#southern accent got me misspelling common words

[anonymouslymadebydesign]

I love Google Docs

docs, seeing i've misspelt caterpillar : its CAT-ER-PILL-AR, not catapiller

docs, seeing i've written cherriness and not cheeriness, underlining it in red : idk what this word is, i have no possible idea what the fuck you were trying to write. how did you manage to mess it up so spectacularly ? what exactically IS your problem ?? is this even a WORD ?!

[knee-breeches]

You have sent me on an endless quest to find out what the southern accents at the time were now

Here is an answer for you:

“Since there were no voice recordings of the first 21 presidents, we can only guess how they sounded.  But since speakers reflect region and class, we can at least make educated guesses.  Of the first six presidents, in particular, the four gentlemen from Virginia most likely spoke with cultivated Virginia accents…otherwise their contemporaries and biographers would have noticed and let us know.

Though Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe came from the South…in one particular their accents would have been different from those of the majority of Americans (and presidents) today.  We can be pretty sure that they did not pronounce ‘r’ after a vowel…Washington and his Virginia successors would have had slightly different vowels [than the New Englanders] but the same lack of ‘r’ after vowels that you will find today in much of the Old South, especially near the coast.

This is, of course, the British standard too, and was therefore, for many years of the early American republic, a mark of cultivation.  Listen to a member of the British royal family, or the prime minister, or even Hugh Grant acting the part of the prime minister in the movie ‘Love, Actually’ and you’ll ‘heah’ the same r-less pronunciation.

The division between the r-less and r-ful emerged in British English during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  It was a fashion adopted by the seaboard colonies, both north and south, in what was to become the United States; only Philadelphia of the major cities along the Atlantic coast kept its r after vowels.  By the time the founders of the American republic were born, it was well established.“ (Allan Metcalf, Presidential Voices)

It’s complicated, though, because Metcalf suggests that the Virginian founders spoke with non-rhotic accents, as typical British/American (which were basically the same and didn’t start diverging until well after colonization in Southern England, although there were always different regional dialects and trying to consolidate them all into an overarching manner of English speaking is a big oversimplification), whereas some other linguists would argue that the British/American standard was almost uniformally rhotic until the aforementioned divergence in the late eighteenth century.  Because of the lack of recording technology, the best way for us to glean the English pronunciation standard at the time was via phonetic spellings, which, since there was no standardized dictionary until the early nineteenth century, was common and accounts for all the “misspellings” in early literature by modern day standardization.

As one minute example, the fact that Madison misspelled Sherman as “Sharman” in his congressional notes (and Madison was, of all the high-profile founders, definitely one of the best spellers by modern standards) makes me believe that there were soft rhotic Irish influences in early American accents, but on the same token it might suggest a non-rhotic mid-Atlantic/British influence because if Madison had heard the non-rhotic “Shah-man,” he wouldn’t have spelled it “Shahman” or “Shaman”/”Shamen” because neither of those versions make etymological sense.  His spelling “Sharman,” suggests either that he was hearing the non-rhotic “ah” sound and unintentionally uprooted the ‘e’ to supplement the r-less sound, or he heard the rhotic “ar” as in “arsenal” sound.  

Also consider that non-rhotic speakeing was supposedly considered a sign of cultivation, and all the aforementioned southern Founding Fathers were brought up in gentrified families that would have abided by the higher standard, which didn’t go away until Ohioans started popularizing upper-class rhotic speech in the twentieth century.  It wasn’t until then that this principle got flip-fopped and non-rhotic speaking was no longer a sign of high class.

I usually like to succinctly tell people to pay attention to the way celebrities spoke in American media in the 1930s-60s because the half-American, half-postmodern British hybrid where it was only semi-non-rhotic and lacked the modern American ae-tensing (which is when you don’t raise your tongue to get the short ‘a’ sound) and so forth was probably much closer to an Atlantic American accent in the eighteenth century than either the modern American accent or the modern Southern British accent.  It was taught to upper-class children and high-profile media stars as a callback to the gentrified propriety of r-less pronunciations and was touted in the curriculum as “proper English.”  Although patrician/mid-Atlantic accents weren’t popularly taught until the early twentieth century, it was inherently a midway between the extreme alterations of both American and British accents caused by the early nineteenth-century Southern England non-rhotic divergence, meaning it more than likely gravitates toward the pidgin version of both those dialects from before Southern England started doing It’s Own Thing and American Ohioans started doing Their Own Thing.

In any case, the modern southern accent didn’t develop until late into the nineteenth century, according to the first volume of A Handbook of Varieties of English.  And for that matter, the word “y’all” is traced back to 1909 in the OED, but can be cited no earlier than the 1880s.  

TL;DR they sounded kind of british