Would British U.S. Keep Accents?

Canadians have a distinct accent that is the same whether the person is from Nova Scotia or from Alberta.

I'm from BC, and we sound more like people from Seattle than people from Toronto. I think the stereotypical Canadian accent is only preserved by the elderly nowadays.

EDIT: That being, said, you are right in that Canadian speech is much much more homogenous than American speech. It also helps that Western-Central Canadian English is very close to General American...
 
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Why would the 1848'ers bother settling in a British America which was effectively still a colony of Britain despite its relatively liberal rule? That is a pretty major disincentive for people fleeing political and religious circumstances. Very few of them settled in Canada, or for that matter Britain's other settler colonies.

If America is still British in 1848 then it likely has members in Parliament or local colonial legislatures in charge of domestic policy. Either one would be quite attractive to them.

Of course with out an American revolution, or with a failed one, 1848 would be butterflied away anyways.
 
I'm from BC, and we sound more like people from Seattle than people from Toronto. I think the stereotypical Canadian accent is only preserved by the elderly nowadays.

EDIT: That being, said, you are right in that Canadian speech is much much more homogenous than American speech. It also helps that Western-Central Canadian English is very close to General American...

I'm living overseas in Korea, it seems more telling on girls, but I know a person's from Canada as soon as they open their mouth, and they've been from all over the country.
 
I'm living overseas in Korea, it seems more telling on girls, but I know a person's from Canada as soon as they open their mouth, and they've been from all over the country.

Hmm that's an impressive skill. I can't tell half the time whether a person is from Canada or the States, unless they have a really distinctive accent, like Newfie or Texan. I wonder if it's a situation where Canadian accents sound distinctive to Americans but not vice-versa...

Is it the "eh" that gives it away? :p

EDIT: As for the OP, the answer is a definite no. After all, when the US was formed, a lot of their accents were different from modern American and modern British accents, so theres no reason to assume they'd evolve the same way again.
 
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Delvestius

Banned
The answer is a very obvious no... Perhaps spelling detail would stay the same, but accents? They would change just as significantly as in OTL, though it would be interesting to see how they would differ to those that we know.
 
That being, said, you are right in that Canadian speech is much much more homogenous than American speech. It also helps that Western-Central Canadian English is very close to General American...

It depends on how you define "homogeneous". It is true that most Canadians' accents are very similar, but regional accents can be as divergent as any recognizably English accent. I once worked alongside an Outport Newfoundlander. When we met, he spoke to me for a good five minutes straight and I did not understand a word he said. Eventually I learned to understand him, the difficulty lay not so much with unusual vocabulary but mainly with very non-standard intonation and rhythm. This should be no surprise, Newfoundland was settled mainly from the West Country of England (especially Cornwall, Devon and Bristol) and from southeast Ireland, and due to its relative isolation has retained more of those regions' distinctive linguistic features than remained in their places of origin (plus four centuries of independent development).

On another note, I once read about a project to reconstruct American Southern dialect from Colonial times to the era of sound recordings using spelling errors in diaries, letters, etc. to detect nonstandard pronunciations. Their conclusion was that the distinctive Southern accents were already there in the late eighteenth century, but in a much less divergent form than they are today. Much of the difference between General American and Southern dialects actually developed quite recently, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
It depends on how you define "homogeneous". It is true that most Canadians' accents are very similar, but regional accents can be as divergent as any recognizably English accent. I once worked alongside an Outport Newfoundlander. When we met, he spoke to me for a good five minutes straight and I did not understand a word he said. Eventually I learned to understand him, the difficulty lay not so much with unusual vocabulary but mainly with very non-standard intonation and rhythm. This should be no surprise, Newfoundland was settled mainly from the West Country of England (especially Cornwall, Devon and Bristol) and from southeast Ireland, and due to its relative isolation has retained more of those regions' distinctive linguistic features than remained in their places of origin (plus four centuries of independent development).

I recall reading somewhere that Newfoundlanders for the longest time were using a variation of Shakespearean English and using archaic words well into the 20th century that had long since disappeared from British English...
 
It depends on how you define "homogeneous". It is true that most Canadians' accents are very similar, but regional accents can be as divergent as any recognizably English accent. I once worked alongside an Outport Newfoundlander. When we met, he spoke to me for a good five minutes straight and I did not understand a word he said. Eventually I learned to understand him, the difficulty lay not so much with unusual vocabulary but mainly with very non-standard intonation and rhythm. This should be no surprise, Newfoundland was settled mainly from the West Country of England (especially Cornwall, Devon and Bristol) and from southeast Ireland, and due to its relative isolation has retained more of those regions' distinctive linguistic features than remained in their places of origin (plus four centuries of independent development).

I was referring specifically to West-Central Canadian English, which is spoken from Ontario to British Columbia. The Maritime accent of, well, the Maritimes and the Newfoundland accent are different from each other and Central Canadian as well.
 
Yeah, that does sound a little like Newfoundlander, with a bit of Southern added in. Not the same by any means, but I would imagine that both groups would have an easier time understanding each other than somebody speaking a more 'typical' dialect would have with either of them.
 
Why would the 1848'ers bother settling in a British America which was effectively still a colony of Britain despite its relatively liberal rule? That is a pretty major disincentive for people fleeing political and religious circumstances. Very few of them settled in Canada, or for that matter Britain's other settler colonies.

A tonne of them did however go to the UK itself.
If you're a revolutionary intellectual then you're hardly going to go away to the edge of the known world to start a new life as a frontier farmer. It wasn't due to any hatred of Britain that the US tended to be the favoured emigrant destination, it was that the US just plain was the better place to emigrate. It had better frontier land for those who wanted that and it had bigger better and more dynamic cities for those who wanted that.
Theres a lot of mythologising over people being especially attracted to American freedom which was somehow unique and not seen anywhere else in the world. The truth of the matter however is far more utilitarian.

Anyway, in the 19th century for those who were fleeing Europe purely for political/religious reasons the UK was the destination of choice. Not the US.
 
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