How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-fake-british-accent-took-old-hollywood-by-storm

by tintinnabula • 10 years ago

78 108 10 years ago

zeitgeb3r• 10 years ago

Why does all Star Wars movies use aristocratic British accent?

ajlburke• 10 years ago

The original Star Wars movies were largely shot in Britain, and used British actors for many of the roles, especially the Imperial officers and officials. Carrie Fisher's family had worked in Hollywood during the "golden age" of the mid-Atlantic accent and she had been sent to an elocution school in the U.K. just before being cast for Star Wars - although she admits that her accent changed a lot in the first Star Wars movie.

ajeet_dhaliwal2• 10 years ago

The latest one too.

dmreedy• 10 years ago

This is true, but there was also a significant amount of ADR/Overdubbing work with american actors, especially for the minor roles.

One of the most notable exceptions, of course, being Red Leader, a British actor doing a fantastic rendition of a midwestern american cowboy

pavlov• 10 years ago

Maybe thanks to Sir Alec Guinness? (Who supposedly disliked the Star Wars experience so much that he gave Lucas the idea that Obi-Wan should die, just so that he would be rid of the role... This could be a myth.)

joshvm• 10 years ago

It's not just Star Wars, the Evil Brit is a fairly common trope:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilBrit

jomamaxx• 10 years ago

Star Wars villains in the first series use such accents.

A) The Imperial Navy is a euphimism for the British Navy / Empire.

B) It was filmed in the UK with almost all UK actors.

The new Star Wars - none of the accents are posh really.

Just English accents, again actors, filming etc. - although - I think there was some attempt by JJ to keep it UK-ish in that manner, though I'm not sure.

stonogo• 10 years ago

Ah, yes, the notable villain Obi Wan Kenobi.

Avshalom• 10 years ago

How did that many words get used with out once calling it the "Trans-Atlantic Accent"?

ajeet_dhaliwal2• 10 years ago

Yes, I've mostly known it as being referred to as the TransAtlantic accent rather than mid-atlantic.

SiVal• 10 years ago

Decades ago, I remember it being called the "Mid-Atlantic accent". It was a joke, because it was an artificial accent. The name suggested both a blend of US and England, but also suggested, tongue in cheek, that it was the way people who lived in the middle of the Atlantic (in other words, nobody) actually spoke.

danek3• 10 years ago

fwiw i've heard it called both "Trans-Atlantic" & "Mid-Atlantic"

thembones• 10 years ago

Odd that they call out Cary Grant, he was in fact British.

pash2• 10 years ago

His accent, however, was not.

dirtbox• 10 years ago

I'm British which I think qualifies me to say it very much was. He had a few inflections of the period, but there's no mistaking it.

matt4077• 10 years ago

Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent (either english or my native language), I can't stop myself from imitating it. Really badly. After a week or so I'm terribly annoyed by the sound of my own voice. It has even happened when someone was visiting, and acting in some sort of leadership role with a lot of speaking time.

So I could imagine a single Hollywood director could possibly start a trend (if everybody'a speech center were as spineless as mine).

Osmium2• 10 years ago

Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent

Nit-pick, but everyone speaks with an accent :)

(I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but I have met people who genuinely think that they don't have an accent and are 'unaccented', and it's just other people who do...)

TillE• 10 years ago

But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak, with very minor variations. Most accents that deviate strongly from it are slowly dying out.

This is in stark contrast to the UK, or just England, where you have an incredible amount of linguistic diversity in a very small geographical area. RP is theoretically "standard", but in reality it's a niche upper class thing.

ArkyBeagle• 10 years ago

I have been told that the least accent is the flat Nebraska pronunciation of say, Johnny Carson. I believe it's called General American. It's at least semi-mythic - but some variation of it is used frequently in broadcast.

mc322• 10 years ago

I think it was John Cleese once, who was speaking of a fellow actor who could do great impressions of others and do many accents --he said, "He never had his own voice".

Not sure if Cleese had a point, but it's an interesting take on his fellow actor and that he finds "having one's own voice" important, to some extent.

BellsOnSunday3• 10 years ago

I don't know who John Cleese was talking about but the great comic actor Ronnie Barker (of The Two Ronnies, for you Americans) was like that. Always playing a Cockney barrow boy, Welsh housewife, upper class patrician, so when you heard him on a chat show actually being "himself" it seemed very weird. He was a notoriously private person so those masks might have been part of that. It worked for him anyway, and he must have made at least as many people laugh as did Cleese.

teddyh• 10 years ago

He was probably referring to Peter Sellers.

hackermailman• 10 years ago

There is also many bands with fake accents, like 1980s Minor Threat with whatever UK accent Ian Mackaye was channeling

sverige4• 10 years ago

And all the British bands who have strangely Midwestern accents.

danek3• 10 years ago

I'm always surprised to learn a band is English when I expected they'd be from Chicago or Detroit

microtherion• 10 years ago

I remember how in the 1990s I listened to Green Day (US with British accent) and Bush (British with US accent).

CapitalistCartr• 10 years ago

" . . . sometimes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent, which is deeply offensive to those, like me, from the actual Mid-Atlantic . . . "

" . . . elocution class is wildly offensive to most of the modern linguists . . . "

What is it with this childish writing, being "deeply, wildly" offended at, instead of disagreeing with? Its the wrinting caliber of a young teen, and it seems to be popular.

neffy• 10 years ago

Mermaid infiltration style? Colour me also more than slightly intrigued by this idea of being from the "actual Mid-Atlantic"- which was an ocean last time anybody checked.

sverige4• 10 years ago

I think "Mid-Atlantic" in this case refers to the accents commonly found from Delaware and Maryland south to the northern parts of North Carolina.

flanbiscuit• 10 years ago

I was under the same impression. I thought they called it the "mid-atlantic" accent because it was halfway between the US and British accent. Boy do I feel stupid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_states

nptatall4• 10 years ago

Colour me also more than slightly intrigued by this idea of being from the "actual Mid-Atlantic"- which was an ocean last time anybody checked.

That is exactly why "mid-atlantic accent" is called that[0]. It's halfway between American and British, and it's the native accent of somewhere indistinct where nobody is actually from.

----

[0] Also, since apparently this needs to be explicitly stated in this ridiculous, Gell-Mann-Effect-in-full-force HN thread: "mid-atlantic accent" and "trans-atlantic accent" are synonyms. They are different words for the same thing. BOTH ARE RIGHT.

sverige4• 10 years ago

I have worked with several people who were born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, which is about as mid-Atlantic as it gets. One had very earnestly replaced her accent with that of her adopted Austin, Texas. The other two tried to outdo each other in snobbishness whenever there was a conflict. I don't find it to be a very pleasant accent, but then again, I'm not from there.

vacri• 10 years ago

I was trying to find some sort of self-deprecating humour to explain this kind of obvious hyperbole, but it's not there. If the author was a linguist worth their salt, then they should know the perils of normalising such statements against trivial concepts.

logicallee• 10 years ago

I didn't find the author credible because of their statements going back 'centuries' ("Skinner created one of the most non-neutral accents in the past few centuries" repeated somewhere else in the article which I didn't find just now), but despite this I found it interesting. I looked for youtube clips from several films mentioned, to come to my own conclusion. They matched what the author reports.

So I enjoyed the article but (for myself) didn't necessarily judge the historical account to be accurate. Just read it with a grain of salt.

danek3• 10 years ago

What's with this trend of calling an author's writing "childish" instead of saying you don't care for his style?

openasocket3• 10 years ago

Offensive can also mean something inducing disgust, as in "an offensive odor." That's actually the older usage for it. I've been reading some older novels lately and saw "offensive" used in that way a lot.

tluyben2• 10 years ago

Hmm. That's the meaning I usually hear it used for. What other meaning are you talking about?

lucozade• 10 years ago

I always took that usage to come from the idea of offending one's sensibilities.

That's also how I took the author's use of offensive i.e. it offended his sensibility that mid-Atlantic has two meanings (or whatever it was that he was offended by).

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

It's just straight up bad writing. At least we weren't told to be horrified by anything.

nailer3• 10 years ago

" . . . sometimes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent, which is deeply offensive to those, like me, from the actual Mid-Atlantic . . . "

Speak to any acting coach: it's more frequently called a Trans-Atlantic accent.

Edit: be less absolute.

jewbacca3• 10 years ago

This is incorrect anyway

Even the Wikipedia article is titled "Mid-atlantic accent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

What is it about this article that seems to so efficiently be bringing the armchair prescriptivists out of the woodwork?

nptatall4• 10 years ago

The first thing is obviously playful hyperbole, but I don't know about "childish".

But, regarding your second quote... if you bring up the idea of a way of speaking being "better" or "worse" to a modern linguist, trust, me: you will understand why the author uses "wildly offended" instead of just "offended".

If the author had just kept it at "The entire concept of an elocution class is offensive to most of the modern linguists I know", that would not at all be sufficiently conveying the degree to which the idea of a prescribed elocution class is violently at odds with everything most modern linguists believe in.

zeveb2• 10 years ago

if you bring up the idea of a way of speaking being "better" or "worse" to a modern linguist, trust, me: you will understand why the author uses "wildly offended" instead of just "offended".

Not all modern linguists are descriptivists; some are in fact prescriptivists. It is a pretty fundamental personality divide: some people take the world as it is, others as it could be (or ought to be).

nkrisc• 10 years ago

Shall I fetch your smoking jacket and a brandy so you may tell us how real adults write?

I'll also not point out the elementary writing mistakes in your own comment.

ojosilva• 10 years ago

I missed references in the article to Kelsey Grammer, the actor who portrayed Fraser Crane in the sitcom Fraser. That was how I became acquainted with the Mid-Atlantic accent, by researching Grammer's (or Fraser's to be more precise) distinctively snobby accent.

Fraser's lines and Grammer's interpretation probably deserve a place in the canons of American English accents and linguistics.

wanda• 10 years ago

In the spirit of the aforementioned sitcom's titular character, and with no ill sentiment intended toward the parent, I must hasten to point out that it is spelled 'Frasier'.

StavrosK• 10 years ago

Completely off-topic, but does Latin have genders? Is "Atlas" feminine there? "Atlas obscura" sounds very wrong to me, I imagine it should be "Atlas obscurus".

DonaldFisk3• 10 years ago

Well spotted. Latin has three genders, and Atlas is listed as masculine in all of the online dictionaries listed here: http://www.lexilogos.com/english/latin_dictionary.htm so it should indeed be Atlas obscurus.

cgio2• 10 years ago

Or Atlas obscurae?

sverige4• 10 years ago

An earlier example of this accent is the 1921 recording of William Jennings Bryan reading his famous 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UV2wRCcWJa8

eth0up2• 10 years ago

As a younger creature I had a minor speech complex which at some early point I became conscious of, excessively so. Tormented by the inconsistencies of vowels and consonants in english, I began experimenting with enunciation in grievous violation of convention. In what according to many linguists might be my own stubborn idiocy, I picked a fight with the intervocalic "t", which most Americans pronounce as a "d", e.g. water, little, or i.e. compu(d)er. Some force far less lenient than OCD thereafter compelled me to pronounce the intervocalic "t" as an actual "t", rather than "d". Such enunciation happens to be common in British english. The effects of this compulsion range from public curiosity regarding my origins, to accusations of petty affectation and artificiality. My meager sum of friends might imply a multitude of things, but none of them would dare say I was groveling for more. As for linguists, I adore Mr Pinker and a few others, but can muster no admiration for the notion that prodigious use of discourse-particles indicates conscientiousness[1], particularly the use of "like", which I observe ubiquitously used as punctuation, elocutionary wildcards, and thoughtless substitutions for thoughtfulness and basic articulation. I lack the bravery to willfully incur the wrath of linguistic titans such as Pinker, but I'll have self-definition however fake I seem. If a person's early years are spent in a ghetto where words are spoken one way, but circumstance transports that person to another ghetto where words are spoken differently, must they choose between either/or lest they be deemed "fake" for speaking in accordance with their own ideal? I suggest more scrutiny be placed upon the audience and less on the speaker. This procedure might influence critical-thinking while decreasing the volatility inherent in a system where listeners are trained to reject the unfamiliar and embrace the familiar, i.e cognitive bias, etc.

I have yet to find a dictionary that advises the intervocalic "t" be pronounced as a "d", despite the hordes of individuals who wax tumescently indignant when one doesn't. All I really want is consistency, but I do not insist. And I am aware that the Gods of linguistics profess that language is living and ever mutating and therefore never harmonious or consistent. I doubt, however, that this is an eternal intrinsic attribute. I'm sure I push too far, but such a view seems to me an appeal to authority, while the authority-figures are us unbeknownst.

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/saying-like-study-f...

ewzimm2• 10 years ago

I did the same thing when I was younger. There's still some of it left over, but the embarrassment of being a teenager definitely normalized it. I learned to read when I was pretty young, before I was exposed to a lot of words in speech. I also watched a lot of TV, and people spoke with different accents. Since there wasn't any authoritative way to say things, I preferred to say them how they looked on paper.

douche• 10 years ago

I was in college before I learned how hyperbole is supposed to be pronounced. I'd never actually heard a person say that (it's a little beyond typical small-town Maine vocabulary), so I worked for years under the assumption that it was hyper-bowl, rather than hi-per-boll-ee. I knew hyper, and I knew what the bole of a tree was...

foobarian• 10 years ago

I think you would be a fan of these two guys [1] [2] who championed phonemic spelling. And in fact, Vuk is credited with getting Yugoslav writing to be phonemic.

A common phrase used in Croatia to describe how to write something is to write it "by the Wolf" (since vuk = wolf), indicating that it is supposed to be read as written. This leads to transliterating foreign words in a phonetic manner where one doesn't need to know a particular foreign language to pronounce the word correctly. From your example, to write water "by the Wolf" we would write "votr." :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christoph_Adelung

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87

hx872• 10 years ago

I doubt, however, that this is an eternal intrinsic attribute.

I'm not sure why something has to be intrinsic and eternal in order to be true, or at least useful.

jclem• 10 years ago

Edith Skinner is still taught in conservatory drama programs. I used Skinner at NYU 2004-2008. It's not a rare book at all (or maybe it's just not in a big city with lots of drama schools and training programs). Regardless of how outdated the Good Speech sound is in most contexts (you hear it in a lot of Shakespeare still that isn't RP), the book is an excellent source for learning the International Phonetic Alphabet and techniques for analyzing speech.

I have a lot of southern and mid western speech habits, and learning a rigorous framework for analyzing speech helped me get control over them.

dredmorbius2• 10 years ago

I have a strong suspicion that the accent was adopted, by a newly-talkified Hollywood, in large part because the exTREMEly disTINCT eNUNciation would convey and carry better over the poor audio tracks and reproduction equipment of early theaters (not to mention the audio recording equipment of the time).

With further advances in audio capture, recording, processing, and playback equipment, vernacular accents were possible without risking nonintelligibility to the audience. James Dean's drunken ramble at the conclusion of Giant being a notable exception.

ThinkingGuy• 10 years ago

My understanding was that in the early days of motion pictures, they simply borrowed most of the conventions of stage acting (for example, scenes would commonly show an actor walking into a room, and continue all the way through the action or dialogue, until they had exited the set, rather than cutting out the unnecessary parts). So it would make sense for trained actors accustomed to projecting to a large audience (no wireless mics in those days), to continue projecting and enunciating in the same manner.

dredmorbius2• 10 years ago

That's predating the talkie era.

Yes, early films were shot square-on into the set, as one would film a stage production. That changed with The Great Train Robbery, which introduced a very large number of the set of camera techniques used in film since: long shots, close-ups, tracking, panning, dolly, cross-cutting, and other methods. All in 1903, by Edwin S. Porter.

All that was well established by the time talkies started becoming widespread, particularly with sound-on-film in the 1930s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Train_Robbery_(190...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film

amyjess3• 10 years ago

“Each vowel sound is called a PURE SOUND, and the slightest movement or change in any of the organs of speech during the formation of a vowel will mar its purity, resulting in DIPHTHONGIZATION.”

I find this funny, as the monophthongal /e/ and /o/ sound utterly alien to American ears. So much so that switching from diphthong to monophthong pronunciations for those sounds is a quick-and-dirty way to fake a Scottish accent (yes, very quick and very dirty; nobody will believe your accent is real though they'll think you're trying to sound Scottish).

Edit: Forgot to include gemination marks here. Should be /e:/ and /o:/ above.

lottin• 10 years ago

American English definitely has a monophthongal /e/ sound in words such as BED, which is conventionally transcribed as /e/ although it really is an open/mid "E" rather than a close one and thus /ɛ/ would probably be more accurate. You're probably confusing that sound with the diphthong in FACE /eɪ/, which in Scottish English usually is a long close front vowel /eː/.

amyjess3• 10 years ago

Sorry, I forgot to include the gemination marks (and I've since edited it into GP). I was specifically talking about /e:/ and /o:/, which are monophthongs in Scottish English but diphthongs /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ in American and English English.

emodendroket2• 10 years ago

The entire concept of an elocution class is wildly offensive to most of the modern linguists I know; following the rise of super-linguist Bill Labov in the 1960s, the concept that one way of speaking is “better” or “worse” than another is basically anathema. But that wasn’t at all the case for the rich kids of Westchester County, Beacon Hill, or the Main Line (those would be the home of the elites of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, respectively).

Oh, nonsense. Sociolinguistic prejudices are still with us and it's only those of us speaking the prestige varieties of English who have the luxury of pretending we all speak naturally now. If you don't think so, ask some people their opinions of AAVE or "Ebonics." Or even a Southern drawl.

nptatall4• 10 years ago

The entire concept of an elocution class is wildly offensive to most of the modern linguists I know

Emphasis mine.

Are you a linguist?

psychometry• 10 years ago

I think you're misinterpreting the quote. The author isn't saying that linguists reject the existence of prejudice; they rather reject the bases for that prejudice.

emodendroket2• 10 years ago

But modern linguists are generally not the kind of people who'd want to take an elocution class today. Mostly people who would want to take such a class are people whose accents clearly mark them as being in a disfavored group. So if "modern linguists" really oppose the very concept of such a class I'd say they're being rather solipsistic.

And in fact I don't think they do, since linguists are among the specialists who contribute to "accent reduction" courses, which seems like a modern name for the same thing.

uxp100• 10 years ago

modern linguists

You'd have to ask a modern linguist, not just anybody. Class signifiers in speech still exist, but modern linguists are not likely to endorse one way of speaking as better than others.

I guess I agree with your objection though, this statement is pointless. Its comparing modern linguists to '60s rich folks from the east coast. They don't agree, what a surprise. I think you are right, in that a better comparison would be '60s rich folks from the east coast to 2010s rich folks from the east coast. And I agree that you would find things have not changed as much.

I think the whole statement was a way to introduce that the author has been talking to linguists, and start with a really crude overview of their opinion of the whole thing before we get to the details.

kitd• 10 years ago

Funnily enough, while the mid-Atlantic screen accent was dying out post WW2, its English equivalent, RP, was being kept well and truly alive in the UK by the BBC.

Actors like Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins were instructed to drop their Welsh accents if they wanted to progress in their acting careers, as RP was the "right" way for an actor to speak.

Even in other professions, regional accents were replaced by RP. My father was told to drop his Welsh accent if he wanted to become a lawyer.

RP was only really dropped in the 1980s.

On a side note, is Clara Bow's story the basis for "Singing in the Rain"?

How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

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