AHC: Mid-Atlantic accent remains in use

I'm talking about the cultivated not-quite-British accent associated with people like Katharine Hepburn and George Plimpton. Nobody really spoke this accent natively, but it was very widely cultivated in the years leading up to WWII. It has since died out except among eccentric fictional characters like Frasier Crane. Would it be possible to keep this accent vital and flourishing, with lots of new young people learning to speak this way up to the present day?
 
The issue is that radio and television broadcasting is neutralizing many regional accents. Keep in mind that accents were at their most diverse among those born before 1930.
 
I think it’s very unfortunate what’s happening to accents nationwide. Accents feel as though they emphasize a culture and a place, but they are constantly becoming weaker and rarer. I myself have a very light Long Island accent when my parents both had much stronger ones (my dad was almost unintelligible to people not used to his accent when I was a kid) and I always thought it was really cool.

I don’t think there is any way to preserve that sort of learned accent without a specific culture preservation/revival movement focused on accents and maybe offering free classes for people to learn or re-learn that accent. That would only be so successful and really, when an accent is going away it’s probably not coming back as having one that’s too strong or particular can be seen as a disadvantage in one’s career or if somebody lives somewhere where a lot of people from elsewhere live/are moving to.
 

manav95

Banned
I think it’s very unfortunate what’s happening to accents nationwide. Accents feel as though they emphasize a culture and a place, but they are constantly becoming weaker and rarer. I myself have a very light Long Island accent when my parents both had much stronger ones (my dad was almost unintelligible to people not used to his accent when I was a kid) and I always thought it was really cool.

I don’t think there is any way to preserve that sort of learned accent without a specific culture preservation/revival movement focused on accents and maybe offering free classes for people to learn or re-learn that accent. That would only be so successful and really, when an accent is going away it’s probably not coming back as having one that’s too strong or particular can be seen as a disadvantage in one’s career or if somebody lives somewhere where a lot of people from elsewhere live/are moving to.

True and I feel my accent is so generic, so American. There's nothing distinctive about me, nothing to mark me as a New Yorker or Southerner or Bostonite. That being said, I think the Midwest and South are still retaining their regional accents and these accents will still exist by the end of this century.
 
The rejection of old world accents as prestige ones is a by-product of American triumphalism.

WW2 must not go the way it has in order for this not to happen.
 
The rejection of old world accents as prestige ones is a by-product of American triumphalism.

WW2 must not go the way it has in order for this not to happen.

I guess it's an obvious enough connection, but it hadn't occurred to me that the abandonment of the Mid-Atlantic accent might have been a direct consequence of the decline of the British Empire.
 
Top