Do we know what Americans sounded like in 1776? Did they have accents that we would recognise today as American? Were there regional dialects?
Accents and languages evolve very similarly to anything that evolves, distance and regional uniqueness creates regionally unique variants. The fact that it took 6 weeks to cross the Atlantic and days to get form one end of the USA to the other would create pockets of accents.
Since we did not start recording sound until the 1880s we have very little way of determining what they actually sounded like.
Good point
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