American English - the logic of it????

I was watching superstar Madhuri Dixit on television the other day and among the things that struck me other than her wholesome beauty and her million watt smile was her new American drawl. Listening to her speak helped vindicate my observation that perhaps the first casualty in the dilution of one's accent (especially if influenced by British English pronunciation), and in the acquisition of the American accent is the dropping of the sound of 'ah' in words such as blast, past, fast, etc., and its replacement by the short vowel sound of the letter 'a' (as in cat) instead.


When I first arrived in the US and began to teach a mixed Preprimary Montessori class of 3, 4, and 5-year-olds, I found that often my little students did not follow my Indian accent with its British English influenced pronunciation, especially during read aloud time. Words like last, fast, after, mask, etc., in which I pronounced the grapheme/letter 'a' with the 'ah' sound of the low back unrounded vowel, but which are pronounced with the low front vowel sound (the short vowel sound of the grapheme 'a') in American English, were the main problem. I found myself quickly adopting the low front vowel of the American pronunciation of this vowel sound in these and other such words in my speech, in the interest of being more effective in the classroom.


I began to wonder when and why the Americans first started to use the low front vowel sound for the grapheme 'a' in place of the low back unrounded vowel to pronounce words like the ones mentioned above.


Could it be that, being a melting pot of races from the day the nation was born, it was imperative to adopt a common language that was as easy as possible for everyone to read and write? Had this led to a stress on making reading and spelling phonetic, logical  and rule bound? By that logic therefore, if the grapheme 'a' is pronounced with the short 'a' vowel sound in words like can, man, fat, mat, bag, gas, etc., then the same pronunciation of the vowel 'a' should apply in words like mask, fast, last, after, etc.


The adoption of the low front vowel sound of the grapheme 'a' in the pronunciation of the examples given earlier, as the result of a larger, conscious decision by the country's earliest academicians/intellectuals/founding fathers/educators, for the purpose of bringing speech, reading and writing as much in line with each other as possible seems far fetched and absurd even to me, the propounder of this theory. To accept this crazy theory would mean that you believe that the earliest colonists from the present day UK  arrived in the present day US with an English English accent, and after successfully colonizing the new country and imposing their language on it, consciously changed the language in the process of forging a new political and linguistic identity. Further, my somewhat absurd theory does not hold in the case of words like car, jar, star, mar, stark, mark, marsh, etc., which contain the R-controlled vowel 'ar' and which retain the British English low back unrounded vowel sound of 'ah'.


However, there is a justification of my tentative theory in the case of American English spelling in words like color and honor, albeit in the reverse direction, namely, that the British English pronunciation has been retained, but the spelling has been made phonetic.

Absurd as my hypothesis might seem, there has to have been some reason for changing the rules for spelling, other than simply a desire to be different. This same reason would then apply to pronunciation, don't you think? And the fact is the English colonists were imposing their language on a motley lot of emigres so they had to find a way to make their crazy language of more exceptions and less rules easy to learn to read and write.


Then again, as asserted by Hudson (2000), language change takes place in speech communitites that are removed from the linguistc standards of the broader community, by geography or geographical features, like wide bodies of water or mountain ranges. This may explain the divergence of American and British English as early as in colonial times. Thus, the transformation of the low back unrounded vowel sound of the letter 'a' into the low front vowel sound of this letter in American English in words like last and fast, is probably just an accident in the evolutionary process of a language after all!