The British Used to Sound Like We Did

You might think that early Americans sounded like Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, and that the American accent developed after independence. It was probably the other way around. Up until the early 1800s, you couldn’t tell whether a person was British or American from their accents. When naval officers tried to free sailors who had been shanghaied into service in the War of 1812, they said they couldn’t tell for sure who was American or British by the way they spoke. The hallmark of the British accent — pronouncing words like “path” and “fast” as “pahth” and “fahst” or “fah”...