How did Received Pronunciation catch on? It seems that Britain is chock-full of different accents, especially from the north, but all the English ones sort of contain elements of RP, like the unpronounced R's (Irish and Scottish don't.)
The split came about through formalised education. The British you hear today is upper middle class, noble English.
Similar happened in France and French Quebec. Modern French is formalised Parisian french. While Canadian French is country French, according to a very posh friend, the most educated quebecois still sounds like a country hick the first time he hears them.
> Similar happened in France and French Quebec. Modern French is formalized Parisian french. While Canadian French is country French, according to a very posh friend, the most educated québécois still sounds like a country hick the first time he hears them.
You got it backward. Modern French is bourgeois Parisian French. It was standardized more than a century after the French revolution (in the 1880's when public education became mandatory).
When Québec was colonized in the 1600's, only a handful of territories in France spoke French, mostly around Paris. This was the language of the court, the nobility and a minority of peasants. The rest of the country spoke various languages, such as Caló, Catalan, Corsican, Franco-Provençal, Ligurian, Occitan, Flemish, Luxembourgish, Alsatian, Breton, and Basque [1]. Furthermore, Parisian French was only one of the d'Oïl languages spoken at the time [2].
The colonists that settled and explored Québec were mostly from northern France, the region where an Oïl language was spoken. The language spoken in the colony was standardized to match the one of the royal administration (Parisian French).
Due to not being a French Territory when the revolution happened, Québec kept a fork of Royal French. Reading written french from the 1600's and 1700's out loud is striking, as it's almost identical the pronunciation of modern Québécois French. An example of this is the term "Moi", spelled Moé in the 1700's and pronounced Mo-a (Moi) by modern continental French and Mo-Hey (Moé) in Québécois French.
I find that far fetched. It's much more likely that accents in the two countries evolved from what came before, without either staying the same.
Furthermore, there isn't such a thing as a single "British" accent, there are a huge range of accents in Britain, just like there are a huge range of accents in the US.
