The “Mid-Atlantic” or “Transatlantic” Accent
Please see How to Work on an Accent for advice on using an accent resource.
Context
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 (specifically Received Pronunciation). It is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, “its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so”. The accent was embraced in private independent preparatory schools, especially by members of the American Northeastern upper class, as well as in schools for film and stage acting, with its overall use sharply declining after the Second World War.
Wikipedia: Mid-Atlantic accent
Due to its association with Hollywood’s golden age, this accent has historically been taught in drama schools as “Stage Standard” or even simply “Good Speech.”*
It’s important to acknowledge in our context that no speech variety is intrinsically good or bad, and there is no such thing as culturally “neutral” speech. Mid-Atlantic may once have been considered a so-called standard, but just like any speech variety, it is coded with specific cultural implications, particularly in this case around wealth, prestige, and access.
For that reason, the Mid-Atlantic accent helps convey our story for A Little Night Music…a story about characters who have those kinds of privileges. We can imagine that most of these characters would have been educated to speak a certain way by virtue of their social location/class.
*For a deep dive into the history of the World English movement, including its problems, see Dudley Knight’s 1997 article “Standard Speech: The Ongoing Debate” (accessible via the U-M library.)
Accent Models
Holiday (1938)
(The full movie is available to rent here.)
Additional Samples
Other Speakers
Accent Features
Unless otherwise indicated, practice phrases are excerpted from Lexical Sets for Actors by Eric Armstrong under a creative commons license.
Audio examples are taken from the audio cassette accompanying Edith Skinner’s Speak With Distinction, a textbook of mid-century “Stage Standard” speech. Unfortunately, the audio quality is sometimes not ideal.
General Considerations
In general, the accent uses a spacious, open vocal tract configuration. For many speakers, this will mean dropping the jaw somewhat and adding some range of motion and muscularity to the action of the lips and tongue.
In general, speakers of this accent pronounce the maximum number of sounds in each word, avoiding common fluency/efficiency strategies such as cluster reduction and devoicing.
Vowels of R
This is a non-rhotic accent, meaning that R sounds are not produced when they come in final syllable position.
Another way to say this is that R is only pronounced in front of a vowel sound.
Drop the R’s in words like NEAR, SQUARE, START, NORTH, CURE, NURSE, lettER, etc.
The example sentence from Speak With Distinction: “Fearless bears surely roar far.”
Consonant R (“Crispy”)
R sounds are pronounced when they occur:
- At the beginning of syllables (e.g. “red roses”)
- Between two vowels (e.g. “marry”)
- At the end of a word when the next word starts with a vowel (e.g. “bear attack”)
Rounded Back Vowels
This accent uses actively rounded lips for most back vowels. In the example from Speak With Distinction, all but the last word has some degree of lip rounding: “Do good poetic laws foster drama?”
The recording includes space for you to practice along after each example word:
Liquid U
Liquid U refers to the OO sound preceded by a Y glide (as is always the case in words like “music” or “computer”).
In this accent the liquid U sound also happens:
- Following T, D, and N (e.g. “Tuesday”, “duty”, or “news”)
- Often following L and S (e.g. “lewd”, “suit”)
- But not when the vowel sound is spelled with O (e.g. no liquid U in “do,” “too”, etc.)
Wine/Whine Split
This accent differentiates between the voiced W sound and the voiceless WH sound. Word pairs such as witch/which, wine/whine, and Wales/whales are distinct.
Note that WH shows up frequently in common question words: what, where, why, when, which.
Liaison (Linking)
There are two important ways this accent handles the transition from one word to the next:
“Ask” Words
This accent includes a set of words that use a more open vowel quality than in other varieties of North American English. You can hear this sound in the final word of the front vowel sentence from Speak With Distinction: “Lee is telling airy Ann’s answer.”
An alphabetized list of “Ask” words is available here. If you say a word with the vowel sound in the word BATH, it’s a good idea to check the list to see if you need to open that vowel a bit.
Some usual suspects: ask, rather, dance, laugh, can’t…