Accents

[albalass]

Did people in Tudor/Elizabethan times have an accent like today's modern American accent?

[jno]

Not exactly. Regional differences in speech were probably stronger in England in those days than they are now, so different sorts of English were exported with the earliest colonists. The ones who settled in Virginia mostly came from the south-west. The New England colonists.came more from eastern England.The southern states of the USA still have a noticeably different way of speaking from the rest of the country, but it doesn't sound anything much like Devon. It's sometimes said that the people living round Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia speak something closer to Shakespeare's language than anyone in modern Britain, and that may be true, but again it hasn't gone unchanged in the last 400 years.

[Lil O'lady]

The population of south coastal / south east England seem to have had at this time a dialect very like contemporary Dutch in Tudor times, and its likely that people from northern England and southern England would have struggled to understand each other. No change there then.