Bonus Episode: Rise and Fall of the Classic Movie Accent

Hi, welcome to this bonus episode of the History of English Podcast.

For those of you listening in real time, you'll know that the release schedule for the podcast has been a bit slower over the past few episodes, and I anticipate that that will continue for a while longer, partly because we've reached a point in the overall story of English where there's a lot to talk about, and I'm still researching and organizing the upcoming episodes.

As we reached the late 1580s, we're entering into one of the great periods of English literature, and some would even argue it's the greatest period.

Of course, this is the period when William Shakespeare arrived on the scene, as well as other important playwrights like Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson.

It was also a period when English poetry reached new heights, with the works of Edmund Spencer, and of course the sonnets of Shakespeare and other poets.

Meanwhile, scholars were still writing about the nature of English.

The increasing supply of books and other texts reveal greater details about the evolution of English, and the first English dictionary was soon to be produced.

So there's a lot on our plates, and that means there's a lot more on my plate as well as I try to organize the narrative around these developments.

Since it may take a little bit more time for me to produce these upcoming episodes, I thought it would be a good idea to fill in the longer gaps with a bonus episode.

As I note at the beginning of each regular episode, I do have a Patreon for the podcast, and I usually produce a bonus episode there in between each regular episode.

Those episodes touch on many different aspects of the history of English.

I've looked at many different ways in which new words are formed and common areas of linguistic confusion over the centuries and the interaction of language and culture.

And that means I often explore recent developments in the language, like the history of spelling bees, and how acronyms became so common in English, and how jazz and blues shaped our vocabulary.

In fact, I have a lot of episodes that explore the interaction of language and music, like misunderstood music lyrics, words that were coined in songs, and how the songs of the Beatles reflect their unique Liverpool accent.

So I decided to pull one of those bonus episodes out of the archives and blow the dust off of it and put it in the regular feed.

And since we're going to be delving into the Elizabethan theater in upcoming episodes, I thought it might be good to pull an episode having to do with drama.

A few months back, I looked at the funny accent that actors and actresses used in old movies.

You've probably noticed it before and wondered why they spoke that way.

Well, there's a story behind it, and it has to do with the development of American English in the 1800s and early 1900s.

So I hope you enjoy this bonus episode, which explores the history behind the so-called mid-Atlantic or transatlantic accent.

And if you would like more episodes like that, be sure to check out my Patreon at patreon.com slash historyofenglish.

A $5 monthly contribution provides full access to all of the content, including the History of the Alphabet series and the Beowulf audiobook.

And you can cancel your support at any time.

So with that, here's the bonus episode.

Welcome to this bonus patron episode of the History of English podcast.

This is bonus episode 77.

Rise and Fall of the Classic Movie Accent.

This time, we're going to look at how people spoke in those classic movies from the first decades of filmmaking.

You've probably seen some of those movies and wondered what was going on with those accents.

Well, there's a story behind those accents, and there's also a reason why they mostly disappeared after the 1950s.

So this time, we'll look at the rise and fall of the classic movie accent.

And let's begin by listening to a clip from a movie, a very old movie.

This is a short clip from the the original talkie version of Little Women, which was released in 1933.

You're going to hear a brief conversation between the four sisters, Joe, Amy, Meg, and Beth.

I want you to listen to the dialogue and focus on the accents.

And I should mention here that the movie is set in Massachusetts shortly after the American Civil War, and all four actresses that you're going to hear are American.

You're old enough now to leave off boyish tricks and behave better, Josephine.

Now you're so tall and turn up your hair, you must remember you're almost a young lady.

No, I'm not.

And if turning on my hair makes me so, I'll wear it down until I'm 100.

Joe.

As for you, Amy, your absurd words are as bad as Joe's slang.

Your airs are funny now, but you'll grow into an affected little goose unless you take care.

Well, but if Joe's a tomboy and Amy's a goose,

what am I, please?

You're a dear and nothing else.

We're three ungrateful wretches who don't deserve you.

Oh, wait until I become a famous author and make my fortune.

Then we'll all ride in fine carriages dressed like Flo King, snubbing Amy's friends and telling on Marge to go to the Dickens.

Again, that's a movie that was set in Massachusetts about four young women from Massachusetts, portrayed by four actresses who were all American.

By the way, Joe was played by Catherine Hepburn in one of her earliest film roles.

Hepburn was from Connecticut.

Amy was played by Joan Bennett, who was from the New York, New Jersey area.

Beth was played by Jean Parker, who was born in Montana and raised in California.

And Meg was played by Frances D, who was born in California and raised in Chicago.

So why did these American actresses, portraying these American characters in a movie set in America, all speak with what sounded like British accents?

Well, they weren't really British accents, but they were supposed to sound a little bit like British accents, because that's the way actors and actresses were trained to speak in the first few decades of talking movies.

To a certain extent, that accent was artificial or made up, but it was rooted in a certain upper-class American accent that had been around for at least a century.

The accent was used in movies because it tended to blend certain features of standard American English and standard southern British English, also known as received pronunciation.

It was encouraged because it was thought to be a non-regional, nondescript accent.

Since it seemed to be located somewhere between Britain and America, it became known as the Mid-Atlantic accent, or the transatlantic accent.

and it completely dominated motion pictures and radio from the 1930s through the 1950s.

And elements of it continued on beyond that.

So, what's the story behind this accent?

How did it start?

Where did it come from?

Why did it become so popular?

And why did it mostly disappear by the 1960s?

Well, I'm going to try to answer those questions in this episode.

And the story of this particular accent is really rooted in the deeper history of American English itself.

So, let me begin by making a few broad and sweeping statements about about the development of American English up to the 20th century.

The story of American English really begins in the 1600s, when the first waves of immigrants brought the English language to North America.

From the early 1600s through the mid-1700s, most of that migration came from England itself.

But as we know, England had many different dialects.

Now there were some regional migration patterns which contributed to some regional differences in North America.

For example, a lot of the early migration to the Virginia colony came from the west country of England, and a lot of the early migration to the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts came from the eastern and southeastern parts of England.

Again, that contributed to some regional differences in North American speech, but by most accounts, those regional differences were very small at first.

For the most part, all of those various English accents blended together in the New World.

Many local dialect features from England were lost as people mixed and mingled in the New World, and what resulted was a somewhat generic and uniform English accent.

Now these conclusions are based on the surviving accounts of people who traveled from England to the North American colonies in the 1600s and 1700s.

Their surviving letters and accounts indicate that people in the colonies mostly spoke the same form of English, no matter where the visitors went.

The letter writers actually tended to praise the speech of the colonists because the early American dialect didn't have many of the regional dialect features that were so stigmatized in Britain.

But by the late 1700s and early 1800s, the situation had started to change.

Those minor regional differences grew more and more distinct over time, aided by the isolation of the New World.

Also, there was increasing migration from other parts of the British Isles and Europe, like the Scots-Irish migrations into the Appalachian region, which contributed to a more distinct regional accent there.

So American English became less and less uniform over time.

Differences not only emerged between regions, they also emerged between classes.

In many places, the speech of the upper classes either retained or acquired features that were associated with British English.

The children of the upper classes were more likely to have formal educations, educations, and those educations often featured elocution lessons designed to teach them how to speak properly.

And again, many of those proper features were based on aspects of proper speech that were also taught in England.

One of the features that distinguished upper-class speech from lower-class speech was roticity.

That is to say, whether or not the R sound was pronounced after a vowel.

Rhotic accents pronounce the R, while non-rhotic accents don't.

So rhotic accents say car,

birth, and burn,

whereas non-rhotic accents say ka, birth, and burn.

Today, that difference is one of the major distinctions between standard American English and the standard English of Southern Britain, again known as received pronunciation.

But initially, in the 1600s and 1700s, that regional divide didn't exist, or at least it wasn't as distinct as it is today.

There was a mixture of rhotic and non-rhotic dialects on both sides of the Atlantic.

But by the time of the American Revolution in the late 1700s, the modern divide had started to emerge.

Most accents in England were becoming non-rhotic, while most accents in the U.S.

were becoming rhotic.

There was still some variation, though.

In the U.S., one place where the non-rhotic accent held on was among upper-class speakers.

It may have been partially a holdover from earlier periods of American English, but it was also reinforced by the fact that it was a dominant feature of British English, which many people consider to be a more proper form of English even after the Revolution.

Elocution classes in both England and upper-class schools in the U.S.

taught the non-rhotic accent.

That was considered to be the proper way to speak in those communities.

But many common people people in the U.S.

pronounced their Rs, so a class divide emerged in the 1800s.

By the time we get to the mid-1800s, we can actually find audio evidence to prove that these general class differences existed.

Now we don't really have surviving audio until the late 1800s and early 1900s, but some of that audio captures the speech of people who were older at the time.

They were people who were born in the mid-1800s, or even earlier.

So, presuming that their accents didn't change very much over the course of their lives, those audio recordings give us an idea of how people spoke in the mid-1800s.

For example, we can hear some of these class distinctions when we listen to early recordings of two American presidents.

William McKinley was born in Ohio in 1843, and he served as president at the very end of the 1800s.

William Howard Taft was also born in Ohio, about 14 years after McKinley.

He served as president from 1909 to 1913.

So both men were born in Ohio around the same time, and both grew up in Ohio.

So we would expect their accents to be very similar.

But they weren't.

They were quite different.

McKinley was raised in an upper-class household, and his accent contains many of the features associated with those upper-class accents.

Meanwhile, Taft was raised in a more working-class family, and his accent reflects that background.

Now let me play a clip from each of those presidents so you can hear the difference.

Now again, these are some of the earliest audio recordings we have, so the quality is not the best in the world.

Let's begin with an excerpt from a speech given by William McKinley.

Now having an upper class background, you'll notice his accent is non-rhotic in places, so he drops the R sound after a vowel.

In other places, he pronounces an R sound, but it's a tapped or trilled R, not the kind of R sound that we find in modern American English.

Again, this reflects that upper-class manner of speech that was common at the time.

Then I'm going to immediately follow that clip with a clip from his contemporary, William Howard Taft.

In his case, you're going to notice that the accent is rhotic, so his R's are pronounced, and they're pronounced with a modern pronunciation.

In fact, Taft's overall accent seems very modern compared to McKinley's.

First, William McKinley's upper-class accent.

The figures show that we are furnishing profitable employment to the millions of working men throughout the United States.

Our capacity to produce has developed so enormously, and our products have so multiplied that the problem of more markets requires our urgent and immediate attention.

We must encourage our merchant marines.

We must have more ships.

They must be under the American flag, built, manned, and owned by Americans.

These will not only be profitable in a commercial sense, they will be messengers of peace wherever they go.

Now, here's William Howard Taft.

Who are the people?

They are not alone, the unfortunate and the weak.

They are the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, and the many who are neither.

The wage earner and the capitalist, the farmer and the professional man, the merchant and the manufacturer, the storekeeper and the clerk, the railroad manager and the employee.

They all make up the people, and they all contribute to the running of the government, and they have not any of them given into the hands of anyone the mandate to speak for them as peculiarly the people's representative.

So I hope you could hear the clear contrast between those two presidents, who were born and raised in the same state around the same time, one from an upper-class background and the other from a working-class background.

You may have also noticed how much McKinley's accent, which I played first, resembled that classic movie accent that we listened to earlier.

As we'll see in a moment, there's actually a direct connection between those accents.

Again, much of the difference between those two clips I just played can be attributed to class differences.

Some of those class differences had developed naturally, but they were reinforced and perpetuated by private prep schools for the children of wealthy Americans.

Those schools provided elocution lessons, which taught the students how to pronounce words and also how to speak in certain rhythms and how to emphasize certain words.

American elocution lessons relied heavily on features found in British English, since many American educators considered that form of English to be more proper.

British schools had developed their own elocution programs, which were adapted and modified to fit American schools.

So the style of speech that McKinley used could be heard in upper-class environments throughout North America.

And let me play another clip to further illustrate the point.

This is a clip of Theodore Roosevelt, who was the president between McKinley and Taft in the first decade of the 1900s.

Roosevelt was born and raised in New York, and he also came from a prominent upper-class family.

And in this clip, you'll notice that his accent is closer to McKinley's upper-class accent than Taft's

accent.

In fact, Roosevelt served as McKinley's vice president, and he became president when McKinley was assassinated.

Now, this clip may come as a shock to some of you because we tend to think of Teddy Roosevelt as this rugged macho figure who loved to hunt and was a real man's man.

So, we might expect him to have a deep, natural voice.

But actually, he had a bit of a high-pitched voice, and he spoke with that very notable upper-class accent.

The great fundamental issue now before our people can be stated freely.

It is, are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves?

I believe they are.

My opponents do not.

I believe in the right of the people to rule.

I believe that the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern.

I believe again that the American people are, as a whole, capable of self-control and of learning by their mistakes.

Our opponents pay lip loyalty to this doctrine, but they show their real beliefs by the way in which they champion every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham.

Now, you may have noticed Roosevelt's pronunciation of the verb are as a,

and his pronunciation of the pronoun our as our with a slight trill.

You may also have noticed his general cadence and rhythm.

Again, it was that distinctive upper-class accent, which could be heard in many different parts of the United States at the time.

Now, some people who have listened to these old clips have made the argument that the clips consist of speeches, and as such, politicians like McKinley and Roosevelt may have been affecting or putting on the accent, because that's how they would have been trained to speak in public before large groups of people.

In that case, the accents we hear in these surviving clips were performative, and might not reflect the way those persons actually spoke in private.

And while all of that could certainly be true, it further reinforces the idea that there was a certain way that public speakers were expected to address an audience, especially if they had been trained in elocution and public speaking.

Think about the distinctive speaking style that many preachers use when they address their congregations.

It's a specific style that's used far and wide, and again, there's a performative aspect to it.

The point is that people sometimes use a certain accent or a certain way of speaking when addressing certain audiences.

And that takes us to the realm of motion pictures.

As you probably know, the motion picture industry in the United States began before recorded audio was readily available, so the early motion pictures were silent movies.

But in 1927, a movie called The Jazz Singer was released, and for the first time, moviegoers could hear the actors speak.

That movie was therefore considered to be the first talkie, a common term for the movies where the actors actually spoke, as opposed to having their dialogue printed on the screen.

But that created a challenge for many of those silent movie actors and actresses.

I mean, how were they supposed to speak?

Were they supposed to use their own natural voice and accent, or were they supposed to speak in a specific theatrical style?

Well, very early on, most movie producers wanted their actors and actresses to speak with a non-regional accent.

Since the movies would be distributed throughout the country, they didn't want the accents to indicate any particular location.

And this is where those upper-class elocution classes met the motion motion picture industry.

Performers were encouraged to take elocution lessons to remove or lessen any regional accent that they may have had.

So those actors and actresses ended up learning the same basic way of speaking that was being taught in those private prep schools.

Some performers acquired the accent very easily, while others struggled with it.

According to some film historians, that was a major reason behind the downfall of one of the most famous actresses of the silent movie era.

Her name was Clara Bow.

She was from New York and she spoke with a slight Brooklyn accent.

Supposedly, she never really mastered the cultivated accent that was encouraged at the time.

So when she transitioned from silent movies to talkies, she spoke with a slight Brooklyn accent, or with a blend of the two accents.

Supposedly, some audiences, and probably more likely likely some producers, didn't like her voice.

And the criticism and stress ultimately led her to retire from acting at a very early age.

In reality, Clara Bow had a variety of personal problems that also contributed to the rapid decline of her career, but her story was a cautionary tale for other actors and actresses who wanted to survive in the era of sound.

The performers who thrived in the new era were those who mastered the cultivated accent required by producers and directors.

And remember that Hollywood used the studio system back then, where performers basically worked for specific studios rather than being free agents like today.

So the studios had a lot more control over the performers back then.

As the performers tried to master the new accent that was being encouraged by the studios, They had the help of an Australian linguist named William Tilly.

Now Tilly is an important figure in this story.

He taught English and phonetics at Columbia University in New York, and he developed a thorough set of rules to define what he considered to be the best and most preferred pronunciations of American English.

He adopted many of the elocution rules that had been taught in American prep schools.

And he lived at a time when America was experiencing a lot of immigration from all parts of Europe and from many other parts of the world as well.

The United States was also starting to emerge as a world power after World War I,

and he envisioned a type of American speech that would become the accepted standard around the world, and he therefore labeled his form of pronunciation World English.

It contained many features associated with standard British English, and therefore it also shared features found in English accents in other parts of the English Commonwealth.

Tilley, therefore, thought his so-called world English was the perfect form of English, not just for Americans, but for all English speakers.

The sense that there was this correct or proper form of English that all English speakers could use happened to coincide with the advent of sound in motion pictures.

And most movie producers thought that it should be used as the standard accent used by actors and actresses in the rapidly growing film industry.

The film industry attracted actors from around the world, and the films would soon reach a global audience as well.

So it made sense that all the performers would be expected to use this form of English that seemed to have an international flair about it.

Now I should emphasize that Tilly's World English was not standard American English.

In fact, they were quite different.

World English was non-rhotic, whereas standard American English was rhotic.

World English also required the pronunciation of the T in the middle of a word as an actual T sound, like in Britain, as opposed to a D sound, like in America.

So instead of American bottle, you get bottle, and instead of American water, you get water, or more specifically, water.

World English also required a slight h sound before the w in words that began with a wh.

So you get what instead of what, and whoch instead of which.

Now, Tilly's World English was quickly adopted by Hollywood, and in fact, one of Tilly's students named Edith Skinner became a leading accent advisor in Hollywood.

She taught at Juilliard and initially worked with stage actors on Broadway before moving to California to work with actors in Hollywood.

She instructed many performers on how to master this particular accent.

And of course, that accent is the accent that became known as the Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic accent.

Actresses like Catherine Hepburn perfected the accent.

Supposedly, she was fired from her first talking production because she blurted out her lines.

A lot of performers struggled to adjust to the new way of acting.

After that first film, Hepburn studied with a coach named Frances Robinson Duff, and she soon acquired the accent that she became famous for.

It's considered by many people to be a model of what became known as the Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic accent.

She used the accent all the time, like in this clip from the 1935 film Break of Hearts, where she plays a character from the upper Midwest.

Isn't it funny?

Thinking back of all the people you've known.

Well, I don't know.

You see, I haven't known very many.

No?

Not even in that place you came from?

What did you say the name was?

North Calvert, Wisconsin.

Oh, North Calvert, Wisconsin.

Didn't you know any boys there?

Oh, of course.

I knew them all.

Anyone special?

Yes, there was Homer Davenport.

His father owned the hardware store.

Are you?

And what happened?

Nothing, really.

No, why not?

Well, because of my music.

His family said that if we were married, I'd have to give it up.

Did they?

Yes, you see, his mother thought that I played nicely enough already.

Imagine playing nicely.

Now, this performing accent became so standard within Hollywood that even non-American actors and actresses were expected to use it.

That included English performers like Vivian Lee, who's probably most famous for her role as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

Well, I have a couple of interesting clips to show how she also affected the accent.

During her heyday in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s, she regularly used the accent, even when off stage.

But a couple of decades later, after she had returned to England, she reverted back to her natural accent.

I'm going to play two clips of Vivian Lee back to back to illustrate those changes.

The first is her acceptance speech when she won the Academy Award for her role as Scarlett O'Hara in 1940.

You'll notice that even though she isn't acting in this clip, she still uses the mid-Atlantic accent.

Then, following that clip, we'll hear her again 20 years later when she presented at the Tony Awards in in 1960.

By that point, the mid-Atlantic accent was on its way out, and you'll hear her speak with her more natural and more clearly British accent in the second clip.

So here's the clip of her accepting her Oscar in 1940.

Ladies and gentlemen, please forgive me if my words are inadequate in thanking you for your very great kindness.

If I were to mention all those who've shown me such wonderful generosity through Gone with the Wind, I should have to entertain you with an oration as long as Gone with the Wind itself.

So, if I may, I should like to devote my thanks on this occasion to that composite figure of energy, courage, and very great kindness, in whom all points of Gone with the Wind meet, Mr.

David Selznick.

Now, here's the clip of Vivian Lee in 1960 at the Tony Awards.

I am absolutely, positively, no good at making speeches, and so I don't intend to make one, but I do very much want to say that I shall never in all my life forget the welcome back that I've been given on this occasion.

I shall remember it always with the profoundest, deepest gratitude.

Now, Gone with the Wind was released in 1939, at a time when color was being introduced to movies, and at a time when the mid-Atlantic accent was still in general use.

And it was around that time that Edith Skinner composed what is considered to be the definitive guide to the accent.

I mentioned Skinner a few moments ago.

She was the student of William Tilley, who served as an accent advisor in Hollywood.

Her book was called Good Speech, and it was published in 1942.

It was partly a guide to English phonetics, but rather than simply describing the way words are pronounced, Skinner provided a specific set of guidelines to what she considered to be proper pronunciation.

In addition to the features I've already discussed, she asserted that vowel sounds should be pronounced as pure vowels, not as diphthongs.

So instead of so,

she would have said that it should be so,

and instead of wait,

she would have said that it should be wait.

In the case of words like bath and chance, which British received pronunciation would pronounce as bath or chance,

Skinner recommended the use of a vowel that was somewhere in between.

Glottal stops were also expressly forbidden, so one should say mountain by pronouncing the T sound in the middle, not mountain with that little stop in the middle.

And the same thing goes for cotton, which should be pronounced with the T sound, not cotton with the T left out.

Skinner also targeted vowel mergers that were common in American English.

Those were situations where certain accents pronounced two slightly different vowel sounds the same way.

For example, in much of the American South, the vowel sounds in pen and pin had merged, so that they were both pronounced as pin.

Skinner emphasized that the vowels should be clearly distinguished.

The same thing applied to the merger of the ah and aw sounds in parts of the northern and western U.S., so that the words cot and cot were both pronounced as cot.

Again, Skinner criticized this merger and said that the vowels should be distinguished.

Skinner's book is often cited as a major factor in the rise of the mid-Atlantic accent, but in reality, the book was published at a time when the accent was starting its slow and steady decline in motion pictures.

The Mid-Atlantic accent had the advantage of being non-regional, but it was also unnatural.

To many, it seemed very affected or artificial, which it was to a large extent.

It also had an association with that upper-class form of speech, so most average audiences had a problem relating to it.

Then, in the 1940s, actors like Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart became became huge movie stars without using the accent.

Moviegoers seemed to relate to them in part because they used their natural voices and their normal accents.

After World War II, more and more performers started to use their natural accents, or at least spoke in a more standard American accent.

Interestingly, the Mid-Atlantic accent continued to be used by performers who were portraying upper-class characters, which only served to further associate the accent with the upper class.

Increasingly, the use of a standard American accent implied that the character was a regular working-class person, but the use of a mid-Atlantic accent implied that the character came from a wealthy or highly educated background.

So it tended to reinforce the class division in the use of the accent.

Then, from the late 1950s, Hollywood began producing gritty films about everyday life, featuring everyday characters who spoke with normal accents.

That included Westerns and war movies and films about gangsters.

The old mid-Atlantic accent didn't really seem to fit those movies, and audiences loved the realism that was being portrayed on film.

Some scholars have taken a broader perspective, and they have suggested that the loss of the mid-Atlantic accent reflected America's emergence as a global superpower.

Americans no longer saw themselves as the colonial offshoot of the British Empire, with British English as the mother tongue.

They now saw America as a world power in its own right, with its own way of speaking, and they wanted to hear regular American accents in their movies, and on television, and radio and other mass media.

At any rate, the accent largely fell out of use in movies and television during the 1960s and 70s.

But it didn't completely disappear.

You can still hear remnants of it today when actors or actresses want to portray someone from the upper class, or someone in a position of high authority, or someone who's a bit sinister.

You could hear Jim Bacchus and Natalie Schaefer use the accent when they played Thurston and Lovey Howell on Gilligan's Island.

My dear, look at those classic features, that bone structure.

There's no doubt about it.

He must come from a fine family.

And even when he grunts, detect just a trace of harbor.

Reading will tell.

You know, dear, even if you'd been born an ape, you'd still be a howl.

A bit hairy, but a howl.

John Houseman used the accent in roles like Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase.

Mr.

Hart,

will you recite the facts of Hawkins versus McGee?

I do have your name right.

You are Mr.

Hart.

Yes, my name is Hart.

You're not speaking loud enough, Mr.

Hart.

Will you speak up?

Yes, my name is Hart.

Mr.

Hart, you're still not speaking loud enough.

Will you stand?

Now that you're on your feet, Mr.

Hart, maybe the class will be able to understand you.

You can hear elements of the Mid-Atlantic accent in Kelsey Grammar's portrayal of Fraser Crane in Cheers and Frasier.

All right, Professor, you know, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I'm afraid you've lost your touch.

Where's your DSM?

Emotionally stunted eight-year-old Mike I.

Ah, here's what I'm going through:

phase of life issue.

A problem associated with a particular developmental phase or other life circumstance.

You can also hear Kelsey Grammar use the same basic accent in his portrayal of Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons.

But any last requests?

Well,

I was wondering if you could sing the entire score of the HMS Pinafore.

Very well, Bart.

I shall send you to heaven before I send you to hell.

You can even hear elements of the Mid-Atlantic accent in the voice James Earl Jones gave to Darth Vader in the Star Wars films.

Don't act so surprised, Your Highness.

You weren't on any mercy mission this time.

Several transmissions were beamed to the ship by rebel spies.

I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.

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

I'm a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan.

You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor.

Take her away.

I have traced the Rebel spies to her.

Now she is my only link to finding their secret base.

She'll die before she'll tell you anything.

Leave that to me.

And in the Star Wars prequels, Natalie Portman played Queen Amadala.

She generally used her normal accent in the film, but for some reason, she shifted into a a mid-Atlantic accent when her character made a speech before a gathered assembly.

I will not defer.

I've come before you to resolve this attack on our sovereignty now.

I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die while you discuss this invasion in a committee.

Again, the mid-Atlantic accent is still a go-to accent for characters that are part of the upper class.

or characters that are pompous or sinister.

The use of that accent has become restricted over time, but when you hear it, you're actually hearing remnants of speech patterns that were once much more common in American English.

The accent itself may have been artificial, but many of its features can be traced back to the speech of upper-class Americans in the 1800s.

And in that regard, the accent serves as a link to the distant past, to a time before microphones, like the one I'm using right now, captured people's voices and transported them around around the world.

I'm going to wrap up this episode on that note.

I hope you've enjoyed this look at Old Movie Accents.

As always, thanks for listening, and thanks for supporting the podcast.