According to linguist John Algeo in his essay <<Language Myths>>, (Penguin Press, 1999), he points out that many American forms of pronunciation are older than British ones.
For example, standard American English has retained the pronunciation of the final ârâ in words like âfatherâ and âmother,â while British has lost it. Americans have maintained the âflat aâ sound of cat in words like âpathâ and âclassâ whereas the British have replaced this sound with the âbroad aâ of âfather.â
Americans also fully pronounce all syllables of words like âlibraryâ and âdictionary,â but the British shorten them to âlibr'ryâ and âdiction'ry.â Algeo shows us that in all of these examples and many more, the American variation is closer to the original sixteenth century version than the British one.
Modern English really starts with Chaucer, who marks a break between earlier English (with strong Saxon, Angle, and Norse roots) and the language of the Home Counties (which borrowed heavily from Norman French, both in vocabulary and grammar).
American English has evolved much less than British English since the Founding Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock; so it retains many elements of Early Modern English (Fall for Autumn, Gotten as a past participle, Digged in many American dialects). So American English is closer to early forms of Early Modern English (the language of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Chaucer).
Much of American English is older than British English. In fact, some words such as âpavement (In the American sense),â and 'fall (to mean the season),â which are generally regarded as American terms, are simply holdovers from Middle English. As well, in most cases where Americans âdroppedâ the U, the American spelling predates the British one. 'Favorâ is centuries older than 'favour,â for instance.
Is it in fact British English which has diverged  from that of our ancestors and does American English bear the greater weight of antiquity?
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