| sc94597 said: It is perfectly possible for the General American English 100 years (or any arbitrary time period, with the probability declining with a greater period) from now to sound similar to what we speak today. Especially in a large city where dialects tend to be standarized. I speak to my 91 year old Great-Grandmother three times a year, we can understand each-other clearly if I talk loudly enough. Not much she says sounds unusually foreign to me. And the few hitches had more to do with diction choice than accent or grammar. I've noticed the largest generational change is with people whose parents or grandparents speak a more regional dialect and their children adopt the more General American English. Otherwise GAE has remained pretty much slow-changing in terms of accent over the last 100 years. The difference between GAE today and 100 years ago doesn't sound even as large as the differences between regional dialects. It is also perfectly possible that a language will undergo a moderate or huge shift, as well (see the decline of rhoticism in many English dialects between the mid 18th and 19th centuries.) It doesn't seem likely that General American English would turn into a variety of accents found in 2015 Britain, though. That would blatantly break the immersion. |
It's not about age, it's about the time at which it was being spoken. Elderly New Zealanders speak with the same kind of accent (mostly) as young New Zealanders... if you go back to the time of World War 1, New Zealanders sounded just like Australians. It's not because of the accent at the time the person was born, but the accent in the last 20 years of the person's life (basically).
Some parts of America seem to have accents that could be called "British-lite". Others have very different accents from Britain. I realised recently just how much Irish is in the general American accent.
This article covers the topic pretty well: http://mentalfloss.com/article/29761/when-did-americans-lose-their-british-accents
Basically, all it takes is a particular accent being seen as the accent used by those with "status", and it becomes common. "General American" of today is basically Hollywood American, and it makes sense - celebrity is the main status-bearing trait at the moment. Within 40 years, that could change dramatically.
