English Conversation American Accent

[Francisco Raya]

Listening to old recordings, there is a distinct accent that radio and television announcers used that is different from a modern-day "Standard American" or neutral accent. It seems that over the course of fifty years pronunciation has shifted. Is this a documented phenomenon? Or is it more a function of broadcast media being less focused on proper enunciation and diction?

I'd guess that the "50's accent" you hear had much to do with the technology of AM and shortwave radio. Precise diction and a somewhat clipped style for words and phrases helped to overcome the crackle and hiss of static in radio reception.

As microphone and broadcast technology improved, it became less crucial to speak distinctly. If you spoke like a 40s or 50s newscaster in ordinary conversation today, people would think you were being overly formal or precise.

This is similar to a question that I asked my father 15 years ago. (I was born in the early '50s, he in the mid '20s.) "The speech of Lowell Thomas on recordings sounds very different from our present day speech. Have things changed that much, and did people really speak as he did?"

My father's answer was that indeed people did speak (or try to speak) in the same way as Lowell Thomas did at important times, and that Mr. Thomas's speaking was never made fun of because it was so "normative".

Indeed, the "mid-Atlantic" accent was encouraged in all mass media in the U.S., because it was a true compromise of U.S. accents: the New Englander found it just as understandable and believable (and attainable) as the Californian or Okie (listen to Will Rogers).

From the time of the invention of the phonograph through the time that the children of television had grown up, there had been a movement in the United States for increasing the education (and common sense) of the people.

By about 1970, most people from all regions of the U.S. had been influenced (often subliminally) to modify their speech toward a "norm". Educators from all levels of society had pushed the norm with zeal. Booker T. Washington, Norman Thomas, Thomas Dewey, Walter Cronkite and Richard Nixon all spoke in public with a similar accent in spite of their very different upbringing and position.

As the broadcast media gained more and more penetration into the daily hearing of people, so did the art of rhetoric and formal oratory decay... if a pretty or handsome face brought more advertising dollars than a clarion voice, the choice was clear.

Concurrently, there were vast upheavals going on socially. The mid-Atlantic accent was often viewed as the voice of the rich and the white. (After all, who had the power in the country?) There was a strong movement, starting in the late '60s, to "democratize" many things, including speech.

It is no coincidence that the man of the 70s considered Richard Nixon's "expletive deleted"s to be important to be printed in their full glory, when 30 years earlier the same words of Gen. McAuliffe were edited by every American newspaper to read "Nuts!"

So yes, speech has changed. Especially public speech... which always influences the speech of the man on the street. And yes, the speech of the '50s, at all of its levels (colloquial, informal, and formal) was different from that of our day.

Need an example from history? Just look at the Great Vowel Shift in English, where a massive change in pronunciation (vowel lengthening and diphthongization) took place for about 100 years before 1450, followed for the next 250 or so years with more changes.

Pronunciation in America certainly has changed a lot since the 1950s, but to identify exactly what has changed depends on where you are (see my answer here). It's also probable, but I don't know the solid facts, that standards of "house pronunciation" at broadcasting companies have also changed. What was once considered good pronunciation is no longer, so they have changed with the times.

I have an example not from the broadcast industry. I found an old wire recorder that had a wire of recordings loaded on it, which I found contains recordings from the 1950s. The first recording is a telephone conversation, talking about building foundations for a house. I noticed there was a different style of speaking that sounded "of that time period". I'm of course talking about the accent, not the sound quality of the mike (carbon microphone). The style of speaking of the businessman on the other side of the line does posses an accent comparable to what's heard in the movies. The (then) owner of the wire recorder had less of the "old time" accent, but there is still a slight "old time" accent, but not much.

I may post the recordings on YouTube at some time, the wire runs for almost an hour, containing the telephone conversation, a child saying some different words (for school I take it), some dictated letters, and a recording (from the radio I believe) about salesmen and prayer.

Regardless of the degree to which these older rural dialects are extinct now, the fact is not so much that the British stopped talking like Americans, so much as urban British dialects became the type of English spoken by a majority of the English populace. Particularly London.

In my opinion, these two countries went in very different linguistic directions because their populations went in different directions (both literally and figuratively). England saw rapid industrialization in the 19th-Century, and with it a change in demographics from rural to urban. The American people, despite great hubs of industrialization like New York and Chicago, remained a mostly rural population for a very long time. The two types of English reflects their history.

As for unrounded LOT, I think that this is an innovation, albeit one probably repeated several times: in rural southern England, the US, the Carribbean, etc.. The sources I have seen give a rounded /ɔ/ for late Middle English LOT: further evidence is that the NORTH set, which is historically identical to the LOT set with following /r/, is widely rounded even where LOT is unrounded. (Of course, the more rounded and close RP LOT vowel is an innovation in the opposite direction).

I find it strange how Australian English, despite being on the other side of the world, can sound very similar to south-eastern varieties and I (British) have even mistaken one for the other on occasions. No one would ever be in any doubt whether a speaker were British or [North] American.

Of course the English dialects had a much longer period to allow for diversification and dialectal splits. Also English was probably dialectally split since the times of first settlement in the 4th and 5th centuries as settlers from the continent established three geographically separate colonies and they may have come from different areas, too.

Has anyone got a rough reconstruction of the phonology of South-Eastern English English around 1625? This would probably be the base dialect for the first generation of settlers in North America, I would suspect.

Having been to both sides of the atlantic. To me there is a lot of similarity between American English, its spelling and its emphasised Rs to Elizabethan English. Americans also use the correct Anglo-Saxon word for Autumn which is Fall whereas the English have taken on the French word. English has moved on especially in the 1930s where sounds were softened and we were taught to speak with our mouths closed so that the words were sweet and that pronunciation although has died out has remnants in the English spoken to date. Not to mention the Irish and Scottish influence in the Americas as well as the other migrants. For example when I went to see some American speakers who were of Anglo-Saxon descent, I was shocked with the amount of gestures and body movement that the English and north-west Europeans avoid. There are some dialectal English sounds in the Americas though whether that is from migration is another question. Anyway that my 2 cent piece ?

Also the midwest had huge influence from Scandinavia. I can hear the tones and musical shapes (I am professional musician) When I went to Sweden the students who knew English (most of them) spoke with an almost perfect Illinois/Indiana accent!

british english has evolved faster than american english. other than the more affluent elites still remain in britain, could such difference also have anything to do the population density? just like urban accent is expected to evolve faster than rural accent becoz of the increased social interaction, which is expected to speed up the accent refinement to become aesthetically more pleasant to ears?

Without question British English has changed more over the last two hundred years than American English. Having said that as in America, accents change from region to region, but in Britain they change within 10 to 30 miles, depending on where you live.

However to many people in the northern half of England and all Scotland, apart from a number of social climbers, the Hanoverian influenced accent never really took hold and even today many northern English regard southern English as pompous sounding.

What has not been mentioned enough here is the massive influence Ireland has had on the American accent, particularly southern Irish. Even today the northern states and Canada have a very close relationship to the way the Irish speak, as outside Dublin the Irish accent has not changed anything like as much as English or even Scottish.

First of all, I m not in the linguistic field. The following is only my opinion based on observation and exposure thru schools, media and hearsay. Also my view couldbe much limited by the fact that English is not my native tongue.

being pretentious is driven by the aspiration to be better perceived yet unfortunately lacking enough empathy and right tact to carry out such aspiration appropriately. Many people must have had the experience of trying too hard to impress but ending up not being oneself and poorly perceived. It is probably an inevitable part of the refinement process. The affluent socialites are the ones with more leisure, resources as well as greater inclination for social refinement so their speech/ accent is expected to evolve faster than that of the working class. it is also natural for accent to diffuse from the affluent to the less privileged as man subconsciously would mimic and seek inspiration from the better off to improve oneself.

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