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How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm
- zeitgeb3r 10y agoWhy does all Star Wars movies use aristocratic British accent?
- ajlburke 10y agoThe 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_dhaliwal 10y agoThe latest one too.
- dmreedy 10y agoThis 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 10y agoMaybe 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 10y agoIt's not just Star Wars, the Evil Brit is a fairly common trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilBrit http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilBrit
- jomamaxx 10y agoStar 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 10y agoAh, yes, the notable villain Obi Wan Kenobi.
- arethuza 10y agoPlayed by Guinness who was half Scottish and educated in Edinburgh and Mcregor who seems completely Scottish. Do we Scots get an exemption from the "evil Brit" trope - (OK apart from Begby or Fred the Shred, but there aren't really people like that in Scotland, honest). ;-)
- BellsOnSunday 10y agoIt doesn't matter where Alec Guinness was born, he sounded about as Scottish as the Queen. Ewan McGregor's English accent OTOH sounds fake.
- arethuza 10y agoI was probably thinking of Guinness as Charles I in Cromwell.
- amyjess 10y agoIt makes a bit more sense when you realize that the Empire saw themselves as the continuation of the Republic (the Senate wasn't abolished until partway through A New Hope, for example), and Obi-Wan was very much a part of the Republic's leadership, being a sitting member of the Jedi Council and all. So it's not so much a "villain accent" as it is a "Republic leadership accent", where the Empire is just a corrupted Republic.
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- Avshalom 10y agoHow did that many words get used with out once calling it the "Trans-Atlantic Accent"?
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- ajeet_dhaliwal 10y agoYes, I've mostly known it as being referred to as the TransAtlantic accent rather than mid-atlantic.
- SiVal 10y agoDecades 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.
- danek 10y agofwiw i've heard it called both "Trans-Atlantic" & "Mid-Atlantic"
- thembones 10y agoOdd that they call out Cary Grant, he was in fact British.
- pash 10y agoHis accent, however, was not.
- dirtbox 10y agoI'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.
- tagawa 10y agoI disagree - to me the inflections in his on-screen speech sound predominantly American. (For the record, I'm British too)
- pash 10y agoI won't tell you what you hear, but his manner of speaking is often held out as an example of Mid-Atlantic diction, albeit an idiosyncratic one—Cary Grant spoke like Cary Grant. His accent was his native Bristol at base, with Americanisms heaped on top, a Mid-Atlantic destination arrived at from the opposite direction of contemporary American actors. But with his short American a's and clipped cadence, to my ear his delivery often seems closer to that of his American co-stars than to that of his English ones. For example, take a listen to the trailer of The Grass is Greener (1961) [0], in which Grant plays alongside a cast from both sides of the Atlantic. Hear it? (I'm American and have lived in England, by the way.) 0. https://youtu.be/JpCm22wh6qQ https://youtu.be/JpCm22wh6qQ
- zc75 10y agoJust a counterpoint: I have short A's and a clipped cadence. I'm English and have never been to America. (Not that I'm from Bristol either!) I've never thought of Cary Grant's accent to be anything but English. I don't hear any American in it at all.
- matt4077 10y agoWhenever 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).
- Osmium 10y 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 10y agoBut 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.
- Osmium 10y ago> But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak, with very minor variations. So this was actually the kind of thing I was hoping to address with my comment. The idea that there's a "neutral" accent is, linguistically speaking, nonsense. That said, there probably isn't too much harm in it, in that if you're an American talking to other Americans there's probably not much ambiguity. The problem is more that it could create the mistaken idea that, say, "General American" is somehow "normal" and therefore anybody speaking with a different accent becomes "the other", for whatever that may mean. It becomes a reference point to judge other accents against, when that's not necessarily helpful. And there's a lot of accent prejudice out there... ask anyone who's gone for a job interview, for example, who's been very well-qualified but has an accent that the interviewer didn't expect (this can be due to regional or social backgrounds, or even gender – e.g. so-called "valley girl speak"/high rising terminal). Just something worth thinking about, that's all. I know I've dismissed someone before off-hand based on how they sound, which is not a good thing, and something I'd like to be more aware of myself.
- hackermailman 10y agoThere is also many bands with fake accents, like 1980s Minor Threat with whatever UK accent Ian Mackaye was channeling
- sverige 10y agoAnd all the British bands who have strangely Midwestern accents.
- danek 10y agoI'm always surprised to learn a band is English when I expected they'd be from Chicago or Detroit
- microtherion 10y agoI remember how in the 1990s I listened to Green Day (US with British accent) and Bush (British with US accent).
- CapitalistCartr 10y 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 10y agoMermaid 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.
- sverige 10y agoI think "Mid-Atlantic" in this case refers to the accents commonly found from Delaware and Maryland south to the northern parts of North Carolina.
- CRConrad 10y agoOch att döma av citatet ur artikeln ett par poster högre upp så har du fel.
- flanbiscuit 10y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_states
- cperciva 10y agoIt is called a "mid-Atlantic" accent because it's halfway between American and British; it has nothing to do with mid-Atlantic states. The author even acknowledges this in the sentence immediately following the one where she claims to be deeply offended: "What that name means in this case is that the accent can be placed somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between New England and England". This is simply poor writing.
- ojosilva 10y agoI 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 10y agoIn 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 10y agoCompletely 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".
- DonaldFisk 10y agoWell 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 http://www.lexilogos.com/english/latin_dictionary.htm so it should indeed be Atlas obscurus.
- cgio 10y agoOr Atlas obscurae?
- jessaustin 10y agoI don't know Latin, but from the word "alumnae" I would expect that to be the plural feminine ending. Of course in the one case it's a noun and in the other it's an adjective, so I may be way off base.
- DonaldFisk 10y agoHow is that supposed to parse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#First_and_second_declension_adjectives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#First_and_sec... gives the declension for adjectives such as obscurus. I think the web site gets it wrong because of "camera obscura" (Latin for "dark room"). Camera (modern French: "la chambre") is feminine so takes the feminine form of the adjective.
- cgio 10y agoI think it's not the Atlas that is obscure/dark, but rather an Atlas of darkness.
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- sverige 10y agoAn 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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UV2wRCcWJa8
- eth0up 10y agoAs 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-filler-words_n_5484309.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/saying-like-study-f...
- ewzimm 10y agoI 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.
- jclem 10y agoEdith 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.
- dredmorbius 10y agoI 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 10y agoMy 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.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThat'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_(1903_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Train_Robbery_(190... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film
- amyjess 10y 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 10y agoAmerican 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/.
- amyjess 10y agoSorry, 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.
- emodendroket 10y 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.
- nptatall 10y 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 10y agoI 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.
- emodendroket 10y agoBut 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 10y 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 10y agoFunnily 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"?