Way Out West

After the Doctor Who announcement, the wonders of Freeview enabled me to switch over to Channel 4+1 and catch the repeat of John Adams, which can never watch too many times. It is sublime.

And its characters speak in accents only slightly removed from the West Country whence (specifically, from Plymouth) those who settled America set sail. Listen hard enough to an American accent even today, and you can still hear the West Country in it, just as you can still hear London in an Australian accent. Very occasionally, an American who has lived in this country for many years will speak with an Anglicised American accent that sounds very much like a West Country one.

Likewise, the French in Canada and the Spanish in Latin America are close to the speech of the original port area, rather than to the standard form in France or Spain. I assume that the Portuguese in Brazil also adheres to this principle. Does it?

More than once, I have argued with people who, for reasons of their own, have insisted that the American accent was Irish. It simply isn’t, and any sizeable migration to America by, at least, the Irish whom they have in mind began far too late for it to be. It is English, and specifically West Country English. As even HBO acknowledges.