When the first soon-to-be Colonial Americans crossed the pond from Great Britain, they brought the native English language of their homeland with them. Over the years, their typical British accent morphed into an entirely different accent and dialect known as American English. But what exactly did Colonial Americans sound like? In 2008, HBO premiered the seven-part miniseries John Adams, which followed the life of Founding Father John Adams in Colonial America and documented his impact on the formation of the United States. Widely considered one of the most accurate historical dramas to be created, the show’s screenwriter and producer Kirk Ellis utilized dialect coach Catherine Charlton and early American history to make sure that the characters sounded as close to what real American Colonists sounded like in the 1700s. Nailing down the Colonial American accent The English first came to America in the 1600s, with English settlers founding Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. By the 1730s, England had established all of the American colonies, according to the Library of Congress. It’s hard to fully define what the American Colonists sounded like by then. In fact, in a 2008 interview with Vanity Fair, Charlton explained that, simply put, no on can truly know what they sounded like. “We don’t know exactly. It’s almost forensic in some ways,” she said. “For example, an English lord who arrived in the colonies made a comment about how clearly spoken the Americans were compared to the British.” Charlton is referring to a 1770 excerpt from the visitor to the Colonies, according to JSTOR: “The colonists are composed of adventurers, not only from every district of Great Britain and Ireland, but from almost every other European government…Is it not therefore reasonable to suppose that the English language must be greatly corrupted by such a strange admixture of various nations? The reverse is however true. The language of the immediate descendants of such promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform, and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed any provincial, or national accent from its British or foreign parentage.” The accent sounded similar to British As Charlton explains, accents take time to form. “Accents today are influenced by people moving from one town or village to the other, or the television, etc.,” she explained. “But in those times, for example, John Adams used to ride to the Congress in Philadelphia from Boston on horseback. That took a long time. There wouldn’t be a huge and rapid change of dialect like there is now.” In a 2008 interview with The New Republic, Ellis shared that they learned Colonial Americans were not speaking with a “full-blown” American accent like we have today. “All our research pointed to the fact that, in written and spoken speech, America was much closer to the mother country than had been acknowledged in past dramatizations,” he shared. Ellis explained how they consulted historians on what the Colonial American accent may have sounded like. “From our advisors in Colonial Williamsburg, we learned that one’s residence in America frequently depended on one’s point of origin in England. Virginia, for instance, was largely settled by residents of East Anglia—in terms of dialect and accent a very distinctive region,” he explained. “Moreover, a goodly number of our characters (notably John Dickinson) had been educated in English schools and had acquired the manners and speech of the time and place. Still others, such as Adams’s Secretary of War James McHenry, were themselves immigrants whose accents (Irish, in McHenry’s case) were noted at the time.” Characteristics of the Colonial American accent In her dialect research for John Adams, Charlton learned how American Colonists put their own twist on English. “There were certain things that were quite clearly American. Webster was writing his dictionary at this time and they really hated the way the British would say things like “secretary [Ed. Pronounced “SEC-reh-tree],” “cemetery,” as so on,” she said. “And children were actually taught how to tap out syllables. Ce-me-ta-ry, mil-i-tar-y.” Charlton worked with the actors to develop their Colonial American accents by geographical region. “It was a very complex thing for the actors to try and assume an accent that is developing. “I figured that I would give them enough background information and then have them listen to particular British dialects with a preponderance of certain sounds—for example, in the Boston area the Pilgrim’s ancestors were mainly from non-rhotic parts of Britain, when you don’t pronounce the letter ‘r’,” she added. “So we could make a distinction between the Northern territories and the Southern territories. Virginia was mainly colonized by west-country people.” The post This is exactly what Colonial Americans sounded like, according to dialect coach appeared first on Upworthy.