How Did George Washington Talk?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you doing? This is Diego.

Hey, Diego, where are you calling us from?

From Orange County, California.

Welcome. What can we do for you, Diego?

Hi, yeah. So I was calling, I find myself watching these, you know, historical documentaries pertaining, like, to the Revolutionary War.

A lot of times we depict, like, George Washington as a very stoic figure who is speaking proper English, but very stoic and with little to no accent, an American accent.

And so I thought to myself, you know, at that time period, wouldn’t there have been some sort of British accent or some other European accent that our revolutionary leaders at the time, or even the general public would have at the time?

And slowly over time, would that have morphed into what is today the American accent?

Oh, that’s a good question.

So in other words, what did George Washington sound like?

Yeah, exactly.

A lot of it’s guesswork.

We have some ideas.

But the larger themes still hold true, which is nobody who was alive then spoke with an accent that exists now.

So just so you know, so sometimes people assume that for some reason, people assume that the British accent has always been what we know it to be today.

That isn’t true.

And the American accent, of course, wasn’t there at the time.

Not the same American accent.

And even the Southern accent, because he was a Virginia gentleman, right?

You might expect him to sound a little bit like today’s Virginian gentleman.

Even that was very different.

So we don’t really know.

And I say we, meaning people who study this stuff.

We have some guesses.

His speech was described in letters and documents from the time.

But usually it’s amateurs describing talking about the tone of his voice or the coarseness of his language or whether or not he could curse a blue streak.

Apparently he could.

But some things that we know, he was born in Virginia.

He was educated.

He was upper class, but he was rural.

And all these factors come into play there.

So he probably spoke a little more like upper class British people of his day than he did like anyone alive today.

But he also would have had a pronounced accent to the British ear of the time.

They would have recognized that he wasn’t part of their elite and part of the top people of their day, the people in power, the people with authority.

Because what we think of the British accent today and the Southern accent today did not exist in 1732 when he was born.

They were not around then.

Even the lack of the R’s that we think of, the lack of roticity in British English, wasn’t really a thing then.

So British speech was just as artful, as they say, then as American speech was.

And so in the 219 years since Washington died, the regional accents have changed, and they’ve changed a lot.

And they also changed during the 67 years that he lived on this planet.

So that’s what we know.

That’s kind of the summary of it.

But people have spent careers trying to figure stuff like this out.

So we will never know.

We will never know.

Until I invent a time machine, we will never know.

I’ll go back with my tape machine and figure it out.

So we will go on just making our own accents for them as we move forward.

Well, you know, it reminds me, I love when movies and television are clever about accents.

The Wallander TV series starring Kenneth Branagh is set in Sweden but has British actors.

And so what they did was kind of map the British regional and formal accents to the different characters in this TV series.

So even though it’s in Sweden, they’re speaking English, but it’s an English appropriate to the socioeconomic class and status of the character.

So a farmer in Sweden would sound like a British farmer and a politician would sound like a British politician.

So it was very clever.

So I think that when we show George Washington with a patrician or educated modern accent, it’s probably the right thing to do.

It’s probably the only way you’re not going to be incredibly distracted by this accent you’ve never heard before, which may technically be more accurate, but it’s really just going to derail you as far as believability goes.

Right, right.

Okay.

That work for you, Diego?

I will always wonder that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We’ll always know.

Let me know when the time machine is ready.

Diego, my advice for you is to solve this problem for the linguists who come 500 years from now is to record a bunch of tape and leave it in safe places so that your accent, your idiolect, Diego, yours will become the one everyone’s like, this is how they spoke in 2018.

I hope they can read that media in the future.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, take care now.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

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