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by coolreader18 1892 days ago
It's funny, for at least the first example, original pronunciation just sounds like Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies, which is especially interesting considering that's intended to be a less formal/"lower class" accent. Reminds me of something I heard once that the modern american accent is actually closer to the british accent at the time of the revolutionary war, and it's the british accent that's changed more since then. No idea if that's actually true, but it was really interesting when I heard it.
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What Americans think of as “the” British accent is known as “Received Pronunciation”. An accent that arose in London in the latter 19th century.
There's an accents guy on Wired's youtube channel that has a really interesting slew of videos on accents. His latest ones are a bird's eye view of American accents: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wired+accent+ex...
The British (well, everywhere really) have a lot of accents and dialects! Most of them never come to your awareness.
Hagrid has a West Country accent. The character is supposed to come from the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, and the accent is approximately from that area. The most obvious difference from RP English is that it has the rhotic "R", which is how it's closer to standard American and to historical English accents. The non-rhotic R is also found in the Boston accect ("hahvahd yahd").
I seem to remember that the closest thing to an old school English is a costal Maryland/Virginia accent. Which sorta makes sense historically speaking.