The odd accent of Tangier VA - American Tongues episode #3
People Like Us - The CNAM Channel1 HN recommenders · 2010–2025
1.9M views · documentary · evergreen · Uploaded 2008-02-23
A clip from the documentary American Tongues about the isolated Tangier Island, Virginia, whose dialect is among the most unusual in the US. It is often said to resemble speech from centuries ago.
HN uses it as the standard audio example of the Tangier accent in discussions of archaic or colonial-era English.
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8 comments from Hacker News
Well, there's Tangier, Virginia: [VIDEO] Which has an accent thought to have remained unchanged since Colonial times.
This might be an interesting video ( [VIDEO] ) - its a video of Tangier, VA where they still speak English from when the town was settled in 1600s.
Ooh, reminds me of the accent on Tangier Island, Virginia: [VIDEO] (that's a direct link to an example of the Tangier accent, which the article claims is not an uncorrupted version of Shakespearean English, but it does sound a bit similar to what those Shakespeare scholars have pieced together, what they call Original Pronunciation)
(Replying to both you and dylangs1030 here) The "18th century" thing stuck in my mind from some media piece, and now that you mention it, does sound rather obviously like a myth. But the place exists—I think it was probably Tangier Island [1], and the accent there is indeed archaic: [VIDEO] Some of that sounds like a Monty Python sketch! It's definitely an example of one native English speaker (me) finding another (them) hard to understand. I also second the commenter who brought up the Glaswegian accent. I love how it sounds but damned if I can make out half of what they're saying. Maybe you're just gifted with dialects :) [1] [LINK]
the modern English accent would sound completely foreign to the English of the 1700's The accent on Tangier Island in Virginia[1] is said to be the closest living pronunciation to Elizabethan English, and based on that I think some mutual understanding could be wrangled. 1. [VIDEO]
See [LINK] . Similar things have happened and are happening to many other minority languages (e.g. [LINK] ). ----- Also, regarding Scots not being that different, people do tend to (not always consciously) modify their speech towards mutual intelligibility when talking to people of different languages. My parents recently visited Tangier, VA[1], and had a conversation with some kids on the ferry, noticing "oh, they speak a bit differently", then they turned to speak to each other and my mom couldn't understand a word. [1] [VIDEO]
Some interesting U.S. accents: [LINK] The oddest is Tangier Island, VA: [VIDEO] Relevant to this submission, a Cajun accent: [LINK] Relevant to HN, tech talk circa 1985: [LINK]
Imho, the Tangier accent is a lot more eclectic: [VIDEO] Barrier islands from Maryland to Georgia are linguistically fascinating. (As someone who spent a lot of time around them as a kid)