I've read many times in different places that people in Hollywood (especially women) were taught to lower their voices (pitch-wise) to sound "better". There's a lot of misinformation around about this accent (including the comments), so here's my infodump on everything I know about it: First of all, nothing fake about it. ", "American Horror Story Just Gave Us a Glimpse of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Next Big Role", "Language Mystery: When Did Americans Stop Sounding This Way? Another place you run into technical restriction of voice band transmission is on the telephone.

The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a cultivated accent of English blending together features of both American and British English (specifically Received Pronunciation for the latter) that were considered the most prestigious by the early 20th-century American upper class and entertainment industry.

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", "Why Did Old-Timey Baseball Announcers Talk the Way They Did? [6] A similar accent that resulted from different historical processes, Canadian dainty, was also known in Canada in the same era. The Mid-Atlantic accent is so well-known because of its use in film and amongst Hollywood stars, however there are many examples of affected speech in other languages as well. While FM broadcast didn't offer more audio bandwidth it was naturally less susceptible to noise so it sounded better. ", http://web.mit.edu/flemming/www/paper/rosasroses.pdf, https://assets2.merriam-webster.com/mw/static/pdf/help/guide-to-pronunciation.pdf, "How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mid-Atlantic_accent&oldid=982706694, Wikipedia articles needing factual verification from May 2017, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2016, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2018, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2019, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, A comedic example of this accent appears in the television sitcom, No weak vowel merger: The vowels in "Ros. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

It also explains why you can always hear your neighbor's bass line just fine through the wall.

I had an English teacher who had this accent and would say the exact same thing, about us having the weird accents. [82] The vowels /ə/ or /ɜː/ do not undergo R-coloring. After WW2 it fell out of vogue in a big way so even somebody born in the 30s who grew up speaking that way has lost it by now (because it's an affectation, and not a genuinely developed accent). But I do know everyone should start talking that way immediately. All of this means, in short, that transmitting the lower bass band of human speech is not so hard. It had certain traits.

It was then that the majority of audiences first heard Hollywood actors speaking predominantly in the elevated stage pronunciation of the Mid-Atlantic accent. Once you're not a teenager any more, your hearing starts to attenuate above about 10kHz. Let's codify and teach that one!"

A few friends' grandparents have anachronistic accents and its a trip hearing them tell stories. It's basically the equivalent of the likes of Canadian Dainty or Cultivated Australian, that is to say, a slight American variation on RP.

I grew up in West Virginia and this accent was taught in high school speech/elocution classes up through I think the 50s. http://goo.gl/0bsAjO Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both speak with a New York City accent. 5.8k .

New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Widespread. [15] Linguistic prescriptivists, Tilly and his adherents emphatically promoted this invented type of English, their own non-rhotic variety, which they called "World English": World English was a speech pattern that very specifically did not derive from any regional dialect pattern in England or America, although it clearly bears some resemblance to the speech patterns that were spoken in a few areas of New England, and a very considerable resemblance ... to the pattern in England which was becoming defined in the 1920s as "RP" or "Received Pronunciation." I studied linguistics in undergrad and specialized in historical and sociolinguistics.

As a result of American culture traditionally having a tendency to condemn refinement as unmanly and effeminate, the use of it became rather gender-based: Most actresses were trained in it, whereas male actors generally retained some of their regional accent or were trained to use Western Standard.

President William Howard Taft, who attended public school in Ohio, and inventor Thomas Edison, who grew up in Ohio and Michigan of modest means, both used natural rhotic accents. If you want me to, I'll do it. The belief in a General American accent being related to whiteness can be seen when challenged in media and studies whereby African Americans adopt a 'White' (read General American aka Midwest) accent in order to avoid prejudice and stereotypes.

[47] The clipped, non-rhotic English accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, Jr. were vestigial examples. In relation to this point, elitist folks became more interested in hiding themselves, thus out went the accent in favour of appearing as "just one of you folks". There may have been, almost certainly is, some socio-culteral reason for the use of a specific accent on a nationwide broadcast system. [17] Wealthy or highly educated Americans known for being lifelong speakers of the Mid-Atlantic accent include William F. Buckley Jr.,[18] Gore Vidal, H. P. Lovecraft,[19] Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Averell Harriman,[20][21] Dean Acheson,[22] George Plimpton,[23][24] Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who began affecting it permanently while at Miss Porter's School),[25] Louis Auchincloss,[26] Norman Mailer,[27] Diana Vreeland (though her accent is unique, with not entirely consistent Mid-Atlantic features),[28] C. Z. save hide report. [7] More recently, the term "mid-Atlantic accent" can also refer to any accent with a perceived mixture of both American and British characteristics. - Hollywood transitioned the cultural center from East Coast to California, where the local accent was very close to Western Standard / General American.

Most people over 40 have lost the upper end of this range. describe that such "r-less pronunciation, following Received Pronunciation", the standard accent of London and much of Southern England, "was taught as a model of correct, international English by schools of speech, acting, and elocution in the United States up to the end of World War II". When Afrikaans pride by the White Afrikaans people flared up during the first Anglo Boer war in the 1800s, Afrikaans was claimed as the language of 'proper' South Africans i.e.

A daily dose of art, culture and technology. As a result, most residents have a bit of a drawl, but it was beaten out of us in speech therapy and high school speech class. I know/knew many older people who had this accent and many could turn it on/off in a snap. All of their children speak with a general American accent.

Not considering its origins and despite it being synthetic, I really like the accent.