#002 Differences between American and British accents

#002 Differences between American and British accents
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Hi everyone!

I’m Georgiana, founder of SpeakEnglishPodcast.com. My mission is to help YOU to speak English fluently.

In this episode:

• I’ll talk about why is the American accent is so different from the British accent.

• After that, I’ll use the Question and Answer technique for helping you develop your speaking skills.

Let’s get started!

In the eighteenth century, American and British pronunciations were pretty similar.

Remember that the British Empire colonized America.

Many immigrants traveled to America to start a new life.

So, a fair question is:

Why are American and British pronunciation so different nowadays?

Well, there are many theories, but here’s a reasonable one:

I know that may come as a surprize to you, It’s actually the standard British accent that has radically changed in the past two centuries. However, the American accent has remained almost identical.

So, what happened? A little bit of history can help us. At the time the British accent started to change, the industrial revolution began. That means that many families became wealthy in a short period.

The upper-class society did not welcome those families, although they had a lot of money.

Therefore, newly wealthy families tried to distinguish themselves from the other lower classes. One way to achieve that was to change the way they spoke. They tried to sound more sophisticated, more elegant.

So, new tutors and experts on pronunciation offered their services to the newly affluent people. New guidelines and pronunciation dictionaries were written. This new way of speaking became standardized – it’s called “Received Pronunciation” – and it spread all over the country.
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