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Jacobean remnants in modern English

Urban legend has it that pockets of Appalachia or the outlying reaches of Britain have retained Jacobean English virtually unchanged.  The other extreme, where popular mythology is concerned, is that we have no idea what Shakespeare's plays originally sounded like, because they were never recorded.  The truth, in fact, is somewhere in the middle. 

The former idea was current at least as early as the 19th century, when scholars began seriously studying Appalachian dialects.  Serious academic journals ran articles tracing Appalachian English directly to Shakespeare.  In some ways, they got it right-Appalachian English certainly shares some qualities with Shakespeare's. (There are all those things your English teacher warned you about double-negatives, superlatives, and comparatives, using adverbs where an adjective would be more inappropriate, a similar confusion of verbs and nouns, and specific words, like "holp" and "afeared.") Heavily sounded rs and rich diphthongs are also typical of both Elizabethan and Appalachian English.  However, the similarities should not be overstated.  All languages change over time, even in the most isolated places.  Ideas that colonies preserve the language long after their parent countries have moved on are "a considerable oversimplification".  It would be more accurate to say that Shakespeare's English has something in common with every English dialect because it "is the ancestor of the accents we hear in English today."   

The sources dispute over where in England the original Virginian colonists came from.  England at that time had strong and distinctive regional accents, so the English the colonists brought to America would have been determined by the place in which they grew up.  David Crystal argues that they were from the West Country-places like Gloucestershire and Somerset; however, Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes report that these early colonists came from Southeastern England, near London.  Crystal contends that the early colonists brought the Western accent "with its 'Zummerzet' voicing of s sounds and the r strongly pronounced after vowels.".  Wolfram and Schilling-Estes argue that the first colonists "would have spoken varieties of English which were quite close to the emerging London standard rather than the more 'rustic' varieties spoken in outlying areas such as Northern and Southwestern England." 

Due to dropping the ending -g in words like dancing, and hitting every r that follows a vowel (farm), Elizabethans would "end up sounding somewhat 'rustic' to modern ears," particularly modern British ears.  The fact that Elizabethan English would sound less strange to American ears than to British ones is because "the divergence of American and English phonetic practice seems to be less a modern departure on [the West] side of the Atlantic than a survival of early English characteristics; just as many words which have been classified as Americanisms are in reality old English terms which had dropped out of use in their native land."  Certain vowels, like the flat a and o sounds, are common in the United States, and were current in Britain until the eighteenth century at least.  Now they are only used in the lower-class and more rustic British dialects. 

Any discussion of "what Shakespeare sounded like" must contain the disclaimer that, just as not everyone sounds the same now, not everyone sounded the same then.  There was considerable regional variation.  London was, even then, a diverse city, and further, the actors in Shakespeare's company came from all over the country.  Unlike today, there was no "standard accent" to emulate; we know of no Renaissance equivalent of Received Pronunciation, also known as "BBC English."  While, in the modern world, television is regularizing and flattening the regional distinctions between various American dialects, the Elizabethans had no such unifying influence.

How do we know?

Is Shakespeare's English lost forever, then?  Not at all.  Despite the fact that tape recorders did not exist at the time when his plays were produced, his works themselves are excellent sources of hints for how the language once sounded.  The meter of the plays provides a hint about the stresses (that were once placed on various syllables.)  Rhymes can also point toward earlier pronunciation, for example, when prove and love rhyme, or I and authority.  There are some puns that tell us that certain words were once homophones, like room and Rome.  By piecing together these clues, along with printed documents from an age when spelling and pronunciation had more in common than they do now, we can begin to reconstruct some idea of what Shakespeare's English really sounded like.

>Click here to the pronunciation guide...

Does it still exist in the world now?

Often, one will hear that certain pockets of Appalachia still speak "Shakespeare's English."  There are bits of Devonshire and costal Virginia that make a similar claim.  Do such claims have any validity?  The answer is, yes, they do, but probably not any more than anywhere else.  Because Shakespeare's English was what the early explorers and colonists spoke, it is the English that went out into the world and evolved into modern speech.  Shakespeare's English is the ancestor of the English spoken all over the world, and as such, it has certain sounds in common with all the world's English.

America is the first place to have Jacobean English as its starting point.