“Professor William A. Read, a distinguished linguist, put it this way in a journal of philology: “The pronunciation of educated Americans is in many respects more archaic than that of educated Englishmen.” This should be no surprise, he said, since “the phonetic basis of American pronunciation rests chiefly on the speech of Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” And those Englishmen sounded much like the Americans of today. The “English accent” that we now associate with educated British speech is a relatively new phenomenon and didn’t develop until after the American Revolution.
Look at the way the letter r is pronounced (or not pronounced), perhaps the most important difference in the speech of educated people in the US and the UK. Since Anglo-Saxon days, the English had pronounced the r in words like “far,” “mother,” “world,” “church,” and “mourn.” English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic pronounced the r’s in these words when the Colonies broke away from England. Most Americans still do. But educated people in Britain began dropping their r’s in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Americans most likely to drop their r’s were those, like New Englanders, who had strong commercial and social ties with the mother country… .
The other letter that’s a dead giveaway in telling a Brit from a Yank is the a in a word like “past.” We all know how an American would say it — with an a like the one in “cat.” And as anyone who’s watched Masterpiece Theatre can tell you, the standard British pronunciation is PAHST. But it wasn’t always so. The Brits used to say it the same way Americans do now. Here again, the Americans stuck with an old way of speaking, one the British abandoned about the same time they dropped their r’s.”
