Southern US Accents & Shakespeare's Accent

hello I made a video a while ago about the idea that the slightly flawed idea that US accent to represent a continuation of preservation of original older British accents but I didn't really go into much detail about what the similarities and differences between modern US accents and older British accents actually were so I thought since American intricate accents are very interesting I've not really talked about that much on this channel I would do video today comparing a modern US accent with David crystals reconstruction of what a Shakespearean sort of accent might have sounded like um now early 1600s British accents can be reconstructed with quite a lot of accuracy because we have for one thing we have a lot of text from the time that we can base things on in terms of poetic meter and Ryan tell us a lot about what words rhymed and what you know how stress was distributed across words and also people were writing about language and pronunciation at that point in a you know a way that was approaching a modern way so we have a very good idea of how things were pronounced back then David Crystal's done a very good job of consolidating the information the the US accent I'm going to use is it's gonna be a broadly southern US accent now obviously there are regional differences and and state differences in accents but I'm gonna use a relatively conservative relatively rural southern US accent a combination of features from across the south and it's gonna be a rhotic accent although in many southern US accents are non-rhotic um a couple of things to bear in mind or one one major thing to bear in mind obviously just like in the US and just like in Britain today in Shakespeare's time there would have been a lot of variation in accents across the country and now the accent David crystal is reconstructed is largely based on poetic literature like Speirs play Shakespeare's plays Shakespeare sonnets things like that this does not necessarily represent Shakespeare's actual accent it's just the accent that his plays were intended to be written in his plays were designed to be written in so it might be his accent it might be a generic London accent it might be a generic southern accent either way it was an accent people considered to be a typical or a normal southern accent in in the late 1500 and 1600 so this is post great vowel shift one thing you'll have heard about if you've looked into the history of English is the great vowel shift and it's it's important to remember Shakespeare although maybe the great vowel shift was still happening parts of the country when he was young by the time he was he was very famous it pretty much already happened certainly in the south it already happened so we're talking about a post great vowel shift accent here that has no effect on anything so first I'm gonna read a little passage from Shakespeare in this this generic southern US accent and then I'm gonna read it in this reconstructed early 1600s British accent is this a dagger which I see before me the handle toward my hand come let me clutch thee I have thee not and yet I see thee still or they are not fatal vision sensible to feeling as to sight or art thou but a dagger of the mind a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain I see thee yet in form as palpable as this which now are draw and now in a reconstructed early 1607 English accent is this a dagger which I see before me the handle toward my hand come let me clutch thee I have thee not and yet I say they still are though not fatal vision sensible to fail in as to sight or are though but a dagger of the mind a false Riaan proceeding from the hair to press it brain I see the yet in form as palpable as this which no I draw now the big one and the one everyone mentions is rotisserie the pronunciation of a rut sound in in all positions work is historically a where it appears in spelling now in my accent and in in in most English accents that is accents in England excluding West Country ones in certain northern ones Lancastrian ones and you have something called non rotisserie so a sound will not be realized as a row unless there's a vowel after it so in the word car I don't pronounce the roof I only pronounced in a word like round where there's a vowel after it and there's a thing called the intrusive R or the linking are and but that's that's not really relevant to either the atoms we're discussing whereas in in Shakespeare's accent and in a modern US accent or in a lot of modern US accent you have rotisserie so you have the rough being pronounced in all in all positions where it appears in spelling and now it's important to remember in some in some southern US accents there is not rotisserie there is non relatively as there is in my accent one thing this passage doesn't show as well is the appearance of T tapping or flapping now this happens in certain US accents probably most US accents actually wear when there is a strong vowel and then at ur and then a week now that is a vowel in a stressed syllable at ur and then a vowel unstressed syllable the turf will turn into an alveolar tap era so an example of this is the word butter in my accent it's the art in for example a southern US accent it would be butter or butter and I don't know if I'm saying that quite right um but in a Shakespearean accent it was probably pronounced with the full quality of the term butter something like that the vowels are where the most significant differences pop up not surprisingly now I've told you about the great vowel shift which has already happened by Shakespeare's time but there's another one that's happened between Shakespeare's time and today in southern US accent called the southern American battleship tour the southern US vowel shift um now one example of this is the re monopolization of the vowel in the word shine and in the word bright things like that and so in Shakespeare's day this vowel has different eyes shown in my accent is different as well shine in some US accents in some southern US accent it's a slight difícil shine but then in some is totally monofin eyes again shine and this isn't a retention of the original monopolization is broken with the great vowel shift and then it's really smooth Ahriman optimized in southern American accent and this has has caused the change shift in vowels which is where one one vowel sort of pushes other vowels to change and this happens because vowels we we sort of subconsciously unconsciously try to avoid vowel mergers and occasionally do get situations where two vowels will merge and certain sounds certain words will end up sounding identical to each other but we don't want to when we don't want too many vowels because that that increases ambiguity in a language so if enough sounds merged with each other then the inventory of words within the language goes down and then ambiguity increases and things start to get confusing so we naturally it's a simplistic way of putting it but we naturally avoid vowel mergers and sound mergers in general and so you get these things called change shift where one one sound will change and it will push other sounds away or drag other sounds into its place to increase the symmetry and to decrease the ambiguity in a language so this monetization of the the I Valtor hair has pushed other vowels around it into other situations so in in certain short vowels you get in some cases vowels semi vowel vowel clusters so rare now we're in Shakespeare's time you would have rat and no crystal suggests that in unstressed syllables in Shakespeare's time like words ending with in the net sound was fronted becomes no so in or burn so it would be failing instead of feeling this kind of reduction also happens in southern American English feeling instead of feeling um I think there's a bit of wordplay in this passage that doesn't work in any modern accent that I know of and that is in the line proceeding from the hair to presage brain now here both hate and heat probably pronounced with the same vowel in Shakespeare's accent hate so to somebody listening this could be heat-oppressed brain or hate oppressed brain so that's a bit of wordplay that doesn't work in any modern accent because in both my accent and a typical southern American accent today this vowel is a slight different rather than the monofin it was in Shakespeare's time now crystal suggests that the way prosody and stress affected vowels must have been different in Shakespeare's time based on how he uses these things in poetic meter I would make the comparison to later Cumbrian in terms of vowel reduction or to modern Duchy feel more familiar with that so lots and lots of weakening of sounds lots of elisions and pretty much all pronouns would have had an unstressed version so me would have had the unstressed version but thou would have had the unstressed version that I would have had so it's obviously not a natural because it's poetry but if we were to try crystals elision patterns to the first few lines as if they were just a normal person talking quickly we'd get something like is this a dagger which I see before me the handle toward my hand come let me clutch the I have the knots and yet to see the still or though not fatal vision sensible sorry for the jump there there was a bird making lots of very lovely sounds in that tree there but it's gone now so this kind of weakening of pronouns as far as I know happens to some extent in southern American English but not to the same extent and it happens very very little in my dialect of English so you can sort of be weakened to you in certain positions in my own idiolect but it doesn't sound very natural in those situations as I say in later Cumbrian this kind of weakening of pronouns was quite commonplace and we see it shown in writing a lot older speakers still do it Dutch has this kind of weakening as well and it's even standard in Dutch to represent this in writing so for example in the sentence be frightened mer the fake humor I'm not Dutch speaker so that may have been pronounced a bit doggedly the voiceless what sound was probably present in most speakers in words like what when in the early 1600s and this sounds retained by some speakers in the American South and so my understanding is that most younger speakers and even middle-aged speakers now probably probably don't use it most of the time to some older speakers do it's pretty much unheard of in ordinary speech rhyme from even in older speakers there is an accent that people pick out as being more sort of English sounding than other US accents and that is the high-tide accent and spoken on certain islands off the east coast and when I first heard this I was taken aback by how unlike other US accents it sounded in terms of the realization of Cert valves and also in terms of prosody in the sort of flow of speech and the phrase Southside would be pronounced something like Southside South Side south side I might be seeing that very very wrong but it's something like that and that you know the vowel qualities reminded me a lot of West Country vowel qualities or even Australian male qualities now this isn't actually that similar to a 1600 English accent at least in the South here you'd have something more like Southside with vowels starting in a very central position and in West Country accents today and in high tide accents today the vowels start in a fairly peripheral position by the sound of it but it's interesting how these these developments may have happened in parallel with each other that's that's something very interesting it's certainly a very interesting accent to study in terms of its relation to other US accents I haven't I haven't really done any studying of it at all I've just sort of examined it for 10 minutes more researching this video but it's very interesting the thing to take away here I think is that no accent has stayed the same over the last 400 years whether that Leah a British accent or a US accent no accent stays exactly the same over a period of 200 years there are too many variables within accents and accents changed too much pronunciation changes too frequently for any accent to be exactly the same as it was 400 years ago and but as David crystal points out quite a lot most of us can listen to a Shakespearean accent and identify something in it that we can spot in our own accents today and so that is the end of that video thank you very much for watching and I will see you soon

Channel: Simon Roper

Views: 648,246

Rating: 4.9390168 out of 5

Keywords: Shakespeare, accent, Shakespeare's accent, 1600s, history, 1600s accent, old accent, southern us accent, southern accent, linguistics, historical linguistics, early modern english, david crystal

Id: 4rb0HPDnc8Y

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Pinkminx2]

This was a pretty cool video. Thank you for posting. It’s interesting how many different accents there are, especially in the South. It is interesting to learn how the Southern accent evolved or where it could’ve came from. I don’t think I have a southern accent, but some folks will tell you I do. I guess it depends on where you are from. I wonder if other Southern Snorkels think they don’t have a Southern accent.

[u/I3oredHuman]

Cool! Now I know how to pronounce "whip". Cool whip.