Mid-Atlantic accent


The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a purposefully cultivated accent of English that blends together the most prestigious features of American and British English. Adopted in the early 20th century mostly by American aristocrats and Hollywood actors, it is not a native or regional accent; instead, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, it is an affected set of speech patterns "whose chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". Primarily fashionable in the first half of the 20th century, the accent was embraced in private independent preparatory schools, especially by members of the Northeastern upper class, as well as in schools for film and stage acting. The accent's overall use sharply declined following the Second World War. A similar accent that resulted from different historical processes, Canadian dainty, was also known in Canada in the same era. More recently, the term "mid-Atlantic accent" can also refer to any accent with a perceived mixture of both American and British characteristics.

Elite use

At the start of the 20th century, formal public speaking in the United States focused on song-like intonation, lengthily and tremulously uttered vowels, and a booming resonance, rather than the details of given words' phonetic qualities. However, since the 19th century, upper-class communities on the Eastern seaboard increasingly adopted many of the phonetic qualities of educated, non-rhotic British accents based around London and southeastern England, at least as evidenced in recorded public speeches of the time. Sociolinguist William Labov et al. 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".
Early recordings of prominent Americans born in the middle of the 19th century provide some insight into their adoption or not of a cultivated non-rhotic speaking style. 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. Yet presidents William McKinley of Ohio and Grover Cleveland of Central New York, who attended private schools, clearly employed a non-rhotic, upper-class, Mid-Atlantic quality in their speeches; both even use the distinctive and especially archaic affectation of a "trilled" or "flapped r" at times whenever r is pronounced. This trill is less consistently heard in recordings of Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's successor from an affluent district of New York City, who also used a cultivated non-rhotic accent but with the addition of the coil-curl merger once notably associated with New York accents, as did his non-trilling distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Vocal coach and scholar Dudley Knight describes how the Australian phonetician William Tilly, teaching at Columbia University from 1918 to around the time of his death in 1935, introduced a phonetically consistent American speech standard that would "define the sound of American classical acting for almost a century", though Tilly himself actually had no special interest in acting. Mostly attracting a following of English-language learners and New York City public-school teachers, Tilly was interested in popularizing his version of a "proper" American pronunciation for teaching in public schools and using in one's public life. Linguistic prescriptivists, Tilly and his adherents emphatically promoted this invented type of English, their own non-rhotic variety, which they called "World English":
Now sometimes identified as a Mid-Atlantic accent, this consciously-learned pronunciation was advocated most strongly from the 1920s to the mid-1940s and was particularly embraced in this period within Northeastern independent preparatory schools mostly accessible to and supported by aristocratic American families. However, by 1950, following and presumably due to the Second World War, the accent's influence had largely ended. Wealthy or highly educated Americans known for being lifelong speakers of the Mid-Atlantic accent include William F. Buckley Jr., Gore Vidal, H. P. Lovecraft, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, George Plimpton, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Louis Auchincloss, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland, C. Z. Guest Joseph Alsop, Robert Silvers, Julia Child, and Cornelius Vanderbilt IV. Except for Child, all of these example speakers were raised, educated, or both in the Northeastern United States. This includes just over half who were raised specifically in New York and five who were specifically educated at the private boarding school Groton in Massachusetts: Franklin Roosevelt, Harriman, Acheson, Alsop, and Auchincloss.
In and around Boston, Massachusetts, such an accent, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was associated with the local urban elite: the Boston Brahmins. Examples of individuals described as having a cultivated New England or "Boston Brahmin accent" include Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, Charles Eliot Norton, Harry Crosby, John Brooks Wheelwright, George C. Homans, Elliot Richardson, George Plimpton, the Kennedys, and John Kerry, who has noticeably reduced this accent since his early adulthood. In the New York metropolitan area, particularly including its affluent Westchester County suburbs and the North Shore of Long Island, other terms for the local Transatlantic pronunciation and accompanying facial behavior include "Locust Valley lockjaw" or "Larchmont lockjaw", named for the stereotypical clenching of the speaker's jaw muscles to achieve an exaggerated enunciation quality. The related term "boarding-school lockjaw" has also been used to describe the prestigious accent once taught at expensive Northeastern independent schools.
Recordings of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came from a privileged New York City family and was educated at Groton, had a number of characteristic patterns. His speech is non-rhotic; one of Roosevelt's most frequently heard speeches has a falling diphthong in the word fear, which distinguishes it from other forms of surviving non-rhotic speech in the United States. "Linking r" appears in Roosevelt's delivery of the words "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; this pronunciation of r is also famously recorded in his Pearl Harbor speech, for example, in the phrase "naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan".
After the accent's decline following the end of World War II, this American version of a "posh" accent has all but disappeared even among the American upper classes, as Americans have increasingly dissociated from the effete speaking styles of the East Coast elite; if anything, the accent has become subject to ridicule in American popular culture. The clipped, non-rhotic English accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, Jr. were vestigial examples. Self-help author and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has a unique accent that, following her participation in the first 2020 presidential debate in June 2019, was widely discussed and sometimes described as a Mid-Atlantic accent. An article from The Guardian, for example, stated that Williamson "speaks in a beguiling mid-Atlantic accent that makes her sound as if she has walked straight off the set of a Cary Grant movie."

Theatrical and cinematic use

When the 20th century began, classical training for actors in the United States explicitly focused on imitating upper-class British accents onstage. From the 1920s to 1940s, the "World English" of William Tilly, and his followers' slight variations of it taught in classes of theater and oratory, became popular affectations onstage and in other forms of high culture in North America. The codification of a Mid-Atlantic accent in writing, particularly for theatrical training, is often credited to Edith Warman Skinner in the 1930s, a student of Tilly best known for her 1942 instructional text on the accent: Speak with Distinction. Skinner, who referred to this accent as "Good American Speech" or "Eastern Standard", described it as the appropriate American pronunciation for "classics and elevated texts". She vigorously drilled her students in learning the accent at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and, later, the Juilliard School.
It is also possible that a clipped, nasal, "all-treble" acoustic quality sometimes associated with the Mid-Atlantic accent arose out of technological necessity in the earliest days of radio and sound film, which ineffectively reproduced natural human bass tones. As used by actors, the Mid-Atlantic accent is also known by various other names, including American Theater Standard or American stage speech.
American cinema began in the early 1900s in New York City and Philadelphia before becoming largely transplanted to Los Angeles beginning in the mid-1910s. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, a voice was first heard in motion pictures. It was then that the majority of audiences first heard Hollywood actors speaking predominantly in the elevated stage pronunciation of the Mid-Atlantic accent. Many adopted it starting out in the theatre, and others simply affected it to help their careers on and off in films. Hollywood studios encouraged actors to learn this accent in the 1930s and 1940s.
Example actors known for publicly using this accent include Tyrone Power, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Laird Cregar, Vincent Price, Christopher Plummer, Sally Kellerman, Tammy Grimes, and Westbrook Van Voorhis. Cary Grant, who arrived in the United States from England at age of sixteen, had an accent that was often considered Mid-Atlantic, though with a more natural and unconscious mixture of both British and American features.
Roscoe Lee Browne, defying roles typically cast for African American actors, also consistently spoke with a Mid-Atlantic accent. Humorist Tom Lehrer lampooned this accent in a 1945 satirical tribute to his alma mater, Harvard University, called "Fight Fiercely, Harvard".

Examples

Although it has disappeared as a standard of high society and high culture, the Transatlantic accent has still been heard in some media in the second half of the 20th century, or even more recently, for the sake of historical, humorous, or other stylistic reasons:
The Mid-Atlantic accent was carefully taught as a model of "correct" English in American elocution classes, and it was also taught for use in the American theater prior to the 1960s. It is still taught to actors for use in playing historical characters.
A version codified by voice coach Edith Skinner was once widely taught in acting schools of the earlier 20th century. Her code is listed below:

Vowels

In the Mid-Atlantic accent, the postvocalic is typically either dropped or vocalized. The vowels or do not undergo R-coloring. Linking R is used, but intrusive R is not permitted. In Mid-Atlantic, intervocalic /r/'s and linking r's undergo liaison. In other words, they are put in the onset in the following syllable rather than a part of the coda of the previous syllable.
When preceded by a long vowel, the /r/ is vocalized to, commonly known as schwa, while the long vowel itself is laxed. However, when preceded by a short vowel, the /ə/ is elided. Therefore, tense and lax vowels before /r/ are typically only distinguished by the presence/absence of /ə/. The following distinctions are examples of this concept:
Other distinctions before /r/ include the following:
A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:
ExampleMid-Atlantic
military-ary
-ery
inventory-ory
Canterbury-bury
testimony-mony
innovative-ative