The Mid-Atlantic Accent

I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about.

Mimic Jim Backus

Katherine Hepburn

Bjork

Grace Kelly

R3, but wasn’t hers too affected?

Are there examples of how to pronounce certain words?

Tomato/tohmaato

Vase/Vaas

Hepburn picked it up at Bryn Mawr. Backus picked it up mimicing his father and the father's white show lawyer friends (in Cleveland, not on the East Coast).

[quote] white show

?

Emily Post disliked the pronunciation of the word vase as "vahz".

She responded to the question: "When is a vase a vahz?" with "When it is filled with dah-zies."

(IIRC, a vase-pronounced-vahz is a large vessel that sits directly on the floor; a vase is small and stands on a table or some other article of furniture.)

Always ‘Aunt’, not ‘Ann-t’

Kan’t, not Ken-t

Pick up and study a copy of "Speak With Distinction" by Edith Skinner, a classic standard for learning how to speak on stage (or elsewhere) for ages.

Or, watch this YT video, along with studying and learning to reproduce accents of Lena Horne, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, etc..

Patrick Dennis: Is the English lady sick, Auntie Mame?

Auntie Mame: She's not English, darling... she's from Pittsburgh.

Patrick Dennis: She sounded English.

Auntie Mame: Well, when you're from Pittsburgh, you have to do something.

Another tutorial for the punters. This time from a British perspective.

Did Madonna succeed?

George Plimpton

Personally prefer old Massachusetts "lockjaw" accent a la Gloria Upson.

The Mid-Atlantic "Accent" isn't even a real accent. You don't acquire it from living or growing up in a particular region or background. It is literally a manufactured accent that the people who spoke it had to be formally taught because no one actually talks like that.

[quote] Personally prefer old Massachusetts "lockjaw" accent a la Gloria Upson.

Ghastly. Just ghastly.

OP you could always take elocution lessons. Once standard part of finishing, charm or "executive training" schools there are today scores of teachers that take on anyone from actors to politicians.

Margaret Thatcher joined a long list of British politicians who took elocution lessons to scrub herself up a bit. Sadly things went too far and Mrs. Thatcher became frightfully grand, this included usurping use of royal pronoun "we". HM The Queen was not amused.....

[quote] Personally prefer old Massachusetts "lockjaw" accent a la Gloria Upson.

Not Massachusetts: Connecticut. A.K.A. "Connecticut clench."

Little Glory is from Mountebank, "the most exclusive and restricted community in our part of Connecticut!."

Christopher Plummer had the mid-Atlantic accent.

Jackie On Assistance had that weird accent that was half Mid-Atlantic, half Lawn Guyland, just like her cousin Little Edie.

So, besides hearing it, what would be a general way to define it in a few sentences?

R20

Received pronunciation across pond in UK is the same, but that's the point.

Whole idea is to have an accent that is hard to place so persons cannot pin point one's background.

RP long associated with public school, Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, upper classes, etc... basically was and still is a way of speaking that derived from erasing any common or low background.

Sons and daughters of peers and wealthy in England/GB long had been mostly raised by servants since birth. That staff was largely drawn from surrounding estates and of course spoke with whatever accent dominated. Boys were sent away to public school in part to learn many thing including RP. This prepared them for lives as a gentleman. It was all so important because standard wisdom was a gentleman could tell a person's background within moments after they began speaking.

Girls from upper classes were a mixed bag back then. Some were sent away to schools, but good majority remained at home and were instructed by governesses and or tutors privately at least for much of their primary education years. This is why many were packed off to finishing schools where elocution was part of curriculum. Families who could afford it found English governesses well trained in RP so as best to teach their charges.

The massive exportation of English governesses during 1800's and 1900's was in large part to that training. These would have been "ladies" from good families (the only ones who could afford to have their daughters educated), but were hard up for money. Idea was to have someone above servant class who educated both by formal teaching, but also via example.

The Connecticut Clench is top-drawer.

Done well and consistently RP or Mid-Atlantic gives impression one is from a certain class born and bred.

Noel Coward despite what many would assume from his accent came from a decidedly lower middle class background. Early on he decided best way to advance is stage career was to take up RP. Happily NC ran with the wealthy set of England who were more than happy to aid in that effort. They didn't think him a cheeky bounder at all.

Just as in USA with Mid-Atlantic accent, RP was everywhere in GB during 1930's, 1940's and well into 1950's and beyond.

Rise of first radio then films (and later television) meant some saw need for some sort of standard pronunciation that would be readily understood not just in Britain, but across entire empire.

Thus actors, radio and television broadcasters all learned RP, in particular what once was referred to as the "BBC accent". You watch films like brief Encounter and every actor right down to the children all use some form of RP.

Round tones, OP.

R23

""....the most exclusive and restricted community in our part of Connecticut!."

"Exclusively what, and restricted to whom?"

Be born in Eastern PA, like moi?

I really want this to make a comeback. Everyone speaks like trash these days with limited vocabularies.

Tilda is my model

The von trapp children all speak with a mid Atlantic accent. Especially the word “Faa-tha”

Gore Vidal and Lauren Bacall

Joanna Lumley's accent seems manufactured.

R35 Actually her name is Tilder Swinton. It’s only Tulsa in mid Atlantic.

^Tulsa=Tilda

Dianne Wiest does a wonderful version in bullits over broadway

It's 2021 Eldergays

If anyone under the age of 80 actually spoke like that today people would assume they were doing an impression of an old-time actor and laugh at them.

or enjoy it for the fun of it all. not everyone is a smug cunt

Mid-Atlantic (aka Transatlantic) and Received Pronunciation are not the same although the former draws quite heavily from the latter.

Hepburn didn't pick up anything at Bryn Mawr, R8, she brought her Connecticut accent with her.

I love Connecticut Clench! I've only heard it called Locust Valley (or Long Island) Lockjaw and I agree that it's only spoken by people who are really top drawer!

Jennifer jason Leigh does a parody of it in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY.

[quote]Personally prefer old Massachusetts "lockjaw" accent a la Gloria Upson.

[quote]Connecticut Clench

[quote]I've only heard it called Locust Valley (or Long Island) Lockjaw

r46 is correct. And for Beale fans, Little Edie is even reposing in the ground at Locust Valley.

Move ou of any english speaking country, spend you days and nights watching 1950s movies and seeing interviews from 1940s and 50s celebrities on youtube and you probably will shift your accent to that.

[quote]Christopher Plummer had the mid-Atlantic accent.

He was also Canadian and cut his acting chops performing Shakespeare.

Dorothy Parker had it - initially as a campy affectation. She acknowledged it was fake but got so used to speaking that way that it became her actual accent.

Tallulah Bankhead and Carrie Nye have a variant of it that is closer to a Mississippi/New Orleans accent - nothing like the Gone-With-The-Wind sound that most people associate with the Deep South.

Lauren Bacall had it. I think she admitted she started using it as an actress in part to cover up her nervousness.

R51 Betty Bacall = 1/3 Mid-Atlantic, 1/3 life long smoker, and 1/3 being a bitch that doesn't give two fucks.

R9 "white shoe"

[quote]It is literally a manufactured accent that the people who spoke it had to be formally taught because no one actually talks like that.

[quote]Just as in USA with Mid-Atlantic accent, RP was everywhere in GB during 1930's, 1940's and well into 1950's and beyond.

In the early 80s my elementary school curriculum included elocution classes in the first and second grades but by the time my brother was in the first grade three years later the classes had been dropped. This was in Potomac, MD so I have no idea why this was incorporated into our education.

A few years ago during a conversation about plants someone randomly mentioned my having a Mid-Atlantic accent, she was a linguist/language specialist with the local government but I was still surprised to hear that I had a noticeable “accent” and even more surprised that she felt the need to bring attention to it.

It would be less annoying than the "fry" or "valley girl" accents and the constant insertion of "like".

The Southern pronunciations in GWTW are very light and Gable refused to attempt one at all.

Sally Kellerman for Hidden Valley: :

what an elegant ranch!

R56 Leslie Howard actually probably had the most historically accurate one. They were all for the most part, part of the Southern aristocracy and gentry. At the time the rich still emulated the wealthy of Britain in their speech, so they should've sounded like a combination of a light Southern accent mixed with an upper class English one, think of the late Sen. Warner. A kind of Southern Mid-Atlantic.

Gable however would've had the hardest one to do, which could explain why he didn't even try. Rhett Butler is supposed to come from a very wealthy and established Charleston family. The historically elite Charleston accent is non-rhotic, they tend to pronounce the city as Chalston. War comes out sounding like wawa. New York and other major Atlantic seaports developed similar accents.

Another commercial imbued with Mid-Atlantic elegance:

(Piss-elegance, that is.)

I imagine elder gay d loungers attempting mid Atlantic accents, combined with gay voice, a lisp, and the more than occasional HISSSSSSSS

Moss Hart and wife Kitty Carlisle speak in a Mid-Atlantic accent in this interview. The reporter, less so.

I loved Bacall's voice, but don't ask her to look after her grandkids!

Accents in GWTW were all over the place.

No, Vivien Leigh didn't even bother with southern accent. Leslie Howard OTOH did his best, and things came out rather good on balance.

[quote]Lauren Bacall had it. I think she admitted she started using it as an actress in part to cover up her nervousness.

She kept it for the FLA-VAH!

Niles and Frasier Crane

R67, are you also R54?

For the soap watchers, would you agree that is what Pheobe, Langley, Adam and Palmer spoke on AMC. Though with Adam and Palmer it was established they affected the accent to hide their hillbilly roots.

The Limey at R16's link is fucking lame.

The Mid-Atlantic and the Transatlantic are not the same fucking thing.

Idiot.

He does seem daft

A Mid-Atlantic accent is an accent pattern from Delaware up through Western Connecticut that is influenced by colonial Dutch and German as well as British accents.

A Transatlantic accent is people trying to sound British.

R16's link = #Limeyfail

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Because it never stops being funny....

I liked the Bronx Tony Curtis "Yondah lies da castle of my foddah" which he never said in any movie.

As a Brit, one acquires a semblance of it living in the States for a few decades. We begin to mimic you just a bit, whether we like it or not. Things soften, though we never completely replace our Ts with Ds, something seems to happen over time.

Why do so many shows I've been watching today do the mid-Atlantic accent (or Kennedy-esque accent) like Happy Endings and Friends from College?

Seems weird.

Why has no one mentioned dear Joan?

Mid-atlantic wasn't her first fucking ride at the rodeo

I’m from Eastern Virginia and our older relatives have this accent. There are long vowels and everything ends with “ah” like “sug-ah”. It’s quite elegant sounding, but going the way of the dodo bird since the younger generation just sounds like Kardashian’s. You have to have been born prior to 1950 and be from the area stretching from Richmond to Fredericksburg but not further west than Charlottesville in order to rock the mid Atlantic southern gentry accent.

Whet does the Kardasian possess?

Vocal fry R81.

Justin is easy on the eyes.

Her politics were certainly suspect, but I always think of Diana Mosley when I think of a 1930s/1940s RP accent. It’s interesting to hear it from someone who was a “real” person, not an actress, politician, etc.

Apparently Diana’s sister, Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire was talking while walking around the grounds of the Chatsworth estate and someone stopped her and said, “Oh I’ve always read about a 1930s accent, but have never heard one. Please go on.”

R84 did she really have natural cheekbones like that? Extraordinary.

[quote] I was still surprised to hear that I had a noticeable “accent”

EVERYONE has a noticeable accent. There is no such thing as a "neutral" accent.

british RP and Mid-atlantic aren't precisely the same thing

Is this what you all are talking about?

R88 no that is an accent of the middle Atlantic states, but that is not a "Mid-Atlantic" accent. The Mid-Atlantic accent is so called because it is meant to sound as though it is from the middle of the Atlantic between Britain and America. When you hear old movie actors and think, "They sound vaguely like a posh Brit, yet American,' that is the accent which we are discussing.

R84 Another Mitford sister, Nancy, published a famous article in the mid-'50s explaining aristocratic usage in England.

Link please, R90.

R91 It was published in Encounter magazine. Perhaps somebody does have a link, I don't. Although she didn't originate the U non-U distinction or the term, she popularized it in that article and it caught on.

In any event, here's Deborah the youngest Mitford speaking in late life. She sounds more like the Queen than the Queen.

R92 The interesting thing about U and non-U, as an American, is how much of the U terms would be associated with the poor here. Such as looking glass instead of mirror, scent instead of perfume, etc... to me that sounds like things you'd expect to hear in the Appalachians or Ozarks not Windsor Castle.

There are pockets in the Appalachians and the tidewater areas where the last traces of Elizabethan English can still be heard. But that's fast disappearing.

R93 But that's the point. If you're really up there you don't put on airs.

Can't say I've ever visited one, but I've always heard that homes of old money in the U.S. are comfortable but shabby. Language is just another reflection of the attitude.

R95 I know. The poorer or richer you are the more you value direct speech, as well. It is the middle classes that come up with euphemisms such as drumstick instead of chicken leg, pass away rather than to die, etc...

The surprise that many people discover is that so much of what we think of as posh is really middle class, especially language.

I will also say it is true their houses are shabby. I live in the South, in a town in which wealthy Yankee equestrians have congregated since the end of the Civil War, I've been in their "cottages" which are really mansions. They are nice and grand, yet shabby. They might have gorgeous Persian rugs but they are threadbare and they use the furniture to cover any holes.

R89 I was joking, Jesus.

R86 - you are incorrect.

Joisey native Natalie Schafer had a delightful Mid-Atlantic accent.

[quote]Joisey native Natalie Schafer had a delightful Mid-Atlantic accent.

She was also a stealth lesbian. Gurl had secrets...

He is correct R98.

^^^^ R86 that is.

Does Barbara Walters' accent count?

R103 her accent is quite common in Lispon.

[Quote]Does Barbara Walters' accent count?

It does, and it's quite exquisite!

Barbara Walters has an old New York accent layered with her famous speech impediment, and shaped further by decades of broadcasting when executives scolded her to tone both down. Her speech in no way resembles a Mid-Atlantic accent.

I've told the story here before how my ex, who was from India, and I went to see Mary Louise Wilson as Diana Vreeland in "Full Gallop" - as we exited, the ex remarked in astonishment: "She never moved her jaw the entire time!" I replied, "You never met my grandmother (from Upper Montclair, NJ)."

While RP and Mid-Atlantic accents are different, there are some similarities.

Speaking with a clenched jaw is one of them...

Observe Charles Gray in this clip...

Yes, RP and Mid-Atlantic are different, but Mid-Atlantic was very much designed to be America's RP. You could always tell which teachers graduated from college in the 60s and later by the way they talked. If they graduated in the mid-60s and before they spoke at least with a quasi-Mid-Atlantic accent, if they graduated after that they didn't. Unless, it was a black teacher that went to a major HBCU because they kept it up longer.

Walter Brennen

Talk like you are biting down on a couple of pennies with your molars.

Someone said way back in the thread that Mid-Atlantic and Received Pronunciation are not the same but that MA deliberately draws quite a bit from RP.

Mid-Atlantic Accent would not exist were it not for Received Pronouncation.

From Wiki:

"The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent,[1][2][3] is an accent of English, fashionably used by the early 20th-century American upper class and entertainment industry, which blended together features regarded as the most prestigious from both American and British English (specifically Received Pronunciation). It is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".[4] 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,[5] but its overall use sharply declined following the Second World War.[6] A similar accent that resulted from different historical processes, Canadian dainty, was also known in Canada in the same era.[7] More recently, the term "mid-Atlantic accent" can also refer to any accent with a perceived mixture of both American and British characteristics.[8][9][10]"

MA takes bits of RP and as with many other things makes up something "American". However point made repeatedly in this thread remains largely same. Idea is to remove a person's natural way of speaking and replace it with something taught.

In film versions of Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" Count Aristid Karpathy (played by wonderful Esme Percy in 1938 film), makes an astute observation about Eliza Doolittle and her recently learned RP..

Count Karpathy earns his living by his ability to recognize the origin of high society people from their way of speaking. He claims Miss Doolittle is a "fraud" because she speaks English so perfectly. No Englishwoman (or man for that matter) according to the Count speaks their language that way unless they are taught.

Again this is essence of MA, RP and rest. To stamp, scrub, wipe out any traces of someone's background via their speech. What is substituted instead is a highly stylized (and some may say affected) manner of speaking that is difficult to pin point if at all someone's background.

It is the associations with wealth and status that have attached themselves to RP, MA and rest that cause persons to make assumptions about background of those speaking. Pygmalion was largely about this, take someone from the gutter and pass them off as a lady or gentleman maybe even royalty.

For anyone who believes non of this matters today, bollocks.

When American advertisers and others have need for upscale sounding (among other qualities) voices, it is to RP trained British actors they often look.

Jack Davenport is among a good number of British actors who are in demand and do well from voice work.

Example:

This article, probably written by a DLer , gives great advice on the pronunciation of vase.

Philip Boscoe had the Mid Atlantic accent.

Didn't most of the old time MGM stars speak this way? Norma Shearer, Crawford, even Garland had an affected speaking voice. Gene Tierney, Bacall, Hepburn of course. Walter Pidgeon, Fredric March, Myrna Loy. It seems they all spoke like this. Perhaps I don't understand what it is. But it is a made up accent meant to sound vaguely British, no? As one would learn in finishing school. Theatre or MGM style.

You can hear it in Robert Montgomery and even in his daughter Samantha at times!

Even Bette Davis, when her voice was still young and fluid spoke this way. It's a lovely sound when not laid on too thick. Davis sounds so arresting in Dark Victory. Crawford and Shearer rather overdid it.

I find my accent moves towards RP if I'm spending a few months in a non English speaking Country, otherwise I would starve. My normal British accent is Northern and my speech pattern is very fast.

r119- Katherine Hepburn and Lauren Becall too.

Susan Sullivan had it too

Pronouncing NEW as rhyming with View and Cue, instead of Noo is part of the Mid-Atlantic accent.

I miss the days when all the newscasters were trained in it.

R21 Gloria Upson was so white, she thought mayonnaise was a spice.

The view rhyming thing tends to be saved for [bold] 'knew' [/bold] rather than [bold] 'new' [/bold] in most English speaking countries.

R119, the Mid-Atlantic accent was a hybrid accent that took elements of RP and Eastern Seaboard English to form a "neutral" accent, midway between the US and the British Isles. It was adopted by US prep schools and theater actors to showcase class and refinement. Radio announcers and later, talking picture actors, adopted the Mid-Atlantic accent as it sounded distinguished and was easily understood.

In 1930s films you had a mixed bag-- Mid-Atlantic accents were fine for sophisticated comedies and stagey dramas, but were not suited for westerns, gangster pictures, and stories about the plight of the Dust Bowl farmers. By the 1940s, Mid-Atlantic accents came to be regarded as affected and pretentious, and the General American middle class accent became the dominant neutral accent in all media.

[quote]Pronouncing NEW as rhyming with View and Cue, instead of Noo is part of the Mid-Atlantic accent.

One of my favorite unintentionally camp lines from "A Letter To Three Wives" is Ann Sothern to Kirk Douglas: "Your new blue suit" as your KNUEW BLUEW SUETT.

There was a practical reason the accent was used by actors early on: Hearing what they were saying. This accent (so I am told) has a tendency to make it to the back of the house intact, and sound recording systems -way into the 1950’s- picked it up more clearly also.

I'm afraid, dear OP, that it is inimitable unless you are to the manner born.

No, that's exactly what confuses people, R130. What Buckley mumbled, drawled and posed at was not what I consider a mid Atlantic accent. That lockjaw sound is something totally different. It's grossly affected and not at all pleasing to the ear. Hard to understand actually. Extremely local.

The M-Atlantic was quite the opposite. Designed to be pleasurable and proper sounding but coming out of real people's mouths. Trained and refined. Actors, performers and immigrants. It was a learned and skilled way of speaking.

Not some local yokels like William F Buckley, Jackie Bouvine or Upson Downs.

Tim Gunn has at least some of the sound of it. Sometimes it was referred to as Long-Island Lockjaw. Jim Backus, but even more so, Natalie Shafer (Mr and Mrs Howell from Gilligan's Isle) used it for comic effect.

Buckley and Jackie most certainly were *taught* their way of speaking, in Buckley's case at St. John's Beaumont School in England and the Millbrook School in New York; in Jackie's, at the Chapin School. That's aside from any private tutors, who would have done the same. Whatever you may think of them aesthetically, R131, there was nothing of the "local yokel" in their pronunciations, which were absolutely "trained and refined," and were fully within the gradation of what's called "Mid-Atlantic." Buckley's mumbling is just a pose of upper-class insouciance. His tv fights with Gore Vidal are often held up as showcases of this type of speech; cf. the Wikipedia article on the Mid-Atlantic accent: "Wealthy or highly educated Americans known for being lifelong speakers of the Mid-Atlantic accent include William F. Buckley Jr., Gore Vidal ...."

Not sure what you mean by "Upson Downs," but if you mean Gloria Upson, yes, Joanna Barnes is playing her accent as a parody of the way girls at boarding schools and other expensive, prestigious schools were trained to talk—expunging any local or even distinctly "American" pronunciation in favor of something halfway to Received English.

Tim Gunn is from the Maryland suburbs of DC. The old guard from that area, and even Baltimore, sound the closest to a classic mid Atlantic accent. If you’re a little farther north, there’s the Philly twang and a little further south, a southern twang.

Watch old versions of Tell the Truth and What's My Line. Mid-Atlantic accent aplenty.

Upson Downs was name Mr. and Mrs. Claude Upson gave to their home. Their camp in Adirondacks was called "Upson Pines".

Yes, WASPS are strange people... Lots of booze on offer though, so that's something anyway....

[bold] The One Where Eldergays Pretend That It Is Still 1935.

I talk with a Mid-Atlantic accent.

Edward Herrmann and Kelly Bishop have a Mid-Atlantic Accent

[quote] I talk with a Mid-Atlantic accent.

Me too!

I shan't tell my aunt about the ants nor the debutantes. Shall I?

Patricia Highsmith spoke with a mid-Atlantic accent.

Repeat after me:

“Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put on earth to rise above.”

You’ll have it in no time.

R143 I had totally forgotten where I had heard that, but I told a friend that when I was trying to talk him out of cheating on his girlfriend. Not with me, but some UGLY fat chick.

Step one: Build a time machine....

Go to Philly, Baltimore, Delaware and South Jersey. And take notes.