"Mike Spencer" wrote in message
...

"Jim Wilkins" writes:

"Mike Spencer" wrote in message

[I didn't write that; you did. :-]

Why do you think US and Canadian speech sounds almost identical yet
so
different from British?

To the extent that's true, I'd assume the influence of the media.
Lots of US TV here in Canada, not so much from the UK. I haven't
had
a TV for 40 years but I see it periodically over my dentist's chair.
Last time to the tooth wrangler, I realized US TV can be
characterized
as "fat people yelling at each other". Unfair, I know, to programs
such as yoga classes but a fair first approximation?

But then...

Many up-scale folks in Toronto & Ottawa have inflections that sound
to
people from other provinces as "kinda British". Rural people in
Nova
Scotia didn't sound either Brit or Merkin 50 years ago, unique
Lunenburg (German influence) and Cape Breton (Scots and Gaelic)
pronounciation and usage. After moving here 50 years ago, I had to
learn that "C'mintha hice" was an invitation to enter. That's all
fading gradually away.

In 1980, I was on a bus filled with other blacksmiths proceeding
from
Ironbridge to Hereford. A guy in the seat behind me -- a certified
Brit whose normal delivery was what I took to be UK
upper-middle-class
urban -- was recounting a yarn to his seatmate in some particular
English regional dialect. It sounded exactly like the adults I knew
in (Leftpondian) New Hampshire 65 years ago.

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

My grandmother had the traditional New Hampshire accent but my mother
didn't, and my father had completely lost his southern Appalachian
accent, both before television. I think WW2 stirring the younger
people all together had a considerable effect. Chuck Yeager's
backwoods twang was said to be incomprehensible at first, then after
he gained fame many pilots imitated his drawl on the radio. In Atlanta
I noticed that network TV announcers spoke in the "standard"
Midwestern accent.

My real question is whether or not Canadians allowed themselves to be
influenced by USian speech. My impression is that like Quebecois we
are tolerated but not imitated.

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/so...pronunciation/
Somewhere (haven't found it) I read that RP was an imitation of the
newly rich East Midlands mill owners and their public (USA: private)
school sons, a product of the Industrial Revolution that took hold
simultaneously with our Revolution, so that Americans who visited
London afterwards commented on the change while the USA and Canada
preserved the older accent.
-jsw