BrainStuff explains that the plummy, upper-crust accent is reminiscent of British aristocracy and was actually the style of speaking taught to students in New England boarding schools. The style includes enunciated T's -- in words like water or writer -- and dropped R's -- in words like winner or clear.
And it isn't like most other accents – instead of naturally evolving, the Transatlantic accent was acquired. This means that people in the United States were taught to speak in this voice. Historically Transatlantic speech was the hallmark of aristocratic America and theatre.
Originally Answered: why do people in old movies talk weird? Its called Transatlantic accent. The accent is a cross of British and American speech. The actors were trained to talk that way in order to break the language barrier between the Brits and Yanks.
Was everyone in America talked like that in the 50-60s? It's called a mid Atlantic or transatlantic accent. It was a common accent for upper class northeastern Americans, I guess a lot of people really liked the sound of it, so it was used a lot in theatre and taught in acting schools.
Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region…. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures.
The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the late 19th-century and early 20th-century American upper class and entertainment industry, which blended together features regarded as the most prestigious from both American and British English ( ...
Throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, stars including Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, and Orson Welles employed what's known as a “Mid-Atlantic accent,” a sort of American-British hybrid of speaking that relies on tricks like dropping “R” sounds and softening vowels, in order to convey wealth and ...
The first is isolation; early colonists had only sporadic contact with the mother country. The second is exposure to other languages, and the colonists came into contact with Native American languages, mariners' Indian English pidgin and other settlers, who spoke Dutch, Swedish, French and Spanish.
The Transatlantic accent is sometimes thought of as that “old-timey” way of speaking in 1930s and 1940s films; but its usage and impact extends far beyond American cinema. Sometimes referred to as a Mid-Atlantic accent, it is a carefully crafted dialect meant to imitate the upper-crust elite.
The Jazz Singer, American musical film, released in 1927, that was the first feature-length movie with synchronized dialogue. It marked the ascendancy of “talkies” and the end of the silent-film era.
Lights of New York was the first all-talking feature film. There had been, of course, The Jazz Singer, released in Oct. 1927 as the first feature film incorporating synchronized dialog. However, this film released in July 1928 is virtually unremembered for its place in film history.
Virtually all Hollywood musicals – from West Side Story (1961) and Grease (1978), to Chicago (2002) and High School Musical (2006) – are shot with the actors lip-syncing while on camera to a vocal track they pre-recorded in a studio weeks or months prior.
A video from BrainStuff explains why the people in old movies might have an accent or dialect you just can't seem to place. BrainStuff explains that the plummy, upper-crust accent is reminiscent of British aristocracy and was actually the style of speaking taught to students in New England boarding schools.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, dialects from many different regions of England and the British Isles existed in every American colony, allowing a process of extensive dialect mixture and leveling in which English varieties across the colonies became more homogeneous compared with the varieties in Britain.
These changes can be due to aging changes of the voice, or presbyphonia. Vocal quality changes are a result of changes to the voice box (larynx) and the vocal cords (vocal folds) which is called presbylarynges. The vocal folds need to be able to completely close and vibrate evenly for efficient voicing.
The “American English” we know and use today in an American accent first started out as an “England English” accent. According to a linguist at the Smithsonian, Americans began putting their own spin on English pronunciations just one generation after the colonists started arriving in the New World.
As a result, although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn't.
What do other countries think of American accents?
Abroad, American accents are most likely to be considered “friendly,” (34 percent of non-U.S. respondents), “straight-forward” (27 percent), and “assertive” (20 percent).
TL;DR: Circumstantially, the first American accents were heard just as soon as there were American-born children old enough to talk in 1610s Jamestown and 1620s Plymouth. Around 1670, local American accents such as these began their spread to being regional, used across hundreds of miles in various cities and colonies.
As microphone and broadcast technology improved, it became less crucial to speak distinctly. If you spoke like a 40s or 50s newscaster in ordinary conversation today, people would think you were being overly formal or precise. Also remember that many movie and television stars of that era got their start in theater.
General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm), is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent.
Why don t people speak in a Transatlantic accent anymore?
Teachers eventually stopped teaching it as much after the second World War, and the accent eventually died off, which is why you don't hear it much today.
Considering all of this and his farmer upbringing, it is safe to speculate that Washington's natural accent was, as Morse portrays it, predominantly American with a detectable English influence.
