To expand on my earlier point, though, I suspect that the presence of so many East Coasters and Britons in the movie industry of that time increased the pressure on young actors to conform to some type of ‘Eastern’ or ‘mid-Atlantic’ standard. Elocution strikes me as a booming business in 1930’s Hollywood I seem to recall a long-forgotten Broadway comedy from that era about an LA speech correction school. It’s definitely true that a lot of actors modified their accents to some type of mid-Atlantic standard in that era. Still, it makes you wonder: If the US had stayed within the boundaries of the original thirteen colonies, would America have ended up with a ‘upper-class’ accent like the one that emerged in the UK? And that’s not even acknowledging the separate tradition of the Southern Gentry.Īnd so, rather than being a dominant if minority-spoken accent, American aristocratic English is little more than a historical curiosity. By the time ‘American aristocratic speech’ could be classified as a discrete phenomenon, moneyed elites had already sprung up in far-flung places such as Chicago and San Francisco. The entirety of the UK is less than 100,000 square miles the US is nearly 38 times that size. British RP had geographic limitations in its corner.
In other words, there was never a systematic way for an ‘elite’ accent to transmit itself throughout the country.Īnd about that country ours is huge. We never had a house of lords, schools reserved for the nobility, or an interconnected, nationwide land-owning class. So why did our own ‘RP’ never catch on the way British RP did? First, we never had a real aristocracy, only a de facto one. Astute readers will no doubt find many other pronunciations of note. She preserves the ‘trap-bath’ split (note the broad vowel for ‘ ask’ at 1:40 and ‘l ast’ at 9:12). She pronounces ‘again’ so it sounds like ‘ a gain‘ and ‘been’ as if it were ‘ bean‘ (although she goes with the American pronunciation of ‘category’). Her speech is entirely non-rhotic (r-less), with the vowel in words like ‘nurse’ a long mid-central vowel, often with some lip rounding and/or fronting ( ə ~ ɵ ~ ø). Roosevelt’s accent, first and foremost, is that it is quite like older types of Received Pronunciation. You can get a good idea of how they spoke from this interview from Eleanor Roosevelt from the 1950’s: What I’m referring to is the speech of the East Coast Aristocracy, a small group of elites from powerful old-money families. It simply never caught on the way RP did. Although Americans have a hard time understanding how an accent spoken by so few people could be the ‘standard,’ we in fact had something of our own ‘RP’ in the late 19th- and early 20th-Centuries. I often discuss Received Pronunciation, the British accent which was long the standard of educated speech in England.
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