Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vog Obam here with another classic episode from our archive and from our former host, Christian Sager. If you've ever watched old movies, say from the nineties or earlier, or listen to old radio plays, you may have noticed that the accents American actors used were different than what we hear today. There's a reason for that, and this episode explains it. Hey brain Stuff, it's Christian Sager here.
If you have ever heard old movies or newsreels from the thirties or forties, then you've probably heard that weird old timey voice. You know, it sounds something like this. Now see here, Mr Weather's being there's no money in dog racing. The future is radio. You hear me radio? It sounds a little like a blend between American English and a form of British English. So what is this cadence? Exactly?
This type of pronunciation is actually called the Transatlantic or mid Atlantic accent, and it isn't like most other accents. Instead of naturally evolving, the trans Atlantic 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 theater. In upper class boarding schools across New England, students learned the Transatlantic accent as an international norm for communication, similar to the way posh British society used received pronunciation. Essentially, that's the way the queen and aristocrats are taught to speak. It has several quasi British elements, such as a lack of roticity. This means that mid Atlantic speakers drop their rs at the
end of words like winna or clea. They'll also use softer British vowels daunce instead of dance, for instance. Another thing that stands out is the emphasis on clipped sharp teas. In American English, we often pronounced the tea in words like writer or water as d's. Transatlantic speakers will hit that t like it stole something writer water. But again, this speech pattern isn't completely British, nor is it really
completely American. Instead, it's a form of English that's hard to place, and that's part of why Hollywood loved it. There's also a theory that technological constraints helped mid Atlantic's popularity. According to professor J. Oberski. This nasally clipped pronunciation is a vestiage from the early days of radio Receivers had very little based technology at the time, and it was very difficult, if not impossible, to hear based tones on
your home device. Now we live in an age where based technology booms from the trunks of cars all across America. So what happened to the Transatlantic accent. Well, it's no longer the common tongue of elite boarding schools. Linguist William Labov notes that mid Lantic speech fell out of favor after World War Two, as fewer teachers continued teaching the pronunciation to their students. That's one of the reasons this
speech sounds so old timey to us today. When people learn it, they're usually learning it for acting purposes rather than for everyday use. However, we can still hear the effects of mid Atlantic speech in recordings of everyone from Katherine Hepburn to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and of course countless films, newsreels, and radio shows from the thirties and forties. Today's episode was written by Ben Bolan and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other topics visit
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