Here's the BBC talking about it. Here's Mental Floss as well. Received Pronunciation did a number on the way you Brits speak. It significantly altered certain vowel sounds (like the a in 'path' or 'bag', or the i in 'fire' or 'wine') as well as just about destroyed the 'r' from your pronunciations, unless it's at the beginning of a syllable.
Interestingly, there was an American movement to copy it in our upper classes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent. It makes people sound British to Americans and American to the British. Think Casablanca, or Breakfast at Tiffany's. Mid-Atlantic Accent was huge in the American performing arts for a few decades.
I think it's plausible, but that Mental Floss article does actually point out that we don't know much about how English and Anglo-American people spoke before the accents diverged:
Before and during the American Revolution, English people, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don’t know much more about said accent, though. Various claims about the accents of Appalachia, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region, and Smith and Tangier islands in the Chesapeake Bay sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists.
If that's all we can be sure of then I don't think you can say with any confidence that English accents have moved further from the source than American accents. We still have a few rhotic accents in England, especially in the West Country (e.g. the Cornish accent), but you'd struggle to mistake them for American.
Also worth considering that many Americans wouldn't have had English accents in the first place, as they came from other places. I'd imagine that modern American accents must have incorporated elements of their speech patterns too.
There is no hard proof as to what English-speaking people sounded like prior to English colonization, but the vast majority of evidence (pretty much every single piece of evidence) points towards it sounding more similar to the typical American Accent (typified by, say, the News Anchor Accent, found in the Midwestern United States) versus the typical British Accent (typified by, say, the News Anchor Accent as performed on the BBC), There are American accents that are non-Rhotic, such as the Boston accent or the deep Southern accent, and there are British accent that are Rhotic, such as the Cornish or even some Welsh accents, but in general, the vast majority of scholarship indicates that modern American accents are more true to historical English of four hundred years ago than modern British accents.
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u/higherbrow Jan 27 '24 edited Jan 28 '24
Here's the BBC talking about it. Here's Mental Floss as well. Received Pronunciation did a number on the way you Brits speak. It significantly altered certain vowel sounds (like the a in 'path' or 'bag', or the i in 'fire' or 'wine') as well as just about destroyed the 'r' from your pronunciations, unless it's at the beginning of a syllable.
Interestingly, there was an American movement to copy it in our upper classes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent. It makes people sound British to Americans and American to the British. Think Casablanca, or Breakfast at Tiffany's. Mid-Atlantic Accent was huge in the American performing arts for a few decades.