The sound of American speech
Among the many random things I consider every now and then is how Americans talk. For example, when did business people adopt the Valley Girl habit of ending sentences as if they were questions? When did any trace of a rolled R leave our pronunciation? Stuff like that. (When did I start saying "stuff" as opposed to "things"?)
By complete accident, I ran across a piece in The Atlantic that asks a related question: When did Americans stop sounding this way? By "this way," the author refers to something called the Transatlantic Accent, a sort of manufactured way of speaking taught by elocution coaches that we've all heard in old movies.
Interestingly, long before I discovered this story, I found myself wondering about this question when I heard a story on KUOW a year ago about the Great Seattle Fire (Real Audio | MP3 | audio download | transcript). I suggest listening rather than merely reading the transcript, because my point will be lost otherwise. (Also, it's just a fun, interesting piece.) What struck me about the piece is the way that the people, survivors of the Great Fire, which took place in 1889, sounded. If the announcer is to be believed, the people being interviewed are event attendees pulled from the crowd. But they speak with a version of this Transatlantic Accent, and it appears that they're just average Seattlites, not actors or announcers. So when did we stop sounding this way, if we ever sounded this way at all?
I'm virtually certain that television and the movies have played an enormous role in the evolution of our national sound--that is, if we can be said to have one given all the regional flavor American speech offers. Still, the media has got to be the primary mover of the General American accent. And with the lamentable proliferation of disdain for education in this country today, anything that sounds like it may come from someone who's read a book probably generates enough mocking or repulsion to discourage at least some people from sounding anything like they care about how they express themselves which, I think, is a shame.
But I digress.
When I think about this, what I think about, in early radio, movies, and television, is the difference between how comedians sound and how dramatic actors sound. Comedians so often took the role of the common man in film and television. Characters from the monied class usually came with a Transatlantic Accent built in. So I find myself wondering, based on how people sound in the Seattle Fire clip, if we as a nation circled ourselves into a sort of self-reinforced aural classification by accent adoption, or if (and this is far more likely) the media merely reflected and emphasized a natural national phenomenon.
I suppose what I'm thinking about here is evolution in action, evidence of something changing over time. Just like finding a fossil and interpreting its patterns and ridges, listening to the KUOW piece and the film clip included in The Atlantic story presents an opportunity to examine something that has been lost or changed so significantly that, while it may not be unrecognizable, certainly is unfamiliar. We're offered a window into a very different time. I think that's pretty cool.
By complete accident, I ran across a piece in The Atlantic that asks a related question: When did Americans stop sounding this way? By "this way," the author refers to something called the Transatlantic Accent, a sort of manufactured way of speaking taught by elocution coaches that we've all heard in old movies.
Interestingly, long before I discovered this story, I found myself wondering about this question when I heard a story on KUOW a year ago about the Great Seattle Fire (Real Audio | MP3 | audio download | transcript). I suggest listening rather than merely reading the transcript, because my point will be lost otherwise. (Also, it's just a fun, interesting piece.) What struck me about the piece is the way that the people, survivors of the Great Fire, which took place in 1889, sounded. If the announcer is to be believed, the people being interviewed are event attendees pulled from the crowd. But they speak with a version of this Transatlantic Accent, and it appears that they're just average Seattlites, not actors or announcers. So when did we stop sounding this way, if we ever sounded this way at all?
I'm virtually certain that television and the movies have played an enormous role in the evolution of our national sound--that is, if we can be said to have one given all the regional flavor American speech offers. Still, the media has got to be the primary mover of the General American accent. And with the lamentable proliferation of disdain for education in this country today, anything that sounds like it may come from someone who's read a book probably generates enough mocking or repulsion to discourage at least some people from sounding anything like they care about how they express themselves which, I think, is a shame.
But I digress.
When I think about this, what I think about, in early radio, movies, and television, is the difference between how comedians sound and how dramatic actors sound. Comedians so often took the role of the common man in film and television. Characters from the monied class usually came with a Transatlantic Accent built in. So I find myself wondering, based on how people sound in the Seattle Fire clip, if we as a nation circled ourselves into a sort of self-reinforced aural classification by accent adoption, or if (and this is far more likely) the media merely reflected and emphasized a natural national phenomenon.
I suppose what I'm thinking about here is evolution in action, evidence of something changing over time. Just like finding a fossil and interpreting its patterns and ridges, listening to the KUOW piece and the film clip included in The Atlantic story presents an opportunity to examine something that has been lost or changed so significantly that, while it may not be unrecognizable, certainly is unfamiliar. We're offered a window into a very different time. I think that's pretty cool.