy you could have a beer with instead of somebody who was seen as kind of other like of this aristoctocracy, this kind of like intelligent wealthy class of people that was not like me, you know, kind of thing.

[00:16:20]>> While he wasn't the most morally upstanding figure to say the least, he was dedicated to the average person, >> right? He may have been the only true common man president that the US has ever had. Let me know if you agree with that statement.

[00:16:31]>> I don't know if I'd go that far, but he certainly was the first one that we had.

[00:16:36]>> I mean, just think, when's the last time we had a regular guy be president?

[00:16:39]>> I hit 17 straight three-pointers.

[00:16:42]>> Probably be for the better, right?

[00:16:43]Anyway, Jackson's inauguration was closer to a riot than a ceremony like we're used to now. No, really, it was an actual riot. Thousands of common people flooded the White House. They tracked mud on the expensive rugs. They broke fine china. And they for >> And this is part of the problem. You know, you can see a lot of benefits to being like the appeal to the every man.

[00:17:05]But there's also something to be said for being other, being different, right?

[00:17:11]You know, because we want the person that occupies the White House to be better than most of us, to be more educated, to be more intelligent, you know, to not just be like one of because if he's just like one of us, then anybody could do the job, right? We want somebody who's exceptional. And when you break down those barriers, this is the risk that you run with that. The president to escape through a side door while the staff lure the mob outside with tubs of spike punch. And now we close our eyes and visualize what they may have looked like. Look guys, leave the president alone. Look, there's alcohol outside and that's all it took.

[00:17:43]Man, we used to be a country man. We used to be, you know, to British observers, presumably with their noses upturned. This must have been the end of days. To Americans, it was the birth of the frontier identity. This is the moment we traded the salon for the saloon. We stopped trying to be refined and started being authentic. This is where the American voice gets faster, louder, and more utilitarian.

[00:18:06]>> Yeah. And it's interesting the way he's framed this that, you know, the identity of who a typical American was did change as you get into the middle of the the 1800s. And and that's why the the power base changes, right? Look at how many presidents in the latter half of the 19th century then come from Ohio, which had been kind of one of the frontiers at one time, but of course by this point is right in the center of the country. uh the the idea of what an American is shifted from being your eastern aristocrat uh wealthy landowner type to being the frontiersman to being the adventurer to being kind of the larger than life figure. Something interesting though we should note here specifically with with accents is that we kind of went backwards in the late 1800s and early 1900s wealthy Americans got accent envy again.

[00:19:01]Yeah, look, if you listen to videos, and I've done videos on this, I'll put one up at the end, uh, video where we listen to recorded audio of early presidents, and you can hear how most of them, obviously, they're speaking to large crowds, many of them without a microphone, and so they have to use a particular style to be heard. But it really, other than Taft, most of the presidents, the early presidents for whom we have recordings, they do still kind of sound like aristocrats. get it.

[00:19:29]The Mid-Atlantic accent, that weird half British voice you hear in old movies or or from Franklin D. Roosevelt's a good example of this. That weird like fake accent. Some schools, >> it's not fake. It's just the way that a lot of people were starting to talk then.

[00:19:44]>> Even taught it to make Americans just sound better, more upper class, so to speak. But this ultimately failed. Why?

[00:19:51]Because the pioneer identity was just too strong already. After World War II, the Mid-Atlantic accent died. Trying to sound elite just wasn't cool. It was very unAmerican. And there's definitely some subtext with that one.

[00:20:04]>> So, when did we stop acting British, speaking British? It wasn't a single day. Nothing in history is that fast.

[00:20:11]Instead, >> he I like this guy's style for for analyzing stuff. Like, he seems to have a good grasp of how history works. You know, it's not one thing. It's not black and white. It doesn't happen overnight.

[00:20:23]It's all a process 100%.

[00:20:26]>> It was a 50-year slow fade from the holes of parliament to the mud of the Tennessee frontier.

[00:20:31]>> So, it looks like that is him. Uh, that's really cool. History helms. Okay, I'm definitely going to subscribe. Uh, and I'll invite you to do that, too. I think we'll probably take a look at more. I like his style. I like his way of seeing things.

[00:20:45]So, let me know what you think about that. Did you like it? Did you not like it? Do you agree with him? Do you have more to add to the conversation? and use the comment section below to do that.

[00:20:53]Check out the channel. Uh his name is History Helms. I put the link down in the description. If you like it, subscribe. I'd love to see us push him up over 10,000 subscribers. That'd be really cool to be able to do that and encourage him to keep making content.

[00:21:06]This one came out about a week and a half ago. And if you want to dive more into this topic, I'll throw some videos on the screen where you can learn a little more about it. Thanks for watching.