Turn is one of my favorite shows right now! I deeply appreciate the historical connections, as well as the superb acting; if anyone reading this isn't familiar with it, head over to the wonderful /r/turn and catch up with the episodes here. I'm in the process of writing a historically accurate rundown of what they did and didn't get right on Turn. One of the things I like best is how they capture the different accents. I think it nicely illustrates the diversity of the colonies, as the accents changed between many of the characters, including parents and children; in an interview Jamie Bell (who plays Abe) said that they purposely chose more of a soft Irish-tinged accent for him, as that reflects how close he was with his mother.

Most interestingly, around the time of the revolution the British English was a bit closer to the way we speak than it was to modern "standard" British English (i.e. Received Pronunciation); one of the major shifts between American and British English, non-rhoticity (i.e. dropping the r in words like hard), did not occur until well after the revolution. The English of the Northeast already had certain characteristics that distinguished it from the Southern dialects. For example, New York City, the Hudson Valley, and parts of New Jersey retained a good part of their old Dutch identity by the time of the revolution, and this is reflected in the emergence of the "New York" dialect (which is a major misnomer, as this dialect is certainly not restricted to the five boroughs, stretching out to parts of Long Island, lower New York state and New Jersey) with pronunciations like "dem/dese/dat" (them/these/that), "toity toid" (thirty third) and "cot/cawfee" (caught/coffee). The modern New Jersey accent as we know it did not emerge until much later, but during the revolution it would have been strong enough to distinguish it from the Southern, New England and "standard" British accents.