Posh Bostonians

I think if you look at 1930s/1940s movies featuring the upper crust from anywhere in the northeast the accent will be somewhat plummy and British.

I’ve always wondered about accents in movies, esp. American films, and assumed that Americans can’t tell the difference between one and another.

My favorite is how the very French Jean Reno is constantly referred to as an “Italian Hitman” in The Professional, and how Antonio Bandero is suppposed to pass for an Arab in “The 13th Warrier”.

@3 But that’s how Katherine Hepburn talked – almost inimitably, I’ll admit – haven’t you seen the African Queen?

Would the upper class patois of William S. Buckley be considered English? What about that of grande dame of Marx Brother’s films, Margaret Dumont? I’ve noticed the upper crust in those 30’s movies always sound somewhat English and IMHO the accent is American. Hmmm….I wonder about Canada…

I have a tiny insight into upper class New York speech. Listen to recordings of Franklin Roosevelt sometime — that was once the real thing. I don’t know if anyone still speaks like that, or at least I know only one person who does. I’d swear to god that Judge Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York sounds just like Roosevelt. Which makes sense because, I just learned, he’s an Auchincloss cousin. Now Louis Auchincloss probably sounds like that too, but they are probably relics of another era (or maybe the younger generations have taken on the old speech, but I doubt it).

Now what does that sound like? It doesn’t really sound English-English. But it is very different from the ordinary speech even of educated New Yorkers these days. Maybe the Katherine Hepburn version of it (in her interviews I think she really talked like she did in the African Queen, or maybe was it like her even earlier role in Stage Door?) is as close an analogy as anyone is likely to recognize these days.

I remember when reading Henry James in our high school english class (in America), our professor made a point of telling us that as late as the turn of the last century, the American accent (at least in society circles James would have frequented) sounded quite British. I haven’t a clue what kind of evidence there is for this, but if true it might help explain this fact, perhaps in combination with the fact that the accent shift was slower to take effect in stage speech for the reasons mentioned by jp above.

This includes Southern accents, as my Tennessee-born wife is fond of pointing out.

Damn straight.

One of the best New Yorker cartoons ever showed a community theater rehearsal where the society-lady director’s addressing the cast: “It’s agreed, then, that we will dispense with the Southern accents?” (By Helen Hokinson, if you remember her.)

@4: I’ve seen The Professional many times, and didn’t realize until just this weekend that Jean Reno’s character was supposed to be Italian (as opposed to just working for them). As I said to my girlfriend, “he’s the Frenchiest French who ever Frenched”.

Regarding “The Professional”, since the movie was written and directed by Luc Besson, I think it is safe to assume that he was making a joke.

Loyd Grossman.

That is all.

This is definitely how people used to sound. Combine an Eastern-seaboard accent with an educated person’s articulation, and you get the way my grandparents and their friends sound. What you want is someone who is quite old, born in New England or New York, and went to college. This is the best I could find online, I think he’s in his 60s: http://www.charlierose.com/guests/peter-gomes

It still exists, and not just among the old. There is a branch of my family that continues to use a sort of high blue blood New England accent that is not far removed from FDR et al. I have a cousin who is a radio reporter and is always asked to round off her accent to sound more “American.” And my grandmother, who was a Bryn Mawr girl ca 1918, sounded a lot like Kate Hepburn. Having been raised in Maryland, I sound more like David Simon…

Back in Oklahoma the way we used to imitate an upperclass New England accent was to talk slowly and in round tones while keeping our teeth held toghether. It also helps to open one nostril a little wider than the other.

It also helps to open one nostril a little wider than the other.

Can anyone really do this? Is this even physiologically possible?

Combine an Eastern-seaboard accent with an educated person’s articulation, and you get the way my grandparents and their friends sound.

Come to think of it, it’s a similar thing with the older people in my family. The New England accent is nasally to begin with. Add educated e-nun-ciation (the extreme example would be Charles Winchester III from MASH), and you get the accent. My older relatives didn’t sound like Charles Winchester, but if you exaggerate and add some affectation, you can see it.

I remember seeing the movie Spitfire Grill a few years ago, set somewhat close to where I grew up, and the accents were really bad. They would change from second to second: Southern, English, Scottish, Irish. Here’s a clip:

http://video.tvguide.com/ID/820713

No one in the cast had it right. Maybe 40’s Hollywood imitations of Northeast accents were bad as well…?

Professor Frederick Clifton Packard:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=103637

I heard a nice interview with Martin Scorsese on the making of Gangs of New York. He claims to have put a lot of work into researching accents of the period, and turned up some interesting info: for example, upper-class New York types would be sure to pronounce ‘pearls on the girls’ rather more like we think working-class Noo Yoikers do today (or is this also slipping away?) ‘Poi-als on the goi-als’

I find this very plausible. I think as time goes by, accents are all becoming standardised. Apparantly, even the Queen’s English (I mean Elizabeth’s) has not been immune – I read a report a while ago in which experts had alalysed her speech and concluded that she had been watching too many Australian soap operas.

Here in Ireland, everybody under 15 years old sounds American. I’m always amazed listening to recordings of Joyce or Shaw or Yeats – those accents slipping ever further back into antiquity.

I also remember recently hearing about a Sheakespeare production in which linguists and scholars had cobbled together an approximation of what they imagined Shakespeare’s English might have sounded like. I expect it was wonderfully broad.

Could someone with FDR’s accent be elected President today?

And am I wrong that I’ve noticed a certain “folksy” edge to Obama’s speech I don’t remember from the primaries? (And hasn’t Bush’s speech gotten folksier and folksier throughout his presidency? He sounds like a red-dirt farmer these days, even when he’s wearing a tux.)