Did George Washington Have a British Accent?
In 1584, the first English colony in North America was founded in what is now North Carolina. And though the 117 settlers who comprised the Roanoke Colony mysteriously disappeared three years later, ensuing waves of settlements established England’s presence on the continent for generations to come. By 1770, the total population of Great Britain’s 13 colonies in America was approximately 1.5 million. It raises the question: Since much of the population of the fledgling U.S. descended from Brits, would the American speech pattern at the time have sounded British? Could someone like George Washington, one of the most famous early Americans, have had a British accent?
Since Washington lived in an era that predates sound recordings, we don’t have a simple answer to that question in the form of audio records of the founding father’s voice. But we can determine some possibilities by piecing together factors from Washington’s life that would have impacted the way he spoke.
Washington was born in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and spent most of his childhood near Fredericksburg. His father, Augustine Washington, and mother, Mary Ball Washington, were also born in Virginia. Indeed, George Washington’s lineage in the colony went back two more generations — it was his great-grandfather John Washington who set sail from England and established the family in Virginia. So America’s first president wasn’t from a family of recent British settlers; he was three generations removed, and the household he grew up in wouldn’t have necessarily spoken an accent that was common in England at the time.
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Accents are complex and dynamic — rather than remaining in stasis, they evolve over time, shifting due to factors such as exposure to other languages and dialects. When British colonists settled in North America, they became isolated from shifts that later occurred in the English accent. In turn, the colonists were exposed to different languages, such as the Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish, and German tongues of settlers hailing from those nations, as well as the languages of Indigenous peoples. That exposure created changes in the colonial accent that the British were isolated from. Over time, the colonists’ accent and the homeland British accent diverged as both evolved and changed in different ways.
One way an accent changes over time — especially in an environment where multiple dialects are being spoken — is through a process linguists call koineization, also known as leveling. In order to better understand each other, people tend to subconsciously reduce or omit the more distinctive elements of their speech, resulting in a sort of linguistic common denominator. When British settlers from different regions of Great Britain came to North America, koineization leveled the disparate regional accents of Great Britain into a new accent — an American accent. The question is, how long did it take for that American accent to emerge?
In 1770, a visitor to the colonies whose name has been lost to history wrote, “The language of the [colonists] is perfectly uniform, and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed any provincial, or national accent from its British or foreign parentage.” And linguists at the Smithsonian point out that the English noticed a distinct speech pattern in the colonies as early as one generation after the first settlers arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. So it’s likely the American and British accents first diverged circa the 1700s — around the time of Washington’s lifetime (1732 to 1799).
It’s also worth noting that today’s various English accents are different from what you would have heard in the 18th century, as are the accents in different parts of America. One of the most recognizable British accents today is called Received Pronunciation, a customary BBC-ready speaking pattern that is just one of many English dialects. One of the most noticeable characteristics of the accent is that the “r” sound isn’t pronounced. (The word “star,” for instance, is pronounced “stah,” “card” is pronounced “cahd,” and so on.) Whether or not an “r” sound is pronounced is referred to by linguists as rhotacism: A rhotic dialect will pronounce the “r,” while a non-rhotic dialect will not.
When the first English colonists arrived in North America, their accent was rhotic; British accents didn’t drop the “r” until much later. According to the Cambridge History of the English Language, it wasn’t until the 19th century, around the time of the Industrial Revolution, that Received Pronunciation emerged as the dominant English accent. So Washington couldn’t have spoken in that accent; it didn’t even exist in his time.
As for what the colonial accent in Washington’s time may have been, linguist Paul Longmore described a dialect where “cover” is pronounced as “kiver,” “yesterday” as “yisterday,” “Sarah” as “Sary,” and “engine” as “injin.” Whether that accent corresponds with the accent Washington would have had from his rural Virginia background is unclear, but we do have some descriptions of the quality of Washington’s voice from his contemporaries. Federalist Party leader Fisher Ames called it “deep, a little tremulous, and so low as to call for close attention,” while Washington’s friend George Mercer commented, “His voice is agreeable rather than strong.”
