
How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm - tintinnabula
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-fake-british-accent-took-old-hollywood-by-storm
======
ojosilva
I missed references in the article to Kelsey Grammer, the actor who portrayed
Fraser Crane in the sitcom Fraser. That was how I became acquainted with the
Mid-Atlantic accent, by researching Grammer's (or Fraser's to be more precise)
distinctively snobby accent.

Fraser's lines and Grammer's interpretation probably deserve a place in the
canons of American English accents and linguistics.

~~~
wanda
In the spirit of the aforementioned sitcom's titular character, and with no
ill sentiment intended toward the parent, I must hasten to point out that it
is spelled 'Frasier'.

------
matt4077
Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent (either
english or my native language), I can't stop myself from imitating it. Really
badly. After a week or so I'm terribly annoyed by the sound of my own voice.
It has even happened when someone was visiting, and acting in some sort of
leadership role with a lot of speaking time.

So I could imagine a single Hollywood director could possibly start a trend
(if everybody'a speech center were as spineless as mine).

~~~
Osmium
> Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent

Nit-pick, but _everyone_ speaks with an accent :)

(I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but I have met people who genuinely
think that _they_ don't have an accent and are 'unaccented', and it's just
other people who do...)

~~~
TillE
But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak,
with very minor variations. Most accents that deviate strongly from it are
slowly dying out.

This is in stark contrast to the UK, or just England, where you have an
incredible amount of linguistic diversity in a very small geographical area.
RP is theoretically "standard", but in reality it's a niche upper class thing.

~~~
Osmium
> But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans
> speak, with very minor variations.

So this was actually the kind of thing I was hoping to address with my
comment. The idea that there's a "neutral" accent is, linguistically speaking,
nonsense. That said, there probably isn't too much harm in it, in that if
you're an American talking to other Americans there's probably not much
ambiguity.

The problem is more that it could create the mistaken idea that, say, "General
American" is somehow "normal" and therefore anybody speaking with a different
accent becomes "the other", for whatever that may mean. It becomes a reference
point to judge other accents against, when that's not necessarily helpful.

And there's a lot of accent prejudice out there... ask anyone who's gone for a
job interview, for example, who's been very well-qualified but has an accent
that the interviewer didn't expect (this can be due to regional or social
backgrounds, or even gender – e.g. so-called "valley girl speak"/high rising
terminal). Just something worth thinking about, that's all. I know I've
dismissed someone before off-hand based on how they sound, which is not a good
thing, and something I'd like to be more aware of myself.

~~~
psyc
There's too much appeal to consequences here. I'd rather see someone make an
argument for why a set of pronunciations can't be canonical. I certainly know
exactly which pronunciations are the "neutral" ones, even the ones I don't use
myself. So how did those pronunciations receive their status? What does it
mean for us to hear them as "unaccented", and why exactly is that misguided?

~~~
WorldMaker
The armchair linguistics as I know it: Accents (and languages in general) are
typically social, tribal. We use them as one of the markers of "our tribe"
versus "not our tribe". Things that sound neutral/unaccented to us are things
that sound like they come from "around us", from within our tribe. Things that
sound foreign are clearly not from our tribe.

The misguided part here is that thinking because it sounds neutral/unaccented
to you means it is the "right" one. That path potentially leads to xenophobia
and tribalism.

~~~
psyc
I grew up in a region with a strong, distinctive regional accent and dialect.
Every member of my family, teachers, friends, literally everyone all spoke
with that accent. But even from a very young age (like 3-4) I knew it was an
accent. I didn't pick it up. I understood what canonical pronunciation was,
and opted for that. So, what, I just decided that newscasters were my tribe
for some reason? I'm just very suspicious of the idea that its completely
relative, and just depends on what you're used to hearing. If you were being
taught a foreign language by a native speaker, I think you'd be much less
likely to doubt them when they told you "this is how it is pronounced."

And you ended with another appeal to consequences.

~~~
foldr
The problem with this view is that there are instances where the 'canonical'
pronunciation in one group is the 'noncanonical' pronunciation in another, and
vice versa. For example, in British English, 'r' deletion is part of the
'canonical' pronunciation and it's only nonstandard dialects that are rhotic.
In American English it's the other way round. So in general, it can't be that
features of the pronunciation itself somehow determine whether or not it is
canonical.

I doubt you really know what accent you spoke with when you were three or
four. As to why you picked up an accent somewhere close to SAE, it's most
likely for reasons of prestige.

~~~
psyc
I don't have to remember. I have recordings. Things like 'r' are a bit of a
puzzle. What determines when a letter is silent? I don't actually believe
pronunciation is absolute or fixed in time. But I don't believe its perfectly
relative, either, or that "standard" does not have a meaning. Most accents
sound like vowel sounds aliasing as other vowel sounds. I think the standard
accent just doesn't alias nearly as much among all the vowel sounds, and I
think that's meaningful.

~~~
foldr
>What determines when a letter is silent? I don't actually believe
pronunciation is absolute or fixed in time

Not sure what you mean here. There are rhotic dialects which lack a rule of
'r' deletion and non-rhotic dialects which don't. It has nothing to do with
letters. It has to do with the presence or absence of a particular
phonological rule. The relevant feature most certainly is fixed in time, in
the sense that speakers of non-rhotic dialects consistently delete /r/
phonemes following a vowel whereas speakers of rhotic dialects do not.

>I think the standard accent just doesn't alias nearly as much among all the
vowel sounds, and I think that's meaningful.

This is simply false. There are non-standard dialects that make more
distinctions between vowels than standard dialects.

------
CapitalistCartr
" . . . sometimes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent, which is deeply offensive to
those, like me, from the actual Mid-Atlantic . . . "

" . . . elocution class is wildly offensive to most of the modern linguists .
. . "

What is it with this childish writing, being "deeply, wildly" offended at,
instead of disagreeing with? Its the wrinting caliber of a young teen, and it
seems to be popular.

~~~
neffy
Mermaid infiltration style? Colour me also more than slightly intrigued by
this idea of being from the "actual Mid-Atlantic"\- which was an ocean last
time anybody checked.

~~~
flanbiscuit
I was under the same impression. I thought they called it the "mid-atlantic"
accent because it was halfway between the US and British accent. Boy do I feel
stupid.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-
Atlantic_states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_states)

~~~
cperciva
It _is_ called a "mid-Atlantic" accent because it's halfway between American
and British; it has nothing to do with mid-Atlantic states. The author even
acknowledges this in the sentence immediately following the one where she
claims to be deeply offended: "What that name means in this case is that the
accent can be placed somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway
between New England and England".

This is simply poor writing.

------
Avshalom
How did that many words get used with out once calling it the "Trans-Atlantic
Accent"?

~~~
SiVal
Decades ago, I remember it being called the "Mid-Atlantic accent". It was a
joke, because it was an artificial accent. The name suggested both a blend of
US and England, but also suggested, tongue in cheek, that it was the way
people who lived in the middle of the Atlantic (in other words, nobody)
actually spoke.

------
jclem
Edith Skinner is still taught in conservatory drama programs. I used Skinner
at NYU 2004-2008. It's not a rare book at all (or maybe it's just not in a big
city with lots of drama schools and training programs). Regardless of how
outdated the Good Speech sound is in most contexts (you hear it in a lot of
Shakespeare still that isn't RP), the book is an excellent source for learning
the International Phonetic Alphabet and techniques for analyzing speech.

I have a lot of southern and mid western speech habits, and learning a
rigorous framework for analyzing speech helped me get control over them.

------
thembones
Odd that they call out Cary Grant, he was in fact British.

~~~
pash
His accent, however, was not.

~~~
dirtbox
I'm British which I think qualifies me to say it very much was. He had a few
inflections of the period, but there's no mistaking it.

~~~
pash
I won't tell you what you hear, but his manner of speaking is often held out
as an example of Mid-Atlantic diction, albeit an idiosyncratic one—Cary Grant
spoke like Cary Grant.

His accent was his native Bristol at base, with Americanisms heaped on top, a
Mid-Atlantic destination arrived at from the opposite direction of
contemporary American actors. But with his short American _a_ 's and clipped
cadence, to my ear his delivery often seems closer to that of his American co-
stars than to that of his English ones. For example, take a listen to the
trailer of _The Grass is Greener (1961)_ [0], in which Grant plays alongside a
cast from both sides of the Atlantic. Hear it?

(I'm American and have lived in England, by the way.)

0\. [https://youtu.be/JpCm22wh6qQ](https://youtu.be/JpCm22wh6qQ)

~~~
zc75
Just a counterpoint: I have short A's and a clipped cadence. I'm English and
have never been to America. (Not that I'm from Bristol either!)

I've never thought of Cary Grant's accent to be anything but English. I don't
hear any American in it at all.

------
sverige
An earlier example of this accent is the 1921 recording of William Jennings
Bryan reading his famous 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UV2wRCcWJa8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UV2wRCcWJa8)

------
hackermailman
There is also many bands with fake accents, like 1980s Minor Threat with
whatever UK accent Ian Mackaye was channeling

~~~
sverige
And all the British bands who have strangely Midwestern accents.

~~~
danek
I'm always surprised to learn a band is English when I expected they'd be from
Chicago or Detroit

------
amyjess
> “Each vowel sound is called a PURE SOUND, and the slightest movement or
> change in any of the organs of speech during the formation of a vowel will
> mar its purity, resulting in DIPHTHONGIZATION.”

I find this funny, as the monophthongal /e/ and /o/ sound utterly alien to
American ears. So much so that switching from diphthong to monophthong
pronunciations for those sounds is a quick-and-dirty way to fake a Scottish
accent (yes, very quick and very dirty; nobody will believe your accent is
real though they'll think you're trying to sound Scottish).

Edit: Forgot to include gemination marks here. Should be /e:/ and /o:/ above.

~~~
lottin
American English definitely has a monophthongal /e/ sound in words such as
BED, which is conventionally transcribed as /e/ although it really is an
open/mid "E" rather than a close one and thus /ɛ/ would probably be more
accurate. You're probably confusing that sound with the diphthong in FACE
/eɪ/, which in Scottish English usually is a long close front vowel /eː/.

~~~
amyjess
Sorry, I forgot to include the gemination marks (and I've since edited it into
GP). I was specifically talking about /e:/ and /o:/, which are monophthongs in
Scottish English but diphthongs /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ in American and English English.

------
kitd
Funnily enough, while the mid-Atlantic screen accent was dying out post WW2,
its English equivalent, RP, was being kept well and truly alive in the UK by
the BBC.

Actors like Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins were instructed to drop their
Welsh accents if they wanted to progress in their acting careers, as RP was
the "right" way for an actor to speak.

Even in other professions, regional accents were replaced by RP. My father was
told to drop his Welsh accent if he wanted to become a lawyer.

RP was only really dropped in the 1980s.

On a side note, is Clara Bow's story the basis for "Singing in the Rain"?

------
dredmorbius
I have a strong suspicion that the accent was adopted, by a newly-talkified
Hollywood, in large part because the exTREMEly disTINCT eNUNciation would
convey and carry better over the poor audio tracks and reproduction equipment
of early theaters (not to mention the audio recording equipment of the time).

With further advances in audio capture, recording, processing, and playback
equipment, vernacular accents were possible without risking nonintelligibility
to the audience. James Dean's drunken ramble at the conclusion of _Giant_
being a notable exception.

~~~
ThinkingGuy
My understanding was that in the early days of motion pictures, they simply
borrowed most of the conventions of stage acting (for example, scenes would
commonly show an actor walking into a room, and continue all the way through
the action or dialogue, until they had exited the set, rather than cutting out
the unnecessary parts). So it would make sense for trained actors accustomed
to projecting to a large audience (no wireless mics in those days), to
continue projecting and enunciating in the same manner.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's predating the talkie era.

Yes, early films were shot square-on into the set, as one would film a stage
production. That changed with _The Great Train Robbery_ , which introduced a
very large number of the set of camera techniques used in film since: long
shots, close-ups, tracking, panning, dolly, cross-cutting, and other methods.
All in 1903, by Edwin S. Porter.

All that was well established by the time talkies started becoming widespread,
particularly with sound-on-film in the 1930s.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Train_Robbery_(190...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Train_Robbery_\(1903_film\))

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film)

------
eth0up
As a younger creature I had a minor speech complex which at some early point I
became conscious of, excessively so. Tormented by the inconsistencies of
vowels and consonants in english, I began experimenting with enunciation in
grievous violation of convention. In what according to many linguists might be
my own stubborn idiocy, I picked a fight with the intervocalic "t", which most
Americans pronounce as a "d", e.g. wa _t_ er, li _tt_ le, or i.e. compu _(d)_
er. Some force far less lenient than OCD thereafter compelled me to pronounce
the intervocalic "t" as an actual "t", rather than "d". Such enunciation
happens to be common in Bri _t_ ish english. The effects of this compulsion
range from public curiosi _t_ y regarding my origins, to accusations of pe
_tt_ y affectation and artificiali _t_ y. My meager sum of friends might imply
a multitude of things, but none of them would dare say I was groveling for
more. As for linguists, I adore Mr Pinker and a few others, but can muster no
admiration for the notion that prodigious use of discourse-particles indicates
conscientiousness[1], particularly the use of "like", which I observe
ubiquitously used as punctuation, elocutionary wildcards, and thoughtless
substitutions for thoughtfulness and basic articulation. I lack the bravery to
willfully incur the wrath of linguistic titans such as Pinker, but I'll have
self-definition however fake I seem. If a person's early years are spent in a
ghetto where words are spoken one way, but circumstance transports that person
to another ghetto where words are spoken differently, must they choose between
either/or lest they be deemed "fake" for speaking in accordance with their own
ideal? I suggest more scrutiny be placed upon the audience and less on the
speaker. This procedure might influence critical-thinking while decreasing the
volatility inherent in a system where listeners are trained to reject the
unfamiliar and embrace the familiar, i.e cognitive bias, etc.

I have yet to find a dictionary that advises the intervocalic "t" be
pronounced as a "d", despite the hordes of individuals who wax tumescently
indignant when one doesn't. All I really want is consistency, but I do not
insist. And I am aware that the Gods of linguistics profess that language is
living and ever mutating and therefore never harmonious or consistent. I
doubt, however, that this is an eternal intrinsic attribute. I'm sure I push
too far, but such a view seems to me an appeal to authority, while the
authority-figures are us unbeknownst.

1\. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/saying-like-
study-f...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/saying-like-study-filler-
words_n_5484309.html)

~~~
ewzimm
I did the same thing when I was younger. There's still some of it left over,
but the embarrassment of being a teenager definitely normalized it. I learned
to read when I was pretty young, before I was exposed to a lot of words in
speech. I also watched a lot of TV, and people spoke with different accents.
Since there wasn't any authoritative way to say things, I preferred to say
them how they looked on paper.

~~~
douche
I was in college before I learned how hyperbole is supposed to be pronounced.
I'd never actually heard a person say that (it's a little beyond typical
small-town Maine vocabulary), so I worked for years under the assumption that
it was hyper-bowl, rather than hi-per-boll-ee. I knew hyper, and I knew what
the bole of a tree was...

~~~
ewzimm
It also took me until college to learn to pronounce the e.

~~~
BobCat
So you went to kah lej ee?

------
zeitgeb3r
Why does all Star Wars movies use aristocratic British accent?

~~~
ajlburke
The original Star Wars movies were largely shot in Britain, and used British
actors for many of the roles, especially the Imperial officers and officials.
Carrie Fisher's family had worked in Hollywood during the "golden age" of the
mid-Atlantic accent and she had been sent to an elocution school in the U.K.
just before being cast for Star Wars - although she admits that her accent
changed a lot in the first Star Wars movie.

~~~
dmreedy
This is true, but there was also a significant amount of ADR/Overdubbing work
with american actors, especially for the minor roles.

One of the most notable exceptions, of course, being Red Leader, a British
actor doing a fantastic rendition of a midwestern american cowboy

------
emodendroket
> The entire concept of an elocution class is wildly offensive to most of the
> modern linguists I know; following the rise of super-linguist Bill Labov in
> the 1960s, the concept that one way of speaking is “better” or “worse” than
> another is basically anathema. But that wasn’t at all the case for the rich
> kids of Westchester County, Beacon Hill, or the Main Line (those would be
> the home of the elites of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, respectively).

Oh, nonsense. Sociolinguistic prejudices are still with us and it's only those
of us speaking the prestige varieties of English who have the luxury of
pretending we all speak naturally now. If you don't think so, ask some people
their opinions of AAVE or "Ebonics." Or even a Southern drawl.

~~~
psychometry
I think you're misinterpreting the quote. The author isn't saying that
linguists reject the existence of prejudice; they rather reject the bases for
that prejudice.

~~~
emodendroket
But modern linguists are generally not the kind of people who'd want to take
an elocution class today. Mostly people who would want to take such a class
are people whose accents clearly mark them as being in a disfavored group. So
if "modern linguists" really oppose the very concept of such a class I'd say
they're being rather solipsistic.

And in fact I don't think they do, since linguists are among the specialists
who contribute to "accent reduction" courses, which seems like a modern name
for the same thing.

------
StavrosK
Completely off-topic, but does Latin have genders? Is "Atlas" feminine there?
"Atlas obscura" sounds very wrong to me, I imagine it should be "Atlas
obscurus".

~~~
DonaldFisk
Well spotted. Latin has three genders, and Atlas is listed as masculine in all
of the online dictionaries listed here:
[http://www.lexilogos.com/english/latin_dictionary.htm](http://www.lexilogos.com/english/latin_dictionary.htm)
so it should indeed be Atlas obscurus.

~~~
cgio
Or Atlas obscurae?

~~~
DonaldFisk
How is that supposed to parse?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#First_and_sec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#First_and_second_declension_adjectives)
gives the declension for adjectives such as obscurus.

I think the web site gets it wrong because of "camera obscura" (Latin for
"dark room"). Camera (modern French: "la chambre") is feminine so takes the
feminine form of the adjective.

~~~
cgio
I think it's not the Atlas that is obscure/dark, but rather an Atlas of
darkness.

~~~
DonaldFisk
Then it should be "Atlas obscuritatis" or "Atlas tenebrarum".

