If American English is based on British English why is the American/Canadian accent so different?

Question

I know that other immigration was involved and that accents within the States vary widely not to mention other colonial intonations such as Australian and South African, which, however have maintained a more" British" pronunciation.

Was the British accent (which varies a lot in the British Isles itself)brought over to the States very different from today's

standard British? If not, where and when did spoken American

English sharply branch off from the mother tongue?

Thanks.

Answer 1

As to the difference between Canadian and American accents when speaking English...the French settled Canada, and there is, still, a large population whose first language is French. That accounts for the different tonalities and inflections given to the words. Even those who speak English as a first language have the residual influence of French in their pronunciation.

Now, American and English have developed differently. With standard English, as spoken in England, the accent remains the same, except for dialectic and regional differences. It has remained closer to the roots of the language, and is considered more proper. Their daily speech is more reserved, using more proper phrases and mannerisms. American, however, being influenced by so many different lanuages, and using words borrowed from so many....for instance bureau form the French and Santa Claus from the Norwegian.....has radically changed from the root language spoken by the English colonists. American is considered lax and very informal. We use many, many slang words and phrases in our daily language.“The speech of the United States,” says Gilbert M. Tucker, “is quite unlike that of Great Britain in the important particular that here we have no dialects.”

H. L. Mencken wrote a book about the gradual change/linguistic shift of the language, back in 1921. Its a fascinating book, but its not an easy read. Here is some of what he had to say about it all...

" No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to it—not even Canada, for there a large part of the population resists learning English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Petrograd; the Northern Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences.  Ã¢Â€ÂœWhen we remember,” says the New International Encyclopædia, “that the dialects of the countries in England have marked differences—so marked, indeed, that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other—we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language.” "“From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon,” agrees an English critic, “no trace of a distinct dialect is to be found. The man from Maine, even though he may be of inferior education and limited capacity, can completely understand the man from Oregon.”

(from Chapter 1, The American Language, by H. L. Mencken)

Some philologists have noted the uniformity of language and specualte that it stems from the time of our independence from England and the spread across the country of the descendants of the original colonists.