Mid-Atlantic accent

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This article is about the cultivated accent blending American and British English. For the regional dialect of American English in the Delaware Valley, see Mid-Atlantic American English.

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The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent,[1][2][3] is a consciously acquired accent of English, intended to blend together the "standard" speech of both American English and British Received Pronunciation. Spoken mostly in the early twentieth century, it is not a vernacular American accent native to any location, but an affected set of speech patterns whose "chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".[4] The accent is, therefore, best associated with the American upper class, theater, and film industry of the 1930s and 1940s,[5] largely taught in private independent preparatory schools especially in the American Northeast and in acting schools.[6] The accent's overall usage sharply declined following World War II.[7]

Historical use

Elite use

According to sociolinguist William Labov, "r-less pronunciation, following Received Pronunciation, 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."[7] Mid-Atlantic English was employed by some American elites in the Northeastern United States. Prior to World War II, some American elite institutions cultivated a norm influenced by the Received Pronunciation of Southern England as an international norm of English pronunciation. Recordings of American presidents Grover Cleveland (raised in Central New York) and Ohio-native William McKinley show their oratory employed a Mid-Atlantic accent. Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's successor and a native of New York, had a more natural[citation needed] non-rhotic, upper-class accent.

Upper-class Americans (outside the film industry) known for speaking with a consistent Mid-Atlantic accent include William F. Buckley, Jr.,[8] Gore Vidal, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, George Plimpton,[9][10] Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who began affecting it while at Miss Porter's School and maintained it lifelong),[11] Norman Mailer,[12] Diana Vreeland,[13] and Cornelius Vanderbilt IV,[14] all of whom were raised, partly or primarily, in the Northeastern United States (and some additionally educated in London). The monologuist Ruth Draper's recorded "The Italian Lesson" gives an example of this East Coast American upper-class diction of the 1940s.

The Mid-Atlantic speaking style among the educated wealthy was associated with white Americans of the urban Northeast. In and around Boston, Massachusetts, for example, the accent was characteristic, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, of the local elite: the Boston Brahmins. Examples of people described as having a "Boston Brahmin accent" include Charles Eliot Norton,[15] John Brooks Wheelwright,[16] George C. Homans,[17] McGeorge Bundy,[18] Elliot Richardson,[19] George Plimpton (though he was actually a lifelong member of the New York City elite),[20] and John Kerry,[21] 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.[22] The related term "boarding-school lockjaw" has also been used to describe the prestigious accent once taught at expensive Northeastern independent schools.[22]

Excerpt of FDR's "Fear Itself" speech

Recordings of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came from a privileged New York City family and was educated at Groton, a private Massachusetts preparatory school, 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.[23] "Linking R" appears in Roosevelt's delivery of the words "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; compare also Roosevelt's delivery of the words "naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan".[24]

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. The clipped, non-rhotic English of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, Jr. were vestigial examples.[5]

Theatrical and cinematic use

Being spoken by the American social elite in the early 1900s, this accent consequently also became a popular affectation in the theater and other forms of high culture in North America. As used by actors, the Mid-Atlantic accent is also known by various other names, including American theater standard or American stage speech.[25] The codification of the Mid-Atlantic accent in writing, particularly for theatrical training, is often credited to American elocutionist Edith Warman Skinner in the 1930s,[4][25] best known for her 1942 instructional text Speak with Distinction.[3] Skinner, who often referred to this accent (or register) as "Good Speech" or "Eastern Standard" (both names now dated), described it as the appropriate American pronunciation for "classics and elevated texts".[26] A linguistic prescriptivist, she vigorously drilled her students in learning the accent at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and, later, the Juilliard School.[4]

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.[citation needed] Many adopted it starting out in the theatre, and others simply affected it to help their careers on and off in films.

Among exemplary speakers of this accent from Hollywood's Golden Era are American actors like Tyrone Power,[27] Bette Davis,[27] Katharine Hepburn,[28] and Vincent Price;[3] Canadian actor Christopher Plummer;[3] Humphrey Bogart[3] and Cary Grant, who arrived in the United States from England aged 16,[29] and whose accent is arguably a more natural and unconscious mixture of British and American features. Roscoe Lee Browne, defying roles typically cast for African American actors, also consistently spoke with a Mid-Atlantic accent.[30]

Contemporary use

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Although it has largely disappeared as a standard of high society and high culture, the Transatlantic accent has still been heard in some recent media for the sake of stylistic effect. It is occasionally affected by contemporary American actors, especially when playing characters intended to be regarded as authoritative, privileged, timeless, or vaguely non-American.

Phonology

The Mid-Atlantic accent was carefully taught at American boarding schools and also for use in the American theater prior to the 1960s (after which it fell out of vogue).[33] It is still taught to actors for use in playing historical characters.[34] A version codified by voice coach Edith Skinner was once widely taught in acting schools of the earlier twentieth century. Her code is listed below:

Vowels

File:En-ma-monophthongs.svg
Monophthongs of Mid-Atlantic English. From Fletcher (2013, p. 25)
Pure vowels (Monophthongs)
English diaphoneme Mid-Atlantic realization Example
/æ/ [æ] trap
[a̟] bath
/ɑː/ [ɑː] blah, father
/ɒ/ [ɒ] bother,
lot, top, wasp, what
dog, loss, cloth
/ɔː/ [ɔː] all, bought, taught, saw
/ɛ/ [e] dress, met, bread
/ə/ [ə] about, syrup, arena
/ɪ/ [ɪ~ɪ̈] hit, skim, tip
/iː/ [iː] beam, chic, fleet
/ʌ/ [ɐ] bus, flood
/ʊ/ [ʊ] book, put, should
/uː/ [uː] food, glue, flew
Diphthongs
/aɪ/ [aɪ] ride, shine, try
bright, dice, pike
/aʊ/ [ɑʊ] now, ouch, scout
/eɪ/ [eɪ] lake, paid, rein
/ɔɪ/ [ɔɪ] boy, choice, moist
/oʊ/ [oʊ] goat, oh, show
R-colored vowels
/ɑːr/ [ɑː] barn, car, park
/ɪər/ [ɪə] fear, peer, tier
/ɜːr/ [ɜː] burn, first, herd
/ər/ [ə] doctor, martyr, surprise
  • Trap-bath split: The Mid-Atlantic accent exhibits the trap-bath split of RP. However, unlike in RP, the bath vowel does not merge with palm. It is only lowered from [æ] to [a̟]. (For details on the split in RP, see Trap-bath split.)
  • No æ-tensing: While most dialects of American English have the "trap" vowel tensed in closed syllables before nasals at the minimum, known as æ-tensing, the Mid-Atlantic accent has no trace of æ-tensing whatsoever.[35]
  • Father-bother distinction: The "a" in father is unrounded and lengthened. On the other hand, the "bother" vowel is rounded and unlengthened. Therefore, the father-bother distinction is preserved. The lot vowel is also used in words like "watch" and "quad".[36]
  • Lot–cloth assonance: Like contemporary RP, but unlike conservative RP and General American, words in the cloth lexical set use the lot vowel rather than the thought vowel.[37][38][nb 1] However, the thought vowel is used words such as "all", "salt", and "malt".
  • Cot–caught distinction: The vowels in cot and caught are distinguished with the latter being pronounced higher and longer compared to the former.
  • Lack of happy tensing: The vowel /i/ at the end of words such as "happy" [ˈhæpɪ] (Audio file "en-ma-happy.ogg" not found), "Charlie", "sherry", "coffee" is not tensed and thus is pronounced with the SIT vowel [ɪ], rather than the SEAT vowel [iː].[35] This also extends to "i", "y", and sometimes "e", "ie", and "ee" in other positions in words. For example, the sit vowel is used in a remark, and because, serious, variable.
  • No Canadian raising: The diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ do not undergo Canadian raising and are pronounced as [aɪ] and [ɑʊ], respectively, in all environments.
  • No weak vowel merger: The vowels in "Rosa's" and "roses are distinguished, with the former being pronounced as [ə] and the latter as either [ɪ] or [ɨ].
  • Lack of mergers before /l/: More like in General American than contemporary RP, mergers before /l/ are non-existent. Thus, the vowels in "hull" and "bull" are kept distinct, the former as [ʌ] and the latter as [ʊ].

Vowels before /r/

In the Mid-Atlantic accent, the postvocalic /r/ is typically either dropped or vocalized. The vowels /ə/ or /ɜː/ do not undergo R-coloring. Linking R is used, but intrusive R is not permitted.[41][42] 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 apart of the coda of the previous syllable.

When preceded by a long vowel, the /r/ is vocalized to [ə], commonly known as a schwa, and the preceding vowel is typically lax. However, when preceded by a short vowel, the /r/ 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:

  • Mirror–nearer distinction: Hence mirror is [mɪɹə], but nearer is [nɪəɹə].
  • Mary–merry distinction:[35] Hence merry is [mɛrɪ], but Mary is [mɛərɪ].
  • "marry" is pronounced with a different vowel altogether. See further in bullet below.

Other distinctions before /r/ include the following:

  • Mary–marry–merry distinction: Like in RP, New York City, and Philadelphia, the "marry" is pronounced as /æ/, being kept distinction from both the Mary and merry vowels.[35]
  • Cure–force–north distinction: The vowels in "cure" and "force" are distinguished, with the former being pronounced as [ʊə] and the latter pronounced as [ɔə].
  • Hurry-furry distinction: The vowels in "hurry" and "furry" are distinguished, with the former pronounced as /ʌr/ and the latter pronounced as /ɜːr/.(<phonos file="En-ne-hurry_furry.ogg">listen</phonos>)
  • Distinction of intervocalic /ɒr/ and /ɔːr/: The Mid-Atlantic accent pronounces /ɒɹV/ and /ɔɹV/ the same as in Received Pronunciation. [nb 2]

Consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:

Consonant phonemes
Labial Dental Alveolar Post-alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ŋ
Stop p b t d k ɡ
Affricate tʃ dʒ
Fricative f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h
Approximant l ɹ j ʍ w
  • Wine-whine distinction: The Mid-Atlantic accent lacks the Wine–whine merger: The consonants spelled w and wh are pronounced differently; words spelled with wh are pronounced as "hw" (/ʍ/). The distinction is a feature found in conservative RP and New England English. However, it is rarely heard in contemporary RP.
  • Pronunciation of /t/: /t/ is pronounced as a glottal stop (transcribed as: [ʔ]) only if it is followed by a consonant in either the same word or the following word. Thus grateful is pronounced [ˈɡɹeɪʔfɫ̩] ( listen). Otherwise, it is pronounced as [t]. Unlike General American, /t/ and /d/ do not undergo flapping. Likewise, winter [ˈwɪɾ̃ɚ] is not pronounced similarly or identically to winner [ˈwɪnɚ].[nb 3]
  • Preservation of yod: Yod-dropping only occurs after two consonants, /r/, and optionally after /s/ and /l/.[44][45] Mid-Atlantic also lacks palatalization, so duke is pronounced ['dju:k] (Audio file "en-ma-duke.ogg" not found) rather than (Audio file "en-ma-duke-p.ogg" not found).[46]

Features in the lexicon

  • The -day suffix (e.g. Monday; yesterday) can either be pronounced as [dɛɪ] or as [dɪ] ("i" as in "did").[47]
  • Instead of the strut vowel, the rounded lot vowel (Audio file "en-ma-cot.ogg" not found) vowel is used in everybody, nobody, somebody, and anybody; and when stressed, was, of, from, what. At times, the vowels in the latter words can be reduced to a schwa.[48] However, "because" uses the thought vowel.
  • Polysyllabic words ending in -ary,-ery,-ory,-mony,-ative,-bury,-berry: The first vowel in the endings -ary, -ery, -ory, -mony, -ative, -bury, and -berry are all pronounced as [ə], commonly known as a schwa. Thus inventory is pronounced [ˈɪnvɪntərɪ], rather than [ˈɪnvɪntɔrɪ].
Example Mid-Atlantic[35]
military -ary [əɹɪ]
-ery
inventory -ory
Canterbury -bury [bəɹɪ]
testimony -mony [mənɪ]
innovative -ative [ətɪv~ˌeɪtɪv]

See also

Notes

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References

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Bibliography

  • Fletcher, Patricia (February 1, 2013). Classically Speaking. Lulu.com. ISBN 9781300594239.
  • Fletcher, Patricia (January 1, 2005). Classically Speaking: Dialects for Actors : Neutral American, Classical American, Standard British (RP). Trafford. ISBN 9781412041218.
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Further reading

External links

  1. ↑ Drum, Kevin. "Oh, That Old-Timey Movie Accent!" Mother Jones. 2011.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Queen, Robin (2015). Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Media. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 241-2.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Hampton, Marian E. & Barbara Acker (eds.) (1997). The Vocal Vision: Views on Voice. Hal Leonard Corporation. pp. 174-77.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006), chpt. 7
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ New York City Accents Changing with the Times[verification needed]. Gothamist (February 25, 2008). Retrieved 2011-06-18.
  10. ↑ [1] Archived May 17, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  11. ↑ Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier, Barbara A. Perry
  12. ↑ With Mailer's death, U.S. loses a colorful writer and character – SFGate. Articles.sfgate.com (November 11, 2007). Retrieved 2011-06-18.
  13. ↑ Empress of fashion : a life of Diana Vreeland Los Angeles Public Library Online (December 28, 2012). Retrieved 2013-11-25.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 "On Language", by William Safire, The New York Times, January 18, 1987
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Pearl Harbor speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (sound file)
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Skinner, Monich & Mansell (1990:334)
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Kozloff, Sarah (2000). Overhearing Film Dialogue. University of California Press. p. 25.
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ "Philip French's screen legends: Cary Grant". The Guardian. London. Retrieved June 18, 2011.
  30. ↑ Rawson, Christopher (January 28, 2009). "Lane, Hamlisch among Theater Hall of Fame inductees". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved 2011-06-18.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ http://www.cmdnyc.com/blog/2016/5/3/what-happened-to-the-mid-atlantic-accent
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. ↑ Fletcher (February 1, 2013), p. 4
  35. ↑ 35.0 35.1 35.2 35.3 35.4 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  36. ↑ Fletcher (January 1, 2005), p. 338
  37. ↑ Fletcher (January 1, 2005), p. 339
  38. ↑ Skinner (1990), loc 1701 of 5800 (Kindle)
  39. ↑ [2] pg. 133
  40. ↑ Skinner, Monich & Mansell (1990)
  41. ↑ Skinner, Monich & Mansell (1990:102)
  42. ↑ Skinner (1990), loc 1384 of 5800 (Kindle)
  43. ↑ Mojsin, Lisa (2009), Mastering the American Accent, Barron's Education Series, Inc., p. 36.
  44. ↑ Skinner, Monich & Mansell (1990:336)
  45. ↑ Wells (1982a:247)
  46. ↑ Skinner (1990), loc 1429 of 5800 (Kindle)
  47. ↑ Skinner (1990), loc 1066 of 5800 (Kindle)
  48. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.


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