Her voice sounded like money . . .

Chris Bertram asks:

On a friend’s recommendation, I watched the excellent Now, Voyager the other night. A very fine performance from Bette Davis, who makes the transition from dumpy and downtrodden to shining society beauty brilliantly. But enough of the plot spoilers. Especially in the opening scenes, everyone sounds upper-class English. Perhaps not as cut-glass as Brief Encounter , but close. Maybe some of the characters are supposed to be English (Dr Jacquith, played by the English Claude Rains might be), but others, such as the matriarch Mrs Henry Windle Vale (played by the English Gladys Cooper) are definitely supposed to be American (upper-class Bostonian). And Bette Davis herself, is, obviously, an American actor playing an American character (but still sounding English). So, did Bostonian aristocrats in the 1940s actually speak with English accents? Or were the dramatic conventions such that English actors (Rains, Cooper) didn’t have to change their voices?

It's odd that an entire American accent disappeared virtually overnight: the upper class American accent that covered not only the northeastern seaboard, but California as well. Some of my friends parents had it, and a few famous people are still hanging on, like former New Jersey governor Tom Kean. But the accent of the Roosevelts, Julia Child and Katherine Hepburn pretty much up and vanished sometime in the late 1950s.

Why did this happen? Television tends to flatten regional accents, of course, but how come Britain held onto its aristocratic tones, while America's slipped softly and silently away?

Comments

Inbreeding.

Posted by Thurston Howell III | July 17, 2008 11:39 AM

Just speculatin' here, but the fact that the accent was not merely regional but also class-based helped contribute to its demise.

Another possibility is that schools don't teach phonics so much anymore, though I'm inclined to consider this a minor factor if for no other reason than that most of the upper-class-accent speakers probably didn't attend public schools.

Posted by Peter | July 17, 2008 11:43 AM

how come Britain held onto its aristocratic tones, while America's slipped softly and silently away?

Because in Britain, and indeed much of Europe, "coming from money" has long been more respectable than making your own money "in trade." The upper-class accent is a marker of one born to privilege.

Quite the opposite is true here, the land of senators getting into verbal duels about who's outhouse was farther from the electricity-free shed they were born in; to the extent that you were born rich, people look down on you, so why should you advertise it with your speech?

Posted by Rob Lyman | July 17, 2008 11:56 AM

Perhaps because, in Britain, it remained desirable to be aristocratic, whereas in America, aristocracy has a much more negative connotation.

In other words, in Britain, its cool to be aristocratic. Not so much here in America.

Posted by quanticle | July 17, 2008 11:57 AM

Some of that elocution came from the old prep schools. The male "preppy" voice comes largely from speaking with one's teeth closed. Try it, and you too will sound like Greg Marmalard.

Posted by Peter Orvetti | July 17, 2008 11:57 AM

Television tends to flatten regional accents, of course, but how come Britain held onto its aristocratic tones, while America's slipped softly and silently away?

Partially because the Etonian aristocratic accent in Britain is quite similar to the "Received Pronunciation" or "BBC accent" that is taught in school as proper and said on the news. The Boston Brahmin accent slipped away at about the same time as the movie stars were no longer taught to speak it and the national newscasters were taught to speak a General American based not on it, but on a lower Midwestern accent.

Posted by John Thacker | July 17, 2008 11:59 AM

Heck, the accent that used to be prevalent in the DC suburbs is mostly gone. I hardly ever hear anyone say that they're from "WahRshintun" anymore. They're all from "Washinton".

Posted by wiredog | July 17, 2008 12:04 PM

It's alive and well in Bawlmer though.

Posted by Corey | July 17, 2008 12:11 PM

The sociolinguistic literature does not seem to support the idea that television tends to 'broaden' or 'flatten' regional accents; the diverse dialects of Britain, for example, aren't any less different now than they were when television was becoming popular in the middle of the last century. Tiny dialects have been dying out, but this is probably more the result of their speakers moving to other places or SES-brackets rather than the influence of media as such. Larger regional dialects, on the other hand, are just as healthy as ever - outside of the bigger cities in the American South, for instance (which have large contingents of non-dialect speakers who have physically moved from elsewhere), traditional local dialects are not any more like what linguists call General American than they were 50 years ago.

The disappearance of this particular dialect is just a part and parcel of normal language change - all language varieties change all the time, and this is just a striking and recent example of how marked the change can be between generations. This is really about the replacement of one generation of speakers with another, rather than anything to do with television. In fact, there is a major dialectal change underway in the northern part of the United States as we speak, the so-called Northern Cities Shift, which is making dialects in those areas substantially less like General American, despite the fact that it has occurred almost entirely within the period of time covered by mass access to television. Wikipedia has an article on the change here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_cities_shift

Posted by JAR | July 17, 2008 12:16 PM

My wife, who is originally from Sweden, takes lessons to remove her "foreign" accent. She wants very much to fit in. Her tutor teaches her to do all the things I was carefully taught not to do.

Posted by BobW | July 17, 2008 12:17 PM

Those subtle shifts are hard to tease apart, but "desirability" of a given accent or dialect plays a role.

In Germany over the years, some dialects tended to fade while other dialects and their corresponding accents in standard "Hochdeutsch" have flourished. Southern German "Bavarian" dialect and northern German "Plattdütsch" have been relatively resilient, both being associated with regional pride and a certain "horse sense" of idyllic farmers.

Some of the central dialects like Hessian and "Ruhrpott" have been viewed as the vulgar vernacular of dirty proles. The eastern Saxony dialect produces similar ridicule. Many speakers thus make a conscious effort to eliminate traces of regional accent, preferring the neutral standard. (Of course, there is some counter-cultural amelioration that kicks in when speakers of disfavored dialects rebel and let it all hang out.)

In American English, "Southern" has tended to survive as a preferred regional form. Of the AmE varieties, the ones that do not rhoticize r-sounds have been in decline -- the ones saying things like Brits would: "letter" pronounced as "letta" rather than rhoticized "leddr". In fact, like British, these American east coast variants from north to south only had the midwestern rounded r-sound in front of a vowel. So it disappears in "there" as "they-ah" at the end of a phrase to reappear in a phrase combo like "There is", or as they say it, "theh riz".

Bottom line: The benefits of speaking with an upper class accent probably turned into a disadvantage and so people simply stopped doing so in favor of sounding "normal."

The usual caveats apply, I don't have any numbers to back this up, batteries not included, etcetera etcetera.

Posted by MarkG | July 17, 2008 12:18 PM

Because we magically became a classless society one day, you silly goose.

Posted by Freddie | July 17, 2008 12:18 PM

Until recently, Britain had very few channels, with a lot of content broadcast in exactly the accent you mention.

Posted by Njorl | July 17, 2008 12:19 PM

Yes, the D.C. suburbs are a particularly striking case of a dialect change that has come about because of physical movement. Simply put, most of the people who live in the D.C. suburbs at the present time are not actually from D.C., but came from elsewhere. As a result, the dialect that was prevalent in, say, the 1960's is vanishingly rare in the immediate D.C. area. Bawlmer has not had the same massive influx of outsiders, and so its dialect remains largely intact.

This isn't to say that D.C. won't develop its own dialect - research on a similar situation in post-war Britain in the new city of Milton-Keynes suggests that in perhaps twenty years time a new dialect will emerge in the area, as the current generation of children of people who moved to D.C. converges on a common variety. It will be interesting from a linguistic perspective to see what sorts of features this emerging dialect will have.

Posted by JAR | July 17, 2008 12:22 PM

Accents on the Beeb have changed over the last 20 years or so - you now may hear regional accents with some frequency (though if you want to hear lower/working class accents you still need to wait for "man on the street" interviews or 'til the news is over - and then, my local expert assures me, you more often hear what some "over-educated RSC ponce" thinks it should sound like).

Still, while received pronunciation may fade out, they haven't gone the "standardization" route that US broadcasters chose, so variety may hang on over there.

Posted by Kathryn | July 17, 2008 12:24 PM

MarkG hits the nail squarely on the head. So much of sociolinguistic change ends up coming back to what sorts of prestige are associated with particular varieties, and the benefits and disadvantages of maintaining particular cultural identities.

Posted by JAR | July 17, 2008 12:26 PM

a few fashionable theories in the anthro-linguistic field:

1) Webster's dictionary was very influential in championing a distinct (non-British) pronunciation of English

2) that flat /r/ sound became associated with ignorance, mainly as a way to disparage immigrants, most of whom started out in the northeast.

3) the rise of the 'middling' style of speech as a way for television and political personalities to appeal to midwestern, 'core american' values. think george w. and his charismatic drawl. for more see Jane Hill's work.

Posted by mexican american | July 17, 2008 12:34 PM

but how come Britain held onto its aristocratic tones...

To a substantial degree it hasn't, or at least it isn't. "Estuary English" I'm told is increasingly the standard in Britain, and "posh" British English to many Britons sounds dated and pretentious. Listen to the Queens's grandsons -- they don't talk a bit like their grandmother (and even Her Majesty speaks with a different accent then the one she used in the 1950s). Most of the BBC's presenters and correspondents likewise sound pretty unaristocratic to this Yank's ears (although Katty Kay sounds like an empress).

Posted by Jasper | July 17, 2008 12:35 PM

I think the problem with the Webster's Dictionary theory is that that Webster's isn't really an innovator when it comes to language - it's not trying to be. Rather, it attempts to describe the actual state of the language varieties it is concerned with. Noah Webster's original work championed orthographic reform, of course, but orthography and language are only tangentially related. While there is a correlational relationship between changes in language varieties and changes in dictionaries, it is most definitely not a casual one.

Also, I'm a tad confused - what do you mean by 'flat' /r/, mexican american?

Posted by JAR | July 17, 2008 12:43 PM

forgive, i meant the dropped postvocalic /r/, as in 'I pahked my cah.

Posted by mexican american | July 17, 2008 12:51 PM

There's still a class-based distinction in southern accents, at least in my part of the South (Mississippi, Alabama, western Tennessee). Obviously, vocabulary and grammar are different, but it goes beyond that. The upper-class accent is flatter and broader, and closer to the stereotypical old-timey southern accent, but the redneck accent has more twang to it.

There's also a distinct racial difference, even in the same geographic area and socioeconomic stratum.

Posted by Emma B | July 17, 2008 12:55 PM

People are doing it to fit in.

Look at George Walker Andover Yale Harvard Bush. He tries awful hard to sound like a rig-working roughneck from Odessa.

Posted by secret asian man | July 17, 2008 12:57 PM

Bawlmer? it used to be Bawlmor. And didn't WahRshinton have a sort of subscript g after the first n?

As an English child in Massachusetts in the 1940s, I remember clearly the accent of Megan's parents' friends. It never was British. It faded and changed, but more than its ghost was still around in the 1990s. What was more noticeable in the 1990s was that the accents which were never anything to do with "proper Boston" had become less "New England" and less locally differentiated.

The fade out of local accents has been even more marked in Britain during my life. In my parents' time, there were local accents/dialects in Britain that really were hard to understand. Now even the Geordie of Tyneside won't trouble you much. Even in the 1950's there were parts of London where you could tell to within a street or three where a cockney lived just from her or his accent: that is long gone.

The general southern-English upper to upper middle class accent (often taken as "aristocratic tones") has also become much less widely used, and less markedly different from other English accents. Nowadays, it carries much less in the way of prestiege, and only rarely causes resentment. However, the fine touches of difference of accent which enable one pick out some of the sub-sets of the few people who really enjoy (and/or suffer from) upper-upper class status in the British Isles do continue. And I have a feeling that I have noticed something similar in recent decades amongst a few old money New Yorkers. I once heard the basis for a good California old money accent - a lady who had grown up in Hollywood before the movies, and kept her girlhood speech - but it never came to anything. (Alas?)

Posted by Diversity | July 17, 2008 1:05 PM

One of my language teachers in college (in NYC) told us that, back in the '40s when he attended, they offered courses in understanding NYC dialects for out-of-town students.

When my husband visited me in the city for the first time in the mid-'90s, we prowled diners and coffee shops for days before we found him a waiter with the mythical "New York" accent he was so anxious to hear (and even then it may have been northern New Jersey or "Lawn Giland" for all I know). Cabbies cursing in Urdu we found in droves, but cranky native New York waiters, not so much.

Probably priced out of their apartments, one and all, come to think of it.

Posted by Kathryn | July 17, 2008 1:14 PM

Yeah, it did have that g. Sort of. Hard to write (or describe, in print) what that accent sounded like. Sort of softly Southern where the Baltimore accent is a bit 'harder' and Northern. Not as thick as the accent you still hear in local blacks, but similar to it.

Posted by wiredog | July 17, 2008 1:17 PM

I actually know several people who have that accent (my husband has traces of it, to the point where my Brooklyn-Jewish Great Aunt asked him what country he came from originally), including one of my husband's best friends who sounds very much like Charles Emerson Winchester from MASH. He's married to an English woman (interestingly enough, with a fairly low-class accent which she is very self conscious of). One of my favorite stories he tells is of the time he was showing a rental property he owned to a prospective tenant and the prospective tenant asked him if he was from England. His response: "No, my wife's from England. I'm just pretentious."

Posted by Kate | July 17, 2008 1:19 PM

Social aspirations can have a powerful and rapid effect on pronunciation. Most of the Jewish women I've met raised in the Bronx or Manhattan in the 1950s speak with the studied clarity of Bette Davis or Eva Marie-Saint. Including my mom.

I find it pretty hard to believe that these shifts aren't influenced by mass media.

Posted by Matt Steinglass | July 17, 2008 1:21 PM

Take a moment to think about the sound of Hepburn, Roosevelt, Plimpton, and WFB. This is what's commonly known as Mid-Atlantic, and was the preferred mode of pronunciation prior to WWII. At most schools this was how language was taught, and disseminated through media, thus aped by most of the public who wished to assimilate into polite society. It was a curious amalgam of American and English accents on words. After the war, however after many working class men found their way into the ascendant middle class via the GI bill, and spawned the infamous baby boom, the old received dialect of Queens English became stodgy and pretentious, dare we say, "elitist" - and a new Queens County English, if you will, was de rigeur. It is here that we find the shift from William Powell to Humphrey Bogart, from Fred Astaire to Frank Sinatra.

Posted by Peter | July 17, 2008 1:23 PM

And don't let anyone tell you that English accents can't be developed later on in life...take a look at Madonna.

Posted by trey | July 17, 2008 1:30 PM

The first time I heard Kaine I wondered if he was an Aussie or a Kiwi.

Posted by Holdfast | July 17, 2008 1:31 PM

One thing I've always been interested in is racial crossover in vowels. We tend to think of white accents and black accents as completely distinct in whatever location we're in. But it's my impression that the white ethnic Brooklyn pronunciation of "water" ("whoaw-tah") and the black and Hispanic Brooklyn pronunciations of "water" ("whoa-tuh") are very similar, and that both are very different from the white or black pronunciations of "water" in Atlanta or Boston or various other places.

Posted by Matt Steinglass | July 17, 2008 1:32 PM

Accents in metro NY are still very noticeable. When the Long Island Lolita story became made-for-TV, my daughter (raised in the South but went to high school on LI) was scornful--she said the actress was using a Brooklyn accent instead of a Long Island accent. To me they all sounded alike.

Regionalisms are also a fun topic. Can you identify where these sandwiches are from and what the differences are? Sub, wedge, hoagie, po'boy?

Posted by Rex | July 17, 2008 1:37 PM

To address your point, Matt, to a sociolinguist the example of those Jewish women is not at all surprising - women used to be regarded as the chief innovators in dialect change (though there has been increasing recognition for the role of men as well). Specifically, women of a lower middle-class SES, who were traditionally most sensitive to questions of their class status, and so were often very careful to speak in a way that was regarded as 'proper'. Usually this way of speaking 'properly' is not actually isomorphic with any real or existant dialect - these speakers often 'hypercorrect', identifying some stigmatized pattern in their native dialect and going overboard in trying to purge it. It was the awareness that the loss of non-intervocalic /r/ was stigmatized by other speakers that led speakers of some New York varieties to start putting in /r/'s everywhere, even where they were not present historically (e.g. "the idear of it").

The reason mass media doesn't have a great deal of impact on dialect change over time is that while it may have some influence on the speech of adults, your native dialect is determined largely by who your peer group was as a child, and has very little to do with how your parents speak. And while exposure to other varieties and dialects can change how you speak to some extent (I spent several years overseas in an Anglophone country, and came back to strangers in my home town asking what country I was from), your speech will probably still be characterized mostly by your native dialect (I did not sound like a native to other people in the country I was living in while overseas).

So social aspirations certainly can have an impact on dialect, but they may not have much of an effect on how the next generation learns to speak. Much of that process is finished by the time you've left elementary school, if not before, barring being moved to a different language community before the age of 12 or 13.

Posted by JAR | July 17, 2008 1:38 PM

In America, the incentive was to lose an upper class accent. In Britain the incentive was to maintain it. Just read the post, haven't scanned comments yet, so this is probably something that has already been observed repeatedly.

Posted by Daniel Koffler | July 17, 2008 1:43 PM

I think it's mainly in the South (including Texas) where local accents are still class signifiers. In Austin, Texas, for example, in business, law, politics, even academia, it's useful to have a subtle Texas accent, and it's hard to fake convincingly because it's not too broad. In fact, there's a certain kind of accent that's associated with Austin's liberal governing class.

Posted by Psittakos | July 17, 2008 1:46 PM

One aspect of the more general phenomenon of prole drift, perhaps?

Posted by Brandon Berg | July 17, 2008 1:59 PM

Why would American conformism exempt accent from its march?

Posted by dearieme | July 17, 2008 2:08 PM

following up on Rex's comment...
There is actually more than one distinct Long Island accent - as people from the North Shore speak very differently than people on the South Shaw. I don't know what happens out East... Once you get into Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, everything changes again.

Also, on dialect, you forgot 'hero' which is the New York metro word for that sandwich, and 'grinder' which is the Boston regional word. Never heard of a 'wedge' though. A Harvard professor did a fantastic dialect study using the internet, mapping over a hundred dialectical differences by US region. It looks like the prof has moved, taking his maps with him to here: dialect survey

That link that doesn't work quite right at the moment.

Posted by RMH | July 17, 2008 2:25 PM

Global warming.

Posted by Jack M. | July 17, 2008 2:26 PM

I tend to think the accent change has 2 bases:

1. TV creating a more universal accent. I was raised in Boston, yet, because I was a TV head as a child, I have virtually no Boston accent; my sister, who did not watch much TV, has a very thick Boston accent. We grew up in the same house, but those voices I heard were non-Boston, and that's what I mimicked.

2. Immigrant changes. The New York accent(s) can be traced to Italians and Jews, who dominated NY immigration and demographics for a long periiod--and the various sub-accents (Brooklyn, "Lawn Giland") can be traced to the subsets of Italians and Jews (re: Ashkenazi, Orthodox, Conservative, Sicilian, Calabrian, etc) who settled somewhere. The Boston accent, ditto, from massive Irish immigration.

Yet now, immigration patterns have changed--it is not Jews and Italians moving in droves to New York, but other groups.. Different ethnic groups have different ways of pronouncing words, due to their home languages. Over time, even when English becomes the lingua franca, these cultural by products remain. It doesn't surprise me, then, that a thick, 1950s movie-type New York accent has faded (though, mind you, still remains in various places) a bit, as the groups who created it have moved out and been replaced.

Posted by Jack M. | July 17, 2008 2:34 PM

your native dialect is determined largely by who your peer group was as a child, and has very little to do with how your parents speak.

I dunno -- I think you can still pick out something of the parents' accents in the child. My mother was originally from Bah-ston, and while her accent has shifted to be fairly southern, it was quite Yankee when I was a small child. People sometimes still mistake me as not being from Mississippi, although I've lived here since I was six months old. Likewise, my husband's mother is from New Zealand, and he gets the same thing, despite being born and raised here. (Her accent, after 35 years here, is a truly odd mix of southern and Kiwi.)

Both my husband and I have obvious southern accents, but there are some subtle differences that locals can pick up on -- we're a little more generically southern than true Mississippi.

Posted by Emma B | July 17, 2008 2:35 PM

Mayor Quimby probably had something to do with it.

Posted by Tel | July 17, 2008 2:35 PM

My old boss in NYC, born and raised in Brooklyn, had a strong accent. The most obvious feature was how he's switch a final schwa sound to "er" sound (and vice versa).

The classic joke was if your piano was out of tune, you'd hire a piano "tuna" to fix it, but if you were hungry, you'd order a "tuner" fish sandwich.

To him, every Christina was a "Christiner" and every Jennifer was a "Jennifuh".

But that accent hardly sounded aristocratic.

The accent mentioned in this post, I always associate with old Hollywood movies and when I was young I thought it has something to do with the limitations of sound recording technologies back in the day. I know early phones had microphones more tuned to pick up the frequencies of a male voice and I thought Hepburn's voice was a way to ensure the higher pitched softer female voice wasn't lost in the recording. That, or I figured it stemmed from some theatre technique to project an unamplified voice. And maybe some people mimicked those early stars. I just figured that as mics got better, there was no longer a need to change your natural voice. This was all just personal conjecture and I really had no evidence for this idea (and there is obviously evidence against it).

Posted by Nylund | July 17, 2008 3:07 PM

The aristocratic-sounding, vaguely British style of speaking can still be heard among upper class whites in parts of New Orleans, especially in the Uptown and Garden District neighborhoods.

Posted by Pete S. | July 17, 2008 3:29 PM

The traditional English upper-class accent has been gone for some time, I think - it was on its way to dying when the talkies came in, and it deteriorated into Mockney after the War. I suspect it's hard to get a sense for a truly "U" accent, since it was regarded as obsolete and slightly comical by the Thirties.

There is, however, at least one genuine example: a recording of a Prime Minister's wife that dates from 1918:

http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/margotasquith.htm

Does anyone speak like that anymore?

Posted by Nanonymous | July 17, 2008 3:43 PM

JAR,

I spent several years overseas in an Anglophone country, and came back to strangers in my home town asking what country I was from

I bet that "foreign" accent wasn't Southern Sudanese English like it was in my case, isn't it? And of course, because of the Last-New-Language phenomenon, I tended to shift into that when talking to anyone with a significant foreign accent of their own, no matter how far from Afican it was...

Nyland,

I took a class once from a Cuban-American professor named Silva. He spent a while in England doing some post-doc studies. At first he was troubled when he'd introduce himself as "Dr. Silva" and everyone would think (and spell) Dr. Silver; until he learned to say "Dr. Silver" and then everyone would correctly get Dr. Silva.

Posted by kirk parker | July 17, 2008 3:44 PM

My guess is that since that particular social class is so highly mobile and has no real concentrated geographic base, the accent has to be received at a prep school or college. The accent went out of fashion and was rarely passed on after the 50s.

Contrary to what one of the previous posters said, isn't G.W. Bush a good example of this. Hasn't he stuck with the Midland Texas accent of the peer group he had as a young child and rejected the accents of the prep schools and colleges he attended?

Posted by Bob_R | July 17, 2008 4:14 PM

Perhaps another aspect of flattening aspects from the 1950s onward was the corresponding commoditization of telephone communications. If everyone all over the country is able to do business by direct voice, thick regional accents can become as difficult to decipher as a foreign language.

Posted by aMouseforallSeasons | July 17, 2008 4:18 PM

Some regional dialects are easier to understand than others, of course. In Florida, it's a "car", in Boston, a "cah".... Carolinans, both North and South, say "truck". Go figure.

Posted by reno | July 17, 2008 4:28 PM

And then, to make things more complicated, there are people like me with fake dialects. I often get asked if I'm British or if I've studied in Britain (no, but I'm going to next year). I have an accent that is clearly not British, since I pronounce all the 'r's in words; but I spent five years as a debater and then three or four as a singer, which forced me to pay a lot of attention to the way I pronounce words.

So what I do have is a very highly enunciated pronunciation that allows me to speak very fast and still be understood. It reminds some people of RP because it's very clipped and precise. But it's not British; and it's also, as far as I know, not genuinely American, since I don't know of any American accent that distinguishes 'cot'-'caught' and 'marry'-'merry'-'Mary.'

Posted by Jadagul | July 17, 2008 4:42 PM

A few observations on New England, Southern, and other regional accents:

First, I grew up in a small town in central Florida, and my peers had what I assumed was the standard accent: a low, slow drawl. Until my parents moved to the northern Shenandoah Valley in Virginia while I was in college. To my ears, the local Southern accent there sounded more "refined" than what I had grown up hearing in Florida. But I also noticed what seemed a class-based difference in accent, with working-class folk sounding more like the Florida 'crackers' (that was not considered a derogatory term where I grew up) while more upper- to middle-class speakers had a more genteel sound. This was especially pronounced among women.

I lived for more than a decade in eastern Connecticut after college, and rarely heard what I think of as the classic New England Yankee accent except among real old-timers. As for the Boston accent that I suspect most of us think of, to my ears it has a particularly working-class character to it. Two good pop-culture places to hear that form of the Boston sound is from the Mark Wahlberg character in "The Departed" and then in the on-stage banter from the lead singer of the Boston Irish punk band Dropkick Murphys on their album "Live on St. Patrick's Day".

I now live in southeast Michigan, and am still coming to grips with the local version of the Midwestern accent. I don't even know what I sound like any more.

Posted by PFTrumbore | July 17, 2008 4:54 PM

Look at George Walker Andover Yale Harvard Bush. He tries awful hard to sound like a rig-working roughneck from Odessa.

Pro-rating periods of part-time residency, the President has spent about 2/3 of his 62 years living in Texas, including an un-interrupted period running from age two to age fourteen. That might just have had an effect.

traditional local dialects are not any more like what linguists call General American than they were 50 years ago.

If you say so, JAR. I listen to my relations in the Shenandoah Valley (a region with only small cities) - the grandparents' generation with intense and distinctive accents, the parents' with light and generically Southern accents, and the children's who might as well have grown up in Ithaca, N.Y. - and I have some trouble taking your words at face value. One of the latter set explained to me that the Southern accent remained vigorous in and among her blue-collar relatives but had evaporated among the remainder, and that the same applied in her husband's family (many generations resident in Northern Florida).

Posted by Art Deco | July 17, 2008 5:56 PM

I find Margot Asquith easier to understand than my own daughter, who has the modern English tendency to liquid consonants and diphthongised vowels, stacatto rhythm, and half-digested American colloquialisms. Mind you, my mother might have found Mrs Asquith's accent rather vulgar. Happily, my accent is perfection itself.

Posted by dearieme | July 17, 2008 6:03 PM

It's very interesting for me to hear wiredog and others talking about the old "Warshington" accent. My dad grew up in DC and my mom grew up in the suburbs, and I HAD some approximation of this accent when I was a little kid (both my folks still speak this way.) I actually remember making a conscious decision to ditch the R when I was about 8, because the other kids at my grade school in the MD suburbs would make fun of me for it! I'm 24 now, for what it's worth, and yes this seems fairly ridiculous in retrospect. But I have two brothers and I've noticed that neither of them speaks this way anymore either.

Posted by Warshington | July 17, 2008 6:33 PM

I can tell that very few of these commentators are Brits. It is all relative. Listen to the BBC in the '50s and it will sound almost nothing like what you will hear today. the way people talk on bloggingheads.tv doesn't sound like the way they talked in Chicago and Austen when I was last there. I really don't think there is such a big difference; a difference to be sure, but not such a big difference.

By the way I know many people that really wouldn't want to live in the US because of the segregation by class and wealth. In some contexts traveling in the US is a throw back to the time when the middles classes kept servants (say the Edwardian era).

One of the really attractive aspects of the success of Obama is that it shows that it is still possible. That he understands that it has been getting much more difficult is to his credit and significant.

Posted by Chris Dornan | July 17, 2008 6:50 PM

"One of the really attractive aspects of the success of Obama is that it shows that it is still possible. That he understands that it has been getting much more difficult is to his credit and significant."

Ah yes, if you attend the most prestigious prep school in Hawaii and benefit from affirmative action at every level of your education and career, you too can make it. A real everyman success story.

The last two presidential candidates that I can think of that actually do have non-upper class roots are Clinton and Regan.

Posted by Steve Johnson | July 17, 2008 6:59 PM

The last two presidential candidates that I can think of that actually do have non-upper class roots are Clinton and Regan.

Mr. Obama's grandmother was in middle-management at the Bank of Hawaii and his grand-father sold furniture and insurance. They worked for a living, they did not own a house, and there has been no indication to date that they inherited money or could just have clipped coupons.

Mr. McCain's family has been career military for several generations;

The fathers of Robert Dole, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey were all in small business (trading in dairy, paint, groceries, and pharmacy, respectively);

By some accounts, Ross Perot's father was a farm worker.

Michael Dukakis' father was a doctor; Walter Mondale's was a clergyman.

If I recall correctly, the (uncharitable) rap on Mr. Kerry was that family-of-origin, while culturally patrician, had only modest assets, hence his preference for marrying heiresses.

Posted by Art Deco | July 17, 2008 10:03 PM

I see the thread is starting to unravel, but perhaps it isn't too late to throw in my two cents' worth: the regnant theory of why the "Eastern Establishment" accent (as we used to refer to it) went out of fashion had to do with the center of gravity of the entertainment industry moving from New York (Broadway) to California (Hollywood), and thus becoming deracinated from Eastern pronunciations and adopting the Californian (a blend of Midwestern and Southern influences) in lieu thereof.

Posted by David Hecht | July 17, 2008 11:45 PM

Last week I heard an African-American flight attendant giving instructions with perfect Deborah Kerr 1950's Hollywood elocution (not quite the depth of Bette Davis' accent). I was so impressed I made point of complementing her speech. More impressive was that she had no idea she sounded so well.

Back on topic, David you are exactly right.

Posted by jake | July 18, 2008 12:27 AM

but how come Britain held onto its aristocratic tones, while America's slipped softly and silently away?

It didn't. If you listen to 1950s recordings of the Queen, she wears a het on her hid. These days, the royal head is adorned with a hat.

Posted by Sam | July 18, 2008 2:16 AM

Funny, I was noticing the exact same thing the other day, in a clip from a late 1950s game-show. All four of the high-class celebrity participants had the r-less (hence British-sounding) accent that is now extinct except for (as you mention) Tom Kean.

Sociolinguist Bill Labov has actually identified a new accent - somewhere around Buffalo and environs (I'm too lazy to google right now), which at least offers the comforting thought that accents are created as well as destroyed, even today, and we won't all necessarily be talking the same variety of Nightly Newscaster in fifty years.

Posted by Lane | July 18, 2008 8:42 AM

FWIW, my sister (who lived in Bethlehem, PA until she was 11 and in Lat Am from 11 to 18) went to College in Richmond University in VA.

I found it interesting, when visiting her for Ring Dance (an old Southern tradition for Junior girls in Richmond U), that rich Richmondians spoke with a thick Virginian accent.

I was told at the time by these rich Richmondians that only rich and poor Richmondians spoke with a thick Virginian accent. The middle class (and non-Richmondians/Virginians) did not have an accent of any sort.

And this was all in 1997.

Posted by JRVJ | July 18, 2008 8:51 AM

One still hears it in certain corners of upperclass Boston -- Fidelity's Ned Johnson speaks in that accent, as does some of the other Fidelity old guard, though Abby Johnson doesn't really have it -- and I have met a few old-Beacon-Hill-money types who even "talk through their teeth" in that really old-fashioned Preppy Handbook way. Certain members of Boston's big-name families (Adams, Cabot, etc) still affect the accent too, even among the younger generation, and there are upperclass New England enclaves (Milton, Barrington, Avon, etc) where it's still heard among the congregations in the Episcopal churches and whatnot. It's not quite dead yet, but it's definitely confined to much smaller circles than it was 40-50 years ago.

Posted by John | July 18, 2008 8:58 AM

Chris Dornan, of course today's dialects in Britain are substantially different than they were in the 50's. Language varieties change constantly. My point was simply that the various major regional varieties have not converged on one, generic, regionally undistinct variety. I think all this talk of accents being "easier to understand these days" is the result of lots more people who speak stigmatized varieties being exposed to and learning how to speak less stigmatized varieties, in addition to their native dialects. This may be the real influence of popular media - giving people the opportunity to learn more prestigious dialects, and use them when speaking to people who are not speakers of their native dialects.

While a child growing up in parts of the South now may sound like a child of a similar SES growing up in Ithaca, I will bet cash money that if the child is actually taken to Ithaca and speaks to people of a somewhat lower SES, they will be able to tell immediately that that child is not from Ithaca, or indeed upstate New York.

Jadagul, most American dialects east of the Rockies make the cot - caught distinction. The Mary-merry-marry distinction is, as you rightly point out, a lot more rare, but it's not entirely unheard of in this country; one of the faculty of my department is from western Pennsylvania and produces the distinction fairly reliably.

Posted by JAR | July 18, 2008 9:00 AM

I have no idea why the "pretentious Northeasterner" accent went extinct, but I'm grateful. The only thing I can think when I'm watching movies from the era when every goddamned actor/actress spoke that way is "Why are they all talking like pretentious jackasses?"

The more accents tend to blend together, the better. The most recognizable American accents (Boston, New York, upper Midwest) tend to be the harshest and most painful to listen to. I live on "Lawn Giland," and sometimes I wish I had earplugs.

Next up is stupid regional bastardizations of common phrases, like how everyone in the NYC area stands "on line" instead of "in line."

Posted by Fred | July 18, 2008 9:10 AM

Man, all this DC accent talk has me getting nostalgic. My Grandfather, who lived in the district from boyhood until the 1970s, and then lived in Arlington, speaks with an accent that I never hear from anybody under 70. I should really tape it and save it for posterity. I grew up in the DC suburbs, but have lived in Central VA for the past 7 years, and the main difference is that I now feel liberated enough to say y'all. Its a useful word, but I still get embarrassed when I use it in front of friends who have settled in the north.

Posted by wahoomatt | July 18, 2008 9:11 AM

Sometime after WWII, the transatlantic accent (Thurston Howell, John Kerry, William Buckley, FDR) was dropped in the media for the Nebraska accent (Brokaw, Carson). No longer would "smart" Americans have to sound English.
Having lived in New England a majority of my life, the stereotypical "Yacht/old money" accent is more a sign of affectation than class. It's an accent that people "put on" now moreso than inherit. There are non rhotic dialects still alive in Boston, New Hampshire, and New york but they are a bit saltier and more coloquial than the "blue blood" accent. Otherwise most Northeasterners sound not too differant than people from the Great lakes area.

Posted by Tom in CT | July 18, 2008 9:25 AM

My grandma was born in LA in 1921 and was the child of immigrants (from Ukraine.) All the kids in the Boyle Heights neighborhood where she grew up were first-generation Americans. Everyone had elocution lessons taught by elderly spinsters. They memorized and recited long poems like "Hiawatha" and did drills like "She picks seashells." When I've asked Grandma to speak in her "elocution voice" she sounds exactly like Bette Davis.

Public schools used to be a waystation between Old Country and new and they taught in a uniform way. So much of the curriculum was aspirational, with lofty lectures about civics, memorizing passages from famous speeches or poetry, and the like. The newly arrived citizens, many of whom were themselves highly educated in similar style but in the language of whichever country they came from, wanted their children to have this type of education.

The country is vastly more populated now, and schools don't have the time, money, or inclination to teach in this way, and parents of public schoolkids don't want it.

Posted by Juliet Grossman | July 18, 2008 9:32 AM

If my own family is any example I suspect mobility plays a role.

My grandmother, born 1894, was one of 8 siblings raised in NYC. They all spoke with that deliberate, FDR elocution, lots of soft extended "a"s and vanishing "r"s. When in their presence I was never Marc I was Maaach.

But among their children's generation the accent was largely gone. My own mother, who spent her formative years in Chicago, never acquired it. Her cousins who where raised on the eastern end of Long Island traded there's in for the pronounced accent of that area. Others raised in south Jersey don't have it. A cousin that moved to Australia as a young bride sounds Aussie. The one notable exception among the cousins is the one who was raised in and to this day remains in NYC. When I talk to cousin Nancy I hear those traces of Hepburn and Davis.

Posted by Leo | July 18, 2008 9:33 AM

As a 60 y/o man who grew up in a small Texas city with roots in the South, I left for college with a perfectly executed Texas Twang which I modified with much voice and diction direction in Drama Classes. When I travel to other parts of the USA today, I can hear myself in context. I would say that class and education based accents still exist all over the United States just in different ways.
The Graduates of Briarcliff today do not sound like the ones who graduated in 1938. I am acquainted with both. I learned to speak English from Black Maids and the children that I grew up with, obviously not my north eastern educated parents. I was amused a few years back with an interview of Stone Phillips on what happened to his speaking voice when he would return home to Waxahachie, Texas. After a day in Texas it would take him almost 2 weeks to get his television voice back and lose all the diphthongs. Hearing him speak with the locals with a Texas accent was quite amusing. Much like the first time I was in NYC in the 1960's, and I heard my first Black man say it was a "bee-yootiful day in New Yawk, in Central Pawk.' Blacks that did not sound like Amos and Andy, what a concept.
I do hope that I sound Like James Baker III today.

Posted by tom in dallas | July 18, 2008 9:49 AM

@JRJV:

You must also have been told at some point that it's the University of Richmond, not Richmond U.

"Old" Richmond (people in the West End, members of the Country club of Virginia, people who can trace themselves back to the First Families of Va., etc.) is an insular and exclusive society. Not shocked to think that they all still talk like their grandsires and what not.

More generally: an interesting question posed by all this is the extent to which people are able to willfully change accents, vs. being influenced in their speech by the people they hear every day. I'd love to see some research on this if anyone knows of some.

FWIW, my sister (who lived in Bethlehem, PA until she was 11 and in Lat Am from 11 to 18) went to College in Richmond University in VA.

I found it interesting, when visiting her for Ring Dance (an old Southern tradition for Junior girls in Richmond U), that rich Richmondians spoke with a thick Virginian accent.

I was told at the time by these rich Richmondians that only rich and poor Richmondians spoke with a thick Virginian accent. The middle class (and non-Richmondians/Virginians) did not have an accent of any sort.

And this was all in 1997.

Posted by donald | July 18, 2008 9:57 AM

I would also point out the aristocratic accent became a marker for a series of "buffonish" TV caracters on very popular TV programs in the 60's and 70's, towit Thurston Howell III from Gilligans Island, Miss Jane Hathaway from the Beverly Hillbillies, the aforementioned Charles Emerson Winchester from MASH.

Miss Inch from The Parent Trap comes to mind as well.

I recall in Law School in the 1980's one of my professors regularly employed a mock aristocratic Bostonian accent as a foil to skewer a variety of elitist, privilidged targets.

Posted by davidius | July 18, 2008 9:59 AM

When I was a little kid, my paternal grandmother, a working-class white DC native born in the ‘teens, spoke with such a sharp Wahrshintun accent that until I was around 5 or 6, I didn’t realize that the name “Cholly” referred to my grandfather Charlie. (She rarely used his name and almost always called him “Sweetie” or “Hon” when he was present, so it took me a while to make the connection.) I haven't heard anyone speak that way since she died 8 years ago. On the other hand, who knows how wierd my off-the-rack mid-Atlantic accent is going to sound to young people when I'm in my 80s?

Posted by Jack Squier | July 18, 2008 10:05 AM

The HBO John Adams miniseries may be illuminating here. It had Adams speaking with an FDR-like accent and Thomas Jefferson sounding like he was a farmer from Devon or Somerset. (George III sounded almost identical to Jefferson).

Posted by Skye Winspur | July 18, 2008 10:44 AM

Maybe I'm just getting old, but when I listen to the accents of younger American women (teens to twenties), I just cringe. It sounds like a mix of Valley Girl and loud boisterous toddler. Why do they feel the need to sound like complete morons?

And when did the word "what" start sounding like "white". Grrr...

Posted by Morning's Minion | July 18, 2008 12:24 PM

David Hecht: "...the regnant theory of why the "Eastern Establishment" accent (as we used to refer to it) went out of fashion had to do with the center of gravity of the entertainment industry moving from New York (Broadway) to California (Hollywood)..."

Tom in CT: "Sometime after WWII, the transatlantic accent (Thurston Howell, John Kerry, William Buckley, FDR) was dropped in the media for the Nebraska accent (Brokaw, Carson). No longer would "smart" Americans have to sound English."

Good points both, but can anyone explain another accent, the newscaster/ narrator accent of the 30's, 40's and 50's. Think Herbert Morrison "Oh the humanity" from the Hindenburg (1937), WW II newsreels, and even John Cameron Swayze on NBC in the 50's and for Timex long after that. Maybe a midwestern/plains thing (Morrison worked for a Chicago radio station and Swayze was from Wichita), maybe something imparted from the tinniness of audio recording at that time and maybe a style newscasters were taught to use, but in any event not something you're likely to hear today.

Posted by Dave | July 18, 2008 12:33 PM

To my ears, the nearest we have today to a "Brahmin" American accent is a version of the Southeastern Tidewater accent from Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, shorn of its most pronounced regional quirks. Tom Wolfe and Julian Bond are characteristic speakers. Some Canadians (e.g., Ted Koppel) have a similar accent.

This accent broadens vowels subtly (many different A, E and O sounds), softens without quite omitting R's (sort of "rhhh"), modulates mostly to a mid-range low-tenor or baritone voice and has a slightly breathy or stage-whisper character. It sounds calm and measured; some find it smug. It is very difficult to imitate.

Posted by allbetsareoff | July 18, 2008 12:48 PM

Ted Koppel isn't Canadian. He was born and raised in the UK and came to the US in his early teens. Tom Wolfe is from Richmond and Julian Bond from Tennessee and Pennsylvania--neither from the Tidewater area. For that accent, a good example is former Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings of South Carolina.

Posted by Henderstock | July 18, 2008 1:20 PM

Reminded me of this youtube sketch about Katherine Hepburn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqo7KEx6kTM

Posted by kablamo | July 18, 2008 1:24 PM

The most challenging Tidewater accent quirk is the "ou" sound in words such as "out" or "about."

Definitely not "ow," nor, as outsiders commonly hear it, "oo" or "uh." More like "ah-oo" in one slightly elongated syllable.

It's distinct from the English-Canadian pronunciation, which is more compressed, closer to "uh."

Posted by allbetsareoff | July 18, 2008 1:31 PM

Henderstock: I stand corrected on Koppel. Although Bond was born in Nashville, his accent is strongly influenced by his time in Georgia (and probably at a tony boarding school in Philadelphia).

Wolfe does speak in a Tidewater accent (Richmond is on the border of the Tidewater and Piedmont regions), although it's not as pronounced as the ones heard on the coast (some of which are close to Elizabethan English).

The Charleston accent is quite unlike most other Tidewater accents, with undertones of Huguenot French and Sea-Island Gullah.

Posted by allbetsareoff | July 18, 2008 1:48 PM

Jadagul: An American accent that distinguishes 'cot'-'caught' and 'marry'-'merry'-'Mary' is a Houston accent. It is one of the many distinctive accents of Texas (like that Far West Texas accent that GW Bush affects, sounding like a Yankee who wants to sound like he is from Odessa -- not Midland, which sounds completely different because of the out-of-place Houston sound to it). No one really knows how it evolved, but it is crisp, clear, sharp and doesn't sound all that southern. It is also, sadly, somewhat rare these days, but it is funny that I can be in the middle of nowhere in Texas and people can tell immediately that I am a native Houstonian.

When I have spent time in New York City, people I have met socially assume that I was at one point an actor or had speech training.

I was told years ago by my maternal grandmother that the accent evolved to give orders so that people could understand you clearly on the rig floor. That is a common belief here. I tend to doubt that because rig floors weren't that noisy a century ago, and the accent has been around for quite a while.

Posted by Houstonian | July 18, 2008 1:51 PM

It's interesting to hear everyone talk about the Southern accent as being this monolithic tongue when in fact there are a dozen or so different Southern accents that are very much alive and well. Most of these have to do with geography(Carolinas/East Tennessee and Mid-Southern, for example), others have to do with race and class, however, native southerners still speak with them more so than this "generic" Southern accent you speak or.

Example, I live and work in Austin, TX(originally for Memphis). On my first day at my job in Austin I hear from across the room, "Who hired the Memphian?" in a deep deep Carolina accent. Just by our accents we could be placed by each other....and it isn't like we are from an older generation. We are both under 30.

Posted by Patrick | July 18, 2008 1:58 PM