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A Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is any of various accents of English that are perceived as blending features from both American and British English. Most commonly, the informal label refers to accents of the late 19th century to mid-20th century spoken by the Northeastern American upper class, as well as related accents in the early half of the 20th century taught in American schools of acting. Both types of accents incorporated notable features from Received Pronunciation, the most prestigious accent of British English. This speaking style also became associated with certain Hollywood actors of that era.

A Mid-Atlantic accent was never the widespread or typical accent of any region; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". The late 19th century first produced recordings of and commentary about such accents associated with the Northeastern elite and their private preparatory-school education. With their (limited) high prestige, such accents were also then used by some stage and film actors in the early 20th century, particularly in their performances of classical plays. The prestige of Mid-Atlantic speech largely ended by 1950, presumably as a result of cultural and demographic changes in the United States following the Second World War.

A similar accent that resulted from different historical processes, Canadian dainty, was also known in Canada, existing for a century before waning in the 1950s. More generally, "mid-Atlantic accent" may refer to any accent, including more recent ones, with a perceived mixture of American and British characteristics.

Elite accents

History

In the 19th century and into the early 20th century, formal public speaking in the United States focused primarily on song-like intonation, lengthily and tremulously uttered vowels (including overly articulated weak vowels), and a booming resonance. Moreover, since at least the mid-19th century, upper-class communities on the East Coast of the United States increasingly adopted many of the phonetic qualities of Received Pronunciation—the standard accent of the British upper class—as evidenced in recorded public speeches of the time. One of these qualities is non-rhoticity, sometimes called "R-dropping", in which speakers delete the phoneme /r/ except before a vowel sound (thus, in pair but not pairing), which is also shared by the traditional regional dialects of Eastern New England (including Boston), New York City, and some areas of the South, although precisely how varied by exact location, social class, and other demographic factors. Sociolinguists like William Labov describe that non-rhoticity, "following Received Pronunciation, was taught as a model of correct, international English by schools of speech, acting, and elocution in the United States up to the end of World War II".

Early recordings of prominent Americans born in the middle of the 19th century provide some insight into their adoption (or not) of a carefully employed non-rhotic Mid-Atlantic speaking style. President William Howard Taft, who attended public school in Ohio, and inventor Thomas Edison, who grew up in Ohio and Michigan in a family of modest means, both used natural rhotic accents. Yet presidents William McKinley of Ohio and Grover Cleveland of Central New York, who attended private schools, clearly employed a non-rhotic, upper-class, Mid-Atlantic quality in their public speeches that does not align with the rhotic accents normally documented in Ohio and Central New York State at the time; both men even use the distinctive and especially archaic affectation of a "tapped R" at times when R is pronounced, often when between vowels. This tapped articulation is additionally sometimes heard in recordings of Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's successor from an affluent district of New York City, who used a cultivated non-rhotic accent but with the addition of the coil-curl merger once notably associated with New York accents. His distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt also employed a non-rhotic Mid-Atlantic accent, though without the tapped R.

In and around Boston, Massachusetts, a similar accent, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, was associated with the local urban elite: the Boston Brahmins. In the New York metropolitan area, particularly including its affluent Westchester County suburbs and the North Shore of Long Island, other terms for the local Transatlantic pronunciation and accompanying facial behavior include "Locust Valley lockjaw" or "Larchmont lockjaw", named for the stereotypical clenching of the speaker's jaw muscles to achieve an exaggerated enunciation quality. The related term "boarding-school lockjaw" has also been used to describe the accent once considered a characteristic of elite New England boarding-school culture.

Example speakers

Wealthy or highly educated Americans known for being life-long speakers of a Mid-Atlantic accent include William F. Buckley Jr., Gore Vidal, H. P. Lovecraft, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, George Plimpton, John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who began affecting it permanently while at Miss Porter's School), Louis Auchincloss, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland (though her accent is unique, with not entirely consistent Mid-Atlantic features), C. Z. Guest Joseph Alsop, Robert Silvers, Julia Child (though, as the lone non-Northeasterner in this list, her accent was consistently rhotic), Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, and Gloria Vanderbilt. Except for Child, all of these example speakers were raised, educated, or both in the Northeastern United States. This includes just over half who were raised specifically in New York (most of them New York City) and five of whom were educated specifically at the independent boarding school Groton in Massachusetts: Franklin Roosevelt, Harriman, Acheson, Alsop, and Auchincloss.

Examples of individuals described as having a cultivated New England accent or "Boston Brahmin accent" include Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Charles Eliot Norton, Samuel Eliot Morison, Harry Crosby, John Brooks Wheelwright, George C. Homans, Elliot Richardson, George Plimpton (though he was actually a life-long member of the New York City elite), and John Kerry, who has noticeably reduced this accent since his early adulthood toward a more General American one.

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came from a privileged New York City family, has a non-rhotic accent, though it is not an ordinary New York accent but rather a Mid-Atlantic one. One of Roosevelt's most frequently heard speeches has a non-rhotic pronunciation of words like assert and firm, along with a falling diphthong in the word fear, all of which distinguishes it from other forms of surviving non-rhotic speech in the United States. "Linking R" appears in Roosevelt's delivery of the words "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; this pronunciation of R is also famously recorded in his Pearl Harbor speech, for example, in the phrase "naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan".

Decline

After the accent's decline following the end of World War II, this American version of a "posh" accent has all but disappeared even among the American upper classes, as Americans have increasingly dissociated from the speaking styles of the East Coast elite; if anything, the accent is now subject to ridicule in American popular culture. The clipped, non-rhotic English accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr. were vestigial examples. Marianne Williamson, a self-help author and a 2020 and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, has a unique accent that, following her participation in the first 2020 presidential debate in June 2019, was widely discussed and sometimes described as a Mid-Atlantic accent. An article from The Guardian, for example, stated that Williamson "speaks in a beguiling mid-Atlantic accent that makes her sound as if she has walked straight off the set of a Cary Grant movie".

Theatrical and cinematic accents

According to the vocal coach and drama professor Dudley Knight, when the 20th century began, "American actors in classical plays all spoke with English accents", due to the high prestige of English Received Pronunciation (RP). Early in this century, the wealthy Brahmin accent of Boston, Massachusetts, a subset of Eastern New England English, had already absorbed notable features from RP such as non-rhoticity and the trap–bath split, when Boston was the American center for training in elocution, public speaking, and acting. Therefore, this upper-class Boston accent also may have contributed to the sound then becoming popular among the wider Northeastern elite and in the American theatre.

Furthermore, the popularity of a Mid-Atlantic sound was indirectly inspired by the Australian phonetician William Tilly (né Tilley), teaching in Columbia University's extension program in New York City from 1918 to around the time of his death in 1935, who championed a version of the accent that, for the first time, was standardized with an extreme and conscious level of phonetic consistency. Calling his new standard "World English", Tilly mostly attracted a following of English-language learners and New York City public-school teachers, and his goal was to popularize his standard of a "proper" American pronunciation for teaching in public schools and using in one's public life. While he did not specifically work with actors himself, some of his prominent students ended up doing so. Linguistic prescriptivists, Tilly and his adherents emphatically promoted World English, and its slight variations taught in classes of theatre and oratory, helping to eventually define the Mid-Atlantic pronunciation of American classical actors for decades. According to Dudley Knight:

World English was a speech pattern that very specifically did not derive from any regional dialect pattern in England or America, although it clearly bears some resemblance to the speech patterns that were spoken in a few areas of New England, and a very considerable resemblance ... to the pattern in England which was becoming defined in the 1920s as "RP" or "Received Pronunciation". World English, then, was a creation of speech teachers, and boldly labeled as a class-based accent: the speech of persons variously described as "educated," "cultivated," or "cultured"; the speech of persons who moved in rarefied social or intellectual circles; and the speech of those who might aspire to do so.

From the 1920s to 1940s, the Mid-Atlantic accent was a popular affectation onstage and in other forms of high culture in North America. According to Knight, Americans had the tendency to perceive World English as sounding British, which Tilly's students sometimes acknowledged and other times denied. The codification of such an accent particularly for theatrical training is credited to several disciples of Tilly, notably including Margaret Prendergast McLean and Edith Warman Skinner. McLean, by the late 1920s, was one of the most influential speech teachers for East Coast actors, publishing her text on the accent, Good American Speech, in 1928. Edith Skinner rose to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s, best known for her own instructional text, Speak with Distinction, published in 1942. These speech teachers referred to this accent as Good (American) Speech, which Skinner also called Eastern (American) Standard and which she described as the appropriate American pronunciation for "classics and elevated texts". She vigorously drilled her students in learning the accent at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now, Carnegie Mellon) and, later, the Juilliard School. As used by actors, the Mid-Atlantic accent is also known by various other names, including American Theatre Standard or American stage speech.

American cinema began in the early 1900s in New York City and Philadelphia before becoming largely transplanted to Los Angeles beginning in the mid-1910s, with talkies beginning in the late 1920s. Hollywood studios encouraged actors to learn this accent into the 1940s. For instance, in the 1952 movie Singin' in the Rain, the Skinner-like elocution coach who entreats Lina Lamont to use "round tones" is attempting to teach her American stage speech.

Examples of actors known for publicly using this accent include Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Laird Cregar, the Canadian actor Christopher Plummer, Sally Kellerman, Tammy Grimes, Fred Astaire, William Powell, Orson Welles, and Westbrook Van Voorhis. Despite the accents of their native regions, Grace Kelly, Norma Shearer, and Ginger Rogers developed a Mid-Atlantic accent, including (variable) non-rhoticity and a trap–bath split, likely due to its high prestige in their era and their formal dramatic schooling. Roscoe Lee Browne, defying roles typically cast for black actors, also consistently spoke with a Mid-Atlantic accent. Vincent Price often used the accent in his performances, being from Missouri but attending elite Northeastern schools for high school and college, and also being British-trained. Patrick Cassidy noted that his father, actor and performer Jack Cassidy, affected the Mid-Atlantic accent, despite having a native New York accent. Alexander Scourby was an American stage, film, and voice actor who continues to be well-known for his recording of the entire King James Bible completed in 1953. Scourby was often employed as a voice actor and narrator in advertisements and in media put out by the National Geographic Society with his refined Mid-Atlantic accent considered desirable for such roles.

Humorist Tom Lehrer lampooned the accent in a 1945 satirical tribute to his alma mater, Harvard University, called "Fight Fiercely, Harvard". Cary Grant had an accent that is often popularly described as "Mid-Atlantic", though his specific accent more naturally and unconsciously mixed British and American features, because he arrived in the United States from England at age 16.

Performed examples in 20th-century media

• In the film Auntie Mame (1958), the accent used by Joanna Barnes's character identifies her as a "lockjawed prep princess" from Connecticut's WASP elite.
• David Ogden Stiers used the accent in portraying wealthy Bostonian Major Charles Emerson Winchester III on the TV series M*A*S*H.
• Jim Backus and Natalie Schafer portrayed Thurston and Lovey Howell, a millionaire couple on the 1960s TV series Gilligan's Island; they both employed the Locust Valley lockjaw accent.
• In the Star Wars film franchise, the character Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) noticeably speaks with a deep bass tone and a Mid-Atlantic accent to suggest his position of high authority; Princess Leia (played by Carrie Fisher) and Queen Amidala (played by Natalie Portman) also use this accent when switching to a formal speaking register in political situations.
• An example of this accent appears in the television sitcom Frasier used by the snobbish Crane brothers, who are played by Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce.
• Many 20th-century Disney villains speak either with an English accent (e.g., Shere Khan, Prince John, the Horned King, Scar, and Frollo) or a Transatlantic accent (notably, Lucille La Verne's Evil Queen from Snow White, Eleanor Audley's Maleficent and Lady Tremaine, Betty Lou Gerson's Cruella de Vil, Pat Carroll's Ursula, Vincent Price's Professor Ratigan, Jonathan Freeman's Jafar, and Eartha Kitt's Yzma).
• Mr. Burns, Sideshow Bob, and Cecil Terwilliger from The Simpsons all speak with a Mid-Atlantic accent, with the latter two characters voiced by the aforementioned Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce, respectively.
• In the animated television series The Critic, Franklin Sherman (an affluent former governor of New York) and his wife Eleanor Sherman both speak with pronounced Locust Valley Lockjaw accents.
• Actors working in the late 20th century who sometimes dipped into this accent included Edward Herrmann, Kelsey Grammer, and David Hyde Pierce:

Performed examples in 21st-century media

Although it has disappeared as a standard of high society and high culture, the Transatlantic accent has still been heard in some media in the 21st century for the sake of historical, humorous, or other stylistic reasons.

• Elizabeth Banks uses the Mid-Atlantic accent in playing the flamboyant, fussy, upper-class character Effie Trinket in the Hunger Games film series, which depicts enormous class divisions in a futuristic North America.
• Mark Hamill's vocal portrayal of Batman villain the Joker adopts a highly theatrical Mid-Atlantic accent throughout the character's many animation and video game appearances.
• Evan Peters employs a Mid-Atlantic accent as James Patrick March, a ghostly serial killer from the 1920s on American Horror Story: Hotel, as does Mare Winningham as March's accomplice, Miss Evers.
• Catherine O'Hara uses a unique, comedic accent as the character of Moira Rose in the Canadian sitcom Schitt's Creek, which the press has sometimes labeled "Mid-Atlantic".

Phonology

The Mid-Atlantic accent was carefully taught as a model of "correct" English in American elocution classes before 1945 and it was also taught for use in American theatre into the 1960s, after which it fell out of vogue. It is still taught to actors for use in playing historical characters.

A codified version of the Mid-Atlantic accent for the American theatre, advocated by voice coaches like Margaret Prendergast McLean and Edith Skinner ("Good Speech" as she called it), was once widely taught in acting schools of the early mid-20th century.

Vowels

• Trap–bath split: The Mid-Atlantic accent commonly exhibits the TRAP-BATH split of RP. However, unlike in RP, the BATH vowel does not retract and merge with the back vowel of PALM. It is only lowered from the near-open vowel to the fully open vowel . It was most consistently a feature of the New England upper class, the Boston Brahmins, but also promoted by theatrical teachers like McLean and Skinner.
• No /æ/ tensing: While most dialects of American English have the TRAP vowel tensed before nasals, the vowel is not necessarily tensed in this environment in Mid-Atlantic accents. Skinner and other theatrical teachers intensely discouraged tensing.
• Father–bother variability: The "a" in father is unrounded, while the "o" in bother vowel may be rounded, like RP. Therefore, the father-bother distinction exists for some speakers, particularly those following the 20th-century American Theatre Standard in the vein of Skinner, but not necessarily in aristocratic speakers trained before that time or outside of the entertainment industry, like Franklin Roosevelt, who indeed shows a merger. The bother vowel is also used in words like "watch" and "quad".
• No cot–caught merger: The vowels in cot and caught (the LOT vowel and THOUGHT vowel, respectively) are distinguished, with the latter being pronounced higher and longer than the former, like RP.
  • Lot–cloth variability: Like contemporary RP, but unlike conservative RP and General American, Theatre Standard promoted that the words in the CLOTH lexical set use the LOT vowel rather than the THOUGHT vowel. However, speakers trained before the Theatre Standard, like Franklin Roosevelt, indeed show a LOT-CLOTH split, with the latter aligning to the THOUGHT vowel. The THOUGHT vowel is also used before /l/ in words such as "all", "salt", and "malt".
• Lack of HAPPY tensing: Like conservative RP, the vowel /i/ at the end of words such as "happy" (listen), "Charlie", "sherry", "coffee" is not tensed and is thus pronounced with the KIT vowel , rather than the FLEECE vowel . This also extends to "i", "y", and sometimes "e", "ie", and "ee" in other positions in words. For example, the KIT vowel is used in "cities", "remark", "because", "serious", "variable". Some Boston Brahmins, however, did sometimes show happy tensing.
• No Canadian raising: Like RP, the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ do not undergo Canadian raising and are pronounced as and , respectively, in all environments.
• Back /oʊ/, /uː/, /aʊ/: The vowels /oʊ/, /uː/, /aʊ/ do not undergo advancing, being pronounced farther back as , and , respectively, like in conservative and Northern varieties of American English; the latter two are also similar to conservative RP.
• No weak vowel merger: The vowels in "Rosas" and "roses" are distinguished, with the former being pronounced as and the latter as either or . This is done in General American, as well, but in the Mid-Atlantic accent, the same distinction means the retention of historic in weak preconsonantal positions (as in RP), so "rabbit" does not rhyme with "abbot".
• Lack of mergers before /l/: Mergers before /l/, which are typical of several accents, both British and North American, do not occur. For example, the vowels in "hull" and "bull" are kept distinct, the former as and the latter as .

Vowels before /r/

In a Mid-Atlantic accent, the postvocalic /r/ is typically either dropped or vocalized. The vowels /ə/ or /ɜː/ do not undergo R-coloring. Linking R is used, but Skinner openly disapproved of intrusive R. In Mid-Atlantic accents, intervocalic /r/'s and linking r's undergo liaison.

When preceded by a long vowel, the /r/ is vocalized to , commonly known as schwa, while the long vowel itself is laxed. However, when preceded by a short vowel, the /ə/ is elided. Therefore, tense and lax vowels before /r/ are typically only distinguished by the presence/absence of /ə/. The following distinctions are examples of this concept:

• Mirror–nearer distinction: Hence mirror is , but nearer is .
• Mary–merry distinction: Hence merry is , but Mary is . Mary also has an opener variant of than merry.

• "Marry" is pronounced with a different vowel altogether. See further in the bullet list below.

Other distinctions before /r/ include the following:

• Mary–marry–merry distinction: Like in RP, New York City, and Philadelphia, marry is pronounced as /æ/, which is distinct from the vowels of both Mary and merry.
• Cure–force–north distinction: The vowels in cure and force–north are distinguished, the former being realized as and the latter as , like conservative RP.
• Thought–force distinction: The vowels in thought and force–north are distinguished, the former being realized as and the latter as . Hence saw , sauce but sore/sour , source . This does not precisely agree with /ɔː/ horse and /ɔə/ for hoarse in traditional Received Pronunciation. Speakers outside the American theatre like Franklin Roosevelt and the Boston Brahmins indeed often merged THOUGHT and FORCE and their vowel was often more diphthongal than in RP.
• Hurry–furry distinction: The vowels in hurry and furry are distinguished, with the former pronounced as /ʌ/ and the latter pronounced as /ɜː/. (listen)
• Palm–start distinction: The vowels in palm and start are distinguished, the former being realized as and the latter as . Hence spa , alms but spar , arms . This keeps the distinction observed in rhotic accents like General American, but not made in RP. Also, some New Englanders, particularly in Eastern New England, could pronounce the vowel in start more fronted: . However, in the mid-20th century and later, this came to be associated with non-elite Boston accents.
• Distinction of /ɒr/ and /ɔːr/ in words like

Consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:

• Wine-whine distinction: The Mid-Atlantic accent showed some vestigial resistance to the modern wine–whine merger. In other words, the consonants spelled w and wh could be pronounced slightly differently; words spelled with wh are pronounced as "hw" (/ʍ/). The distinction is a feature found in conservative RP and New England English, as well as in some Canadian and Southern United States accents, and sporadically across the Mid-West and the West. However, it is rarely heard in contemporary RP.
• Pronunciation of /t/: the alveolar stop /t/ can be pronounced as a glottal stop, , only if it is followed by a consonant in either the same word or the following word. Thus grateful can be pronounced [ˈɡɹeɪʔfɫ̩] . However, Skinner recommended avoiding the glottal stop altogether; she also recommended a "lightly aspirated" /t/ in place of the flapped /t/ typical of American speakers whenever /t/ appears between vowels. Likewise, winter is not pronounced similarly or identically to winner , as it is by some Americans. Generally, Skinner advocated for articulating /t/ with some degree of aspiration in most contexts.
• Resistance to yod-dropping: Dropping of /j/ only occurs after /r/, and optionally after /s/ and /l/. Mid-Atlantic also lacks palatalization, so duke is pronounced [djuːk] rather than [dʒuːk] (the first variant versus the second one here). All of this mirrors (conservative) RP.
• A "dark L" sound, [ɫ], may be heard for /l/ in all contexts, more like General American than RP. However, Skinner explicitly discouraged darker articulations for actors.
• A tapped articulation of post-consonantal or inter-vocalic /r/ is heard in many of the very earliest recordings of Mid-Atlantic speakers born in the mid-19th century, likely for dramatic effect in public speaking. However, it was rare in speakers born after that time, and Skinner disapproved of its usage.

Other pronunciation patterns

• Skinner approved of the -day suffix (e.g. Monday; yesterday) being pronounced as or as ("i" as in "did"), without any particular preference.
• Instead of the unrounded STRUT vowel, the rounded LOT vowel (listen) is used in everybody, nobody, somebody, and anybody; and when stressed, was, of, from, what. This is more like RP than General American. At times, the vowels in the latter words can be reduced to a schwa. However, "because" uses the THOUGHT vowel.
• Polysyllabic words ending in -ary, -ery, -ory, -mony, -ative, -bury, -berry: The first vowel in the endings -ary, -ery, -ory, -mony, -ative, -bury, and -berry are all pronounced as , commonly known as a schwa. Thus inventory is pronounced , rather than General American or rapidly-spoken RP .

See also

• American English
• Atlas of North American English
• Elocution
• General American English
• Linguistic prescription
• Received Pronunciation

Explanatory notes

1. A similar but unrelated feature occurred in RP. As one attempt of middle-class RP speakers to make themselves sound polished, words in the CLOTH set were shifted from the THOUGHT vowel back to the LOT vowel. Also see U and non-U English for details.
2. "The t after n is often silent in American pronunciation. Instead of saying internet Americans will frequently say 'innernet.' This is fairly standard speech and is not considered overly casual or sloppy speech."

Citations

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106. Skinner, Monich & Mansell (1990), p. 182.
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114. Skinner, Monich & Mansell (1990), p. 292.
115. Skinner, Monich & Mansell (1990), p. 66.
116. Fletcher (2013), p. 339 harvp error: no target: CITEREFFletcher2013 (help)
117. Skinner, Monich & Mansell (1990), pp. 348–9.

General bibliography

• Fletcher, Patricia (2005). Classically Speaking: Dialects for Actors : Neutral American, Classical American, Standard British (RP). Trafford. ISBN 9781412041218.
• Gimson, Alfred C. (1962). An introduction to the pronunciation of English. Foreign Language Study.
• Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles (2006), The Atlas of North American English, Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, ISBN 3-11-016746-8
• Skinner, Edith; Monich, Timothy (1990). Mansell, Lilene (ed.). Speak with Distinction (Second ed.). New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers. ISBN 1-55783-047-9.

Further reading

• Robert MacNeil and William Cran, Do You Speak American? (Talese, 2004). ISBN 0-385-51198-1.
• Nosowitz, Dan (27 October 2016). "How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 26 November 2016.

External links

• Early radio episodes of The Guiding Light featuring Mid-Atlantic English
• "Puhfect Together", an episode of The Brian Lehrer Show in which William Labov is interviewed about the accent
• "A Dying Race", a segment of the 1986 documentary film American Tongues, in which two Boston Brahmin academics talk about their accents while sitting in the Boston Athenæum

• Culture of the Northeastern United States
• Culture of the Southern United States
• Dialect levelling
• English language in North America
• Standard English
• Sociolects
• Upper class culture in the United States