If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. If you say, I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd, like some vaudeville version of a Boston accent, you are non-rhotic. From looking at Labov’s study, I know today, as I didn’t know yesterday, that linguists use the term rhotic to describe whether a person pronounces, or doesn’t, the “R” sound before a consonant or at the end of a word. The “flipped prestige markers” point here is fascinating. I feel that his work on this and many other language-related matters should be far more widely known than it is. Labov suspected that WWII had something to do about it. NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. You should talk to William Labov, pioneering sociolinguist, whose landmark study into New York City speech led him to ask the same question you have. Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. That is the tendency of Americans trying to sound more British, or Brits trying to sound more Yank, to split the difference and speak in an accent whose home ground is no real country but somewhere in the middle of the sea. With such a useful explanation, why do I gripe about the name? To me, “Mid-Atlantic English” is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). Buckley, Jr., Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland, Maria Callas, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV. Others outside the entertainment industry known for speaking Mid-Atlantic English include William F. Orson Welles notably spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent in the 1941 film Citizen Kane, as did many of his co-stars, such as Joseph Cotten.
It was then that the majority of audiences first heard Hollywood actors speaking predominantly in Mid-Atlantic English…īritish expatriates John Houseman, Henry Daniell, Anthony Hopkins, Camilla Luddington, and Angela Cartwright exemplified the accent, as did. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures. As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region…. Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. (And, OK, I’m not a linguist, but I’m married to one!) But it’s clear that the diction I call Announcer Voice has been the object of close linguistic study. I’ll try to give a representative range, and I am grateful for the care and thought that have gone into these responses.ġ) The linguists have a name for it: they call it “Mid-Atlantic English.” I don’t like this name, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. Here’s a sampling for today, with more planned in the days ahead.
NARRATOR VOICE MOVIE
The responses fall into interesting categories: linguistic descriptions of this accent sociological and ethnic explanations for its rise and fall possible technological factors in its prominence and disappearance explanations rooted in the movie industry nominees for who might have been the last American to talk this way and suggestions that a few rare specimens still exist. Thanks for the scores of replies that have arrived in the past day, in response to my post asking why the stentorian, phony-British Announcer Voice that dominated newsreel narration, stage and movie acting, and public discourse in the United States during the first half of the 20 th century had completely disappeared.
0 kommentar(er)
