I don't think I've ever read anything by Henry James. (I took three English courses in college, and two of them were specifically focused on female writers.)

On another topic, when did English and American accents start getting really different? I'm reading a book published in 1889 and set around that same time, and an English boy and an American girl meet on a train, and he thinks she's English because of her "rosy complexion," and they talk a little, and then he asks her if she's English, and she says that no, she's American. At the beginning of this scene, I assumed that, as soon as he heard her speak, he would have figured out that she wasn't English.

If she was from the Northeast and/or from an upper class family, she could sound fairly British. When I moved from Pennsylvania to Utah, several people thought I was English by my Appalachian border accent.

But would she have sounded English to an English person? My mom's from Massachusetts, and some people in New Jersey sometimes thought she was British, but people in England always knew she was American.

I really have no idea what this character's accent would be, other than some American mishmash. Her father's in the Navy, her mother died when she was young, and from ages 5 to 8 or so she lived mostly with a maybe lower-middle-class aunt in upstate New York, and then her father remarried and she moved to live with his wife's family in North Carolina. Nobody has yet remarked on Northern or Southern accents, either, now that I think about it -- everyone who has an accent has been an immigrant.

I don't think I've ever read anything by Henry James.

Lucky girl.

American accents tended to reflect the accents of the area of Great Britain most of the people came from and also when they left. Colonial accents are inherently more conservative, so accents in Great Britain changed faster than in the U.S. Most American accents kept the short a and hard r that English English started losing in the 17th century, for example.

By 1889, the accents would generally have been pretty different, but without recording devices, how would the average American know what an English accent sounded like? Language scholars base what they know about accents on things like rhyme schemes. The "rosy complexion" was described in books and seen in illustrations.

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When I moved from Pennsylvania to Utah, several people thought I was English by my Appalachian border accent.

The American Appalachian accent is thought to be the closest extant to Shakespearean English. Rural Appalachia was so remote for so long that the accent wasn't affected by the forces that changed other English accents.

By 1889, the accents would generally have been pretty different, but without recording devices, how would the average American know what an English accent sounded like?

Good point.

This author certainly makes a big deal out of Western accents, while never (as far as I can recall) even mentioning Northern and Southern. They're somewhere out in the territories now, and encountered a bunch of people who talk like Yosemite Sam. (I remember reading that the switching of "er" and "ar" -- like "varmint" for "vermin" -- is actually a remnant of a much older English pronunciation.)

Anybody know of any good books about the development of American English usage and accents? I've read Bill Bryson's, but kind of want to know more now.

Yeah, me too. This is fascinating stuff.

Sometimes I forget I'm in California and ask for pop instead of soda. People look at me funny.

Accents and dialects are awesome things. As an English teacher (and having taught a lot about language variation), I really should know of books about American dialects, but most of the books I've read have been UK-centric. If I come across any, I'll let you know.

A really good book on UK dialects is this one. Very readable.

The Dictionary of American Regional English is supposed to be pretty good, Hil:

[link]

DARE is a wonderful piece of work, and they're editing the last volume now, but, like the full OED, not really something the average person can own. (DARE article) I got interested in this stuff years ago when I worked at Emory and took some graduate classes there. Lee Pederson was some years into the 20+ years it took to do the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States.

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I'm sad I've lost my native accent, but apparently when I'm tired or in a particularly good mood I revert. It certainly came back fast when I went back to Pennsylvania last June.

Isolated is a very good term for Greene County, PA. I was in a restaurant with my family, and something odd had caught my eye. Then I realized that the folks sweeping up and cleaning the tables weren't Hispanic. After a bit of Anglo discomfort, I said, "It's weird seeing people cleaning up who . . ." and I couldn't think of a way to say it, until my oldest sister, who lives in California, said, "whose birth language is English?" "Yeah!" Our middle sister, who has lived in our home town all her life, looked mildy baffled, but Sharon and I shared a Western-US-resident nod of recognition.

The homogeneity of Greene County--one of the reasons I left.