Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The final question comes from Richard Short who asks When did North American people begin to speak in a distinctly North American accent. In other words, Gary, when did your voice, that we all know and love, historically evolve into how we hear you now.

Basically, the evolution of the North American English accent began almost immediately once people arrived and were separated from England.

I should note that there isn’t one single accent. There are multiple accents that can be found across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. That being said, for the most part, there has been less diversity in accents in North America than there has been in the UK, where towns just 20 miles apart might speak with very different accents.

Many of the North American accent features are actually elements of 17th and 18th-century accents from England, which died out over there, but remained here. In particular, the pronunciation of the letter ‘r’.

This is probably a subject for a full episode, but there are some places, like Smith Island, Maryland, which speak an accent that is considered to be the closest accent to what might have been spoken in Elizabethan England.

This is not just an English thing. Once populations are separated, changes start to occur. That is why French spoken in Quebec is spoken with a very different accent from French spoken in France, and why there are so many different Spanish accents in the Americas.