I was just watching a video of Queen Elizabeth II giving a toast at the White House in 1976. Her accent (and manner of speaking) compared to President Ford was, of course, a study in contrast.
She refers to her ancestor, George III, and that started me wondering about how different or similar the two Georges would have sounded if they had ever happened to be in the same room together.
Is it even possible to know how they would have sounded? Was that ever written about by their contemporaries?
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As /u/wjrii, I have addressed similar questions to this in this sub in the past.
In answering this question, I'll use some of what I wrote before:
While I'm not a linguist, linguists will tell you that new, isolated (and even just separated) communities develop their own unique accent in a process called leveling. Simply put, aspects of the various accents and manners of speech of the members of the community combine to make something new. It's not an "average" per se, as some accents may "win out" more than others, but neither will it be exactly like any single one of the original, contributing accents. It will be some new combination, which will take some time for it to level into its established, standard form. From there, it will then undergo linguistic drift like every dialect and language does.
According to historian Paul K. Longmore, by the 1670s, there were enough American-born English speakers that this leveling process was probably complete enough that English-speaking visitors from England would have noticed a distinct American manner of speech. Language scholar Allen Walker Read found evidence going back to 1663 of commentary by English visitors of how Americans were using words and language differently from how the language was being used back in England. From that point forward, there is regular indirect evidence that there was a separate American accent from any accent heard back in England.
The first direct evidence of the British recognition of an American accent comes from Hugh Jones, an English-born professor who taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia between 1715 and 1721. After his return to Great Britain, he wrote a book called Accidence to the English Tongue, which was a sort of grammar book. Referring to the American colonies as "the Plantations", he wrote in the book that "Londoners", along with "most of our Learned, Polite, and Gentile People every where" in England "and the Inhabitants of the Plantations (even the Native Negroes) may be esteemed the only People that speak true English."
This is usually taken as recognition that the Americans he encountered in Virginia had an accent of their own, which reminded him of the upper-class accents of southeast England.
Later in the same year that Hugh Jones' first book was published, he wrote a second one, called The Present State of Virginia. This one had an even more direct passage recognizing a unique manner of American speech:
"The Habits, Life, Customs, Computations, &c. of the Virginians are much the same as about London, which they esteem their Home; and for the most Part have contemptible Notions of England, and wrong Sentiments of Bristol, and the other Out-Ports, which they entertain from seeing and hearing the common Dealers, Sailors, and Servants that come from those Towns, and the Country Places in England and Scotland, whose Language and Manners are strange to them; for the Planters, and even the Native Negroes generally talk good English without Idiom or Tone, and can discourse handsomly upon most common Subjects..."
Here, Jones directly acknowledges that some English accents are "strange" to the Americans. The phrase "without idiom or tone" here is usually taken to mean "without slang or accent", which reiterates what Jones wrote in his earlier work about Americans speaking "true English". Of course, everyone has some accent, but to Jones, the American accent he heard in Virginia was one that agreed with his idea of how English "should" be pronounced.
From that point forward, there were regular notices of there being differences between how Americans spoke English and how the English and British spoke English. Not only that, but there was recognition among Americans that they spoke English different from other Americans. The first such notice was in a tongue-in-cheek entry found in the 1739 edition of Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin:
"There are so many invisible Eclipses this Year, that I fear, not unjustly, our Pockets will suffer Inanition, be full empty, and our Feeling at a Loss...Mercury will have his share in these Affairs, and so confound the Speech of People, that when a Pennsylvanian would say panther, he shall say painter. When a New-Yorker thinks to say this he shall say diss and the People in New-England and Cape May will not be able to say cow for their Lives, but will be forc'd to say keow by a certain involuntary Twist in the Root of their Tongues..."
So what does this tell us about George Washington and George III? Yes, they definitely had different accents. George III was British, born and raised in England. George Washington was American, born and raised in Virginia.
Now, what exactly they sounded like is a matter of more dispute. But regardless of what they did sound like, their accents would have been different from each other.
What did George III sound like?
I'm less qualified to answer this question, but what I can tell you is that his accent is generally thought to have been non-rhotic. That is, he dropped his [r]'s when coming after a vowel in many words, as do many (but not nearly all) English accents do today. This is what linguists call "Loss of postvocalic [r]". For example, the word fair is pronounced something like fah. But it doesn't always work that way—fairer is pronounced something like fair-uh. This is also sometimes combined with what is known as intrusive r. So a phrase like law and order become lore and aw-duh.
The claim that George III was non-rhotic is based on a variety of evidence, but one of the most straightforward pieces is the 1791 Critical Pronouncing Dictionary by John Walker. Walker was an Englishman born and raised in the London area who became an elocution teacher in upperclass schools. In the introduction to the book, he wrote:
"In England, and particularly in London, the r in lard, bard, card, regard, &c., is pronounced so much in the throat as to be little more than the middle or Italian a, lengthened into laad, baad, caad, regaad; while in Ireland the r, in these words, is pronounced with so strong a jar of the tongue against the forepart of the palate...as to produce that harshness we call the Irish accent. But if this letter is pronounced too forcibly in Ireland, it is often too feebly sounded in England, and particularly in London, where it is sometimes entirely sunk..."
Earlier on, in 1775, Walker had written a Rhyming Dictionary, which contained some similar [r]-dropping, and even at least one instance of an intrusive [r], writing that aunt can be pronounced arnt.
Another pronunciation George III probably used was to pronounce certain words with a "long a", part of what is known as the trap-bath split. So he would have pronounced words such as "bath", "glass", "laugh", and "can't" something like "bawth", "gloss", "loff", and "cawn't". This is thought to have emerged in the 17th century in southeast England among the upper-class, which George III was very much a part of when he was born in the 18th century.
A pronunciation George III probably did not use was "flapping" of his [t]'s or a glottal stop. Americans do this a lot. They flap their [t] in a word like butter so it sounds like budder, or don't pronounce it at all (glottal stop) in the middle of words like mountain and certain or at the ends of words like hot and rat. George III wouldn't have done this. Butter would have been buttuh and the others all would have had a clear [t] sound as well.
Between George III and George Washington, we have somewhat more direct evidence of what George III may have sounded like, because there is one surviving recording of his granddaughter's voice, Queen Victoria. The sound quality is pretty bad, but the dialect features mentioned above are evident if you listen closely. Of similarly poor sound quality is the recording of William Gladstone, prime minister of Great Britain starting in the 1860s, who exhibited a variably rhotic accent ("future" is "fut-ah" but "wonder" is distinctly "wonder"). While Gladstone was born when George III was in his 70s, and Victoria was born when he was in his 80s, notably, Gladstone was already holding public office a little more than a decade after George III had died.
Certainly, there was some linguistic drift, and more noticeably, there would have been changes in vocabulary and slang in the generations between George III's birth in 1738 and Gladstone's birth in 1809. But the two monarchs and the prime minister were all of the same social class. The changes are unlikely to have been so dramatic in that time-frame that they would have sounded completely different. That kind of thing does happen, and a rapid change is thought to have happened among upper-class British speakers between the late 1500s and the late 1600s, at least in regards to rhoticism. But George III was born after that. Among the upper class, the adoption of rhoticism was nearing completion by the time of George III, and almost certainly by the time of Gladstone and Victoria (though there are those who argue that it hadn't happened yet - more certainly, among the lower classes, the adoption of rhoticism continued well into the 19th century, and is really still ongoing today).