From the Dec 1 2003 International Edition of Newsweek (page 6):
“I thought I was losing my mind.” Philidelphia native Judi Roberts, on being diagnosed with an extremely rare disorder called “foreign-accent syndrome,” after a stroke left her with a British accent.
[quote]Her accent is a mixture of English cockney and West Country.[/quote]Indeed it is a horror.
Maybe she’s possessed by an evil alien like that red-haired guy in DreamCatchers who suddenly started speaking with a very silly English accent to show that he was a baddie.
I fainted after enjoying a night with a stunning Swede some years back? I sang “Abba” tunes all the following week. Does that mean I had this disorder in the past?
And more (than you ever wanted to know):
She started speaking with a British accent when “damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, where language processing occurs.”
For the sake of international harmony, love, and group hugging, I will not comment further about British accents and brain damage. 
i don’t mean to step on anyone’s toes, but american history doesn’t interest me in the slightest, so you’ll have to excuse the fact that i’m not very clear on the details… but since it’s sort of being discussed here, i’ve got a genuine question i’ve often sort of wondered about… how did the presumably fairly standard english/irish/scottish/welsh/etc. accents of the orginal colonists/settlers become bastardised into what is the present day north american accent?..
anyone know?..
Collective brain damage.
[quote=“plasmatron”]… how did the presumably fairly standard English/irish/scottish/welsh/etc. accents of the orginal colonists/settlers become bastardised into what is the present day north American accent?..
anyone know?..[/quote]
For the purpose of your question, there is and was no standard English accent. (Pedants note: Recieved Pronunciation didn’t come about until a few centuries later.) The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth in England’s West Country. West country dwellers had then and still have the rhotic ‘r’ sound (that is, they pronounce the ‘r’ at the end of ‘mother’). The majority of north Americans also have a rhotic ‘r’. I remember learning at school that there is an island or some islands on the east coast of the USA where the people speak with an accent remarkably close to that of the West Country.
As for the rest of the variations, I don’t know the details but presumably they came about in two ways: the mix with immigrants from a large number of different countries, particularly Germany and other places in continental Europe; and changes that naturally happened over time.
my guess is that the british english got “into the mix” with the languages of the rest of the new arrivals. the german-americans didn’t pick up the lilts and today’s american english sounds “flatter” than the british.
when i was stationed in scotland i drove the old men crazy by replying “yeah” instead of “yes”. they took my “yes” as a german “ja” and they would bellow Don’t speak german to us!"
british english (of an older variety) was ingrained in places stateside. e.g.: i grew up saying “autumn” instead of “fall”. my oxford educated co-worker found it necessary to point out that my speech was archaic. as you can imagine, i used “autumn” every chance i could.
spoken languages change and flow. present theory asserts we are ALL speaking “bastardized” Hittite.
I seriously doubt that the 16th and 17th century settlers had anything remotely resembling ‘standard accents.’ You should also be asking how English/irish/scottish/welsh (why does only English merit capitalization?) became ‘bastardized’ into modern English/irish/scottish/welsh accents. Languages change over time,and 250 years is a long time.
Read Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue” if you want a clearer picture.
Blueface, I once taught a neurologist in Taiwan who had a case of a Taiwanese woman who woke up speaking Mandarin with a ‘foreign’ accent. Meaning she sounded like one of us when she spoke Mandarin!
This is the abstract :
[quote]Pure Foreign Accent Syndrome: A Case Report
Chi-Shin Hwang, Ming-Hsien Lin1, Shinn-Kuang Lin2
Departments of Neurology, Taipei Municipal Chung Hsiao Hospital;
1Department of Nuclear Medicine, Graduate Institute of Medicine Science,
[quote=“Alien”]Read Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue” if you want a clearer picture.
Blueface, I once taught a neurologist in Taiwan who had a case of a Taiwanese woman who woke up speaking Mandarin with a ‘foreign’ accent. Meaning she sounded like one of us when she spoke Mandarin!
[/quote]
So she spoke better Mandarin than most Taiwanese.
[quote=“plasmatron”]I don’t mean to step on anyone’s toes, but American history doesn’t interest me in the slightest, so you’ll have to excuse the fact that I’m not very clear on the details… but since it’s sort of being discussed here, I’ve got a genuine question I’ve often sort of wondered about… how did the presumably fairly standard English/irish/scottish/welsh/etc. accents of the orginal colonists/settlers become bastardised into what is the present day north American accent?..
anyone know?..[/quote]
What makes you think the Americans were the ones who changed? Colonies tend to be linguistically very conservative (don’t want to go “native”)and almost always retain an archaic version of the langage while the mother country moves on. Canadian-French is just one example. The big change occurred in the UK between 1795 and 1815. That’s when UK English started pronouncing a “short a” more like a “short o”…very Germanic. The Hannover’s were the royal family and they were German. Very interesting. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the UK’s University of Durham was running a research project along with my university. They were studying the Elizabethan carryovers in Southern English which have all virtually disappeared from British English. They concluded that Shakespeare probably sounded more like Willy Nelson than John Gielgud. For more info, read up some on the North Carolina Outer Banks as well as Charleston, SC and Appalachia.
So what you are saying is that Willy spoke with a southern drawl?
In that case the fake English accents used by Americal actors might be closest to the real thing
[quote=“plasmatron”]I don’t mean to step on anyone’s toes, but American history doesn’t interest me in the slightest, so you’ll have to excuse the fact that I’m not very clear on the details… but since it’s sort of being discussed here, I’ve got a genuine question I’ve often sort of wondered about… how did the presumably fairly standard English/irish/scottish/welsh/etc. accents of the orginal colonists/settlers become bastardised into what is the present day north American accent?..
anyone know?..[/quote]
I don’t mean to step on anyone’s toes, but the history of wherever plasmatron comes from doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I’m not very clear on the details, but I’ve got a genuine question I’ve often sort of wondered about…
How did the presumably fairly standard way of asking a question without sounding like a parochial jerk-off become bastardized into the approach quoted above?
I seriously doubt that the 16th and 17th century settlers had anything remotely resembling ‘standard accents.’ You should also be asking how English/irish/scottish/welsh (why does only English merit capitalization?)… [/quote]
exactly!.. i guess it’s the same reason we can’t refer to Taiwan’s third largest city without being automatically paraphrased with the technically correct but hopelessly pedantic strict pinyin version… actually maybe it’s been changed, let’s give it a test… Taichung … hmmm it seems not…
It seems there are administrative forumosan forces beyond the comprehension of us mere “users” who have taken it upon themselves to ensure that however else we choose to flagrantly abuse our right to freedom of punctuation, under no circumstances can we spell america, taiwan etc. without a capital letter, england and scotland however seem permissable… it seems that some are more equal than others when it comes to this forced capitalization 
[quote]it seems however that some are more equal than others when it comes to this forced capitalization [/quote]See what happens you spell our administrator’s name with a lower case M…
[quote=“porcelainprincess”]
How did the presumably fairly standard way of asking a question without sounding like a parochial jerk-off become bastardized into the approach quoted above?[/quote]
duly noted… i wasn’t aware the i had to dumb down my “approach” to make myself understood to some folks… i’m sorry porcelainprincess in the future i’ll make every effort to ensure you don’t feel left out… 
strange how everyone else just discussed their answer/opinion in a calm and adult fashion… i guess there’s no pleasing some people is there? oh well… “you can take them out the trailer park, but…”
i have a great deal of interest in history in general, irrespective of where it comes from. it is humbling to realize that the korean script was not invented by the king but rather “createdly” lifted from the tibetian (“tibetian headless”)script.
bluefaces comments about the colonies hanging onto the older ways than the motherland ring true. when japanese want to see real, unadulterated japanese style bon dances, where do they go? yes, hawaii. the japanese go to hawaii to see the “real deal” japanese cultural apects of their dance. styles evolved in japan, but styed the same in hawaii.
so…in the journal of the british medical association, the lancet, why do the editors insist on spelling fetus as “fetus” and NOT as the proper british way of “feotus”? why in london is there “honoria park” and not “honouria park”? are the blasted yanks surrepititiously changing the spelling techniques of these hallowed aspects of british culture?
au contrire, mon pardner!
just as the colonials maintained archaic speech patterns, they also maintained original and true spelling, just as the lancet does today. the addition of the “u” into honor came as a result of a revivalist british fad to glom onto the greek culture. this fad hit after the war of independence…so…the american spelling of “color” is the predecessor of “colour”. the colonials kept the old way, while the homeland deviated