By Richard Briles Moriarty
Thomas Paine’s words leap from the written page. How did Paine sound when speaking? Raised in Norfolk, Paine lived in England until age 37 when he sailed to America in 1774. One may assume he spoke with a British accent distinctly different than how English was spoken in the American colonies. That assumption, like other assumptions about Paine, calls for deeper inquiry. Upon inspection, the evidence is that Paine sounded as if he was born in America.
Despite a general belief among English speakers in Britain that it was Americans who rejected traditional rules for speaking, the contrary is true. This is confirmed in a 2018 article by BBC commentator Christine Ro, “How Americans preserved British English.”
Contemporary observers expressed surprise at how well English was spoken in America in the late 18th century. A visitor to Philadelphia in the 1760s was startled that “‘the English tongue’” was “‘spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection surpassing any but the polite part of London.’”
An Englishman visiting during the Revolution observed in his diary that, although “‘the inhabitants of this Country are composed of different Nations and different languages, yet it is very remarkable that they in general speak better English than the English do.’”
Until the end of the 18th century, English was spoken virtually the same way in England and America, asserts Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman in Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language (Random House, 2009).
Today’s British accent emerged in the 19th century. As the century progressed, Americans largely retained traditional ways of speaking English while England radically deviated from those linguistic roots. Spoken British English and American English diverged.
On the cusp of the 19th century, the English began dropping the final “r” sound from words like “mother” and “far” to say “mothah” and “fah.” By the early 1800s, educated Britons were saying “lahf ” and “bahth” and “dahnce” while pronouncing the “h” in “herb.”
O’Connor and Kellerman report speakers in England began dropping whole syllables. For example, they shortened the word “secretary” to “sec- -tree,” cutting off the next to last syllable. Americans continued to pronounce “secretary” and other words in the traditional way, articulating all syllables, as England had.
So, when Paine arrived in Philadelphia, speaking the English he’d spoken for 37 years in England, both he and those hearing him may have noticed little difference in their respective accents. We have no record of how Paine heard the speech of Americans, nor how they heard Paine’s speech. We have clues.
Among the few surviving comments on how Paine spoke English came from the Englishman Abraham Raimbach, upon meeting Paine in Paris in 1802. He observed that Paine was “fluent in speech, of mild and gentle demeanor, clear and distinct in enunciation, and his voice exceedingly soft and agreeable.”
While recognizing the paucity of evidence for how Paine actually spoke, it’s reasonable to extrapolate. We know that Paine, upon arriving in Philadelphia, rapidly fit into the political and social cultures he found in his new home. Since residents of England and America at that time spoke English in ways that were virtually indistinguishable, the way Paine spoke blended in well with the way Americans spoke.