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Want to know why actors in Golden Age Hollywood movies sound different from people today? A legend has grown up that it was all because an Australian and a Canadian invented a fake accent that studios forced their stars to use. Here I’ll try to show why that’s a load of you know what, and get closer to the fascinating reality.
John McWhorter and Jessica Drake interviewed: https://www.mobituaries.com/news/death-of-an-accent
John McWhorter on American non-rhoticity: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=19486
Dudley Knight’s article on Tilly & co: https://ktspeechwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Standard-Speech-The-Ongoing-Debate.pdf
Hepburn interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqFzFyWnnhs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfT_XWTldlo
Drone footage of oil fields courtesy of Alexander X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaDDtimvUUQ
Thank you to the Cinema Museum http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/
Los Angeles crew: Stewart Hoke and Steven Angelo
48 Comments
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Well I learned something today! Thanks for that!
Average tourist: uses the Hollywood sign as a backdrop for a casual Instagram selfie.
Dr Geoff Lindsey: uses the Hollywood sign as the backdrop for a casual half-an-hour video on the brief history of Hollywood's accent.
“And I caned stained him.” 😂
2:50
Absolutely loved the conclusion about each generation being comfortable with the artifice of their own time, had never quite considered it that way before. Thanks for making such an interesting video!
I'm just glad AI won't make things worse with wrong information. Wait. Noooooooooooo!!!!
Bravo!
I had a professor in college who's native accent was definitely mid Atlantic, he was from a wealthy family in the North East and educated there.
Weird how those actors are able to appear to be different people and speak differently with different accents!… oh wait, they’re actors
i just gotta say, it is WONDERFUL to hear Half as Interesting’s voice and a rebuttal to it point by point. Thank you so much for this video, I always have a soft spot for the mid atlantic accent, and especially what I think of as the transatlantic specifically, that of radio news and plays that, somehow someway I feel I grew up with
"Larchmont Lockjaw forever!” – Jim Backus.
I'm confused…. On the other hand, what I got from my fascination with dialects and idiolects, is that having an idiolect is not just Ok but kinda cool. So, I'm not trying to mimic RP anymore.
Thank you Dr. Lindsey for always calling BS when you see and hear it.
We had that Skinner book in our extensive home library (right next to a book by BF Skinner). My mom found it interesting and was always trying to improve her quality of speech. I think if you are specifically trying to speak well and are upper class -ish, this is what comes out.
I met a man in new your with a heavy British accent. He was from Alabama USA and was told when he tried to break into acting he needed to lose his accent. So he became British
Growing up in the South, as a young child in the late 70s and 80s, I would watch a lot of PBS because that was most people's access to a bit of knowledge and culture. Occasionally we'd watch The French Chef with Julia Child. I would wondered why she called herself French when she was clearly English.
When I think of a "mid-atlantic" accent, I think more of the over-the-top baseball announcers in the 1920s. Is there any truth to those accents being "fabricated", any more than would be required to enunciate clearly over the radio?
The ending of the video nails it, it’s an attempt to smear the past as something not to look up to and to try to assert things are better now. It’s subversion and another example of the anti White agenda.
Now you know why America is so broken. A constant stream of bullshit and lies floating to the top.
Well done. Oddly, Gary Cooper, your example of a Middle American accent, was raised in Montana to British parents who never lost their accents. He used a British accent when speaking with them, but for survival purposes, he used a local Montanan accent when dealing with his peers.
It wasn't a fake accent, but it was an accent taught to actors. It was thought to be a good blend of US and England, accent-wise, thereby being acceptable to people on both sides of the pond. This is what Hollywood itself claims.
My understanding was that what today is referred to as the Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic Accent was at the time called Eastern Standard (American) English and American Theater Standard English. Eastern Standard would have corresponded to the natural accents of upper class people from the northern East Coast; while American Theater Standard was the learned accent taught in theater schools, which basically was Eastern Standard with some additional elements from British Received Pronunciation (that may have been introduced/influenced by William Tilly and his students). It was much more prominently featured in the 1930's and 40's because a great deal of American cinema involved aspirational themes that mainly featured upper-class people. The accent that Bette Davis uses in Jezebel was known as Southern Standard (American) English (I've always heard it referred to as a Genteel Southern accent).
This reminds me of the myths about corsets either causing bodily harm or just being uncomfortable. People want to point to how patriarchal society used to be, but they end up infantilizing women instead.
I heard a lot of mid Atlantic accents in the 80's. It was not just an accent, but was mixed with a fake corporate speak that USA corporations adopted. It was horrific to hear at the time.
Great job of editing. Must have taken forever.
Technically every accent is synthetic
I love to hear more about this because it seems to me that the so-called General American accent is based on the Midland dialect and not the Northern dialect like you keep saying. As a native speaker of the Atlantic Midland dialect (Philadelphia) I've lived all over the country north and south, east coast and West Coast, and people have a hard time figuring out where I'm from. But I think that's mostly because they're unfamiliar with the accent – not because I don't have one. That is to say that there is really no such thing as general american. You can almost always tell where someone is from by their accent. They may have smoothed it out to move more towards the middle but there are always tells.
8:05 "…all spoke with English accents, which were still considered the norm of elevated diction." Well, it's 2024. Nothing's changed there. Nor should it.
This is the main problem of internet. Content "creators" keep copying each other on innacurate information. Thank you for this video with a refreshing and professional explanation.
as a youngish person who's been on a crusade to advocate for our shared cultural heritage ( with a particular interest in 40s-70s western cinema and tv ) this myth has been a real pet peeve of mine, it's super smug and stupid. I appreciate your standing up for the truth — and you've made a darn entertaining video in the process!
Thank you! Those videos always bothered me! Especially because some of them are made by linguists and they clearly didn't care to look into it.
Like, there are data bases of recordings of people who grew up pre-WW2 who weren't actors and still spoke like that.
Kinda crazy how fast and easy fake info can spread.
Politicians really need to take a look at wikipedia and make some laws.
There's a general American accent?
Calling one of the most beautiful women in movies “moon faced adds insult to injury. Ingrid Bergman grew up in Sweden knowing how to speak Swedish and German. So yes, she spoke English with an accent. (:Three time Oscar winner, by the way)
All these video essays lied to me? 😢
I would not be surprised if there was some think tank that is behind the propaganda of the fake accent
Many rich people have an axe to grind with Americas historical and cultural inheritance
They are enemies
I believe that the post war tv era also helped change the accent. Many soap operas were based in the Midwest (the fictional Springfield – which is also the setting for the Simpsons) I did read once that a lot of actors were trained to speak in a midwestern (or plain) English. I suppose that could also be untrue. Thanks for sharing this!
Now do a video on the "YouTube accent." What's going on with these guys, and their halting way of speaking?
I knew the "Mid-Atlantic" accent wasn't fake because my grandmother, born in 1892 in Massachusetts, spoke quite similarly to Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, as did many of her friends. You don't hear the accent any more, but the older generation, especially in New England, spoke that way when I was a kid.
Fantastic presentation. Your depth of research is exemplary.
Thank you so much for this video. It is my favorite of yours so far. People did talk differently in the past without being victims of a "scheme." For instance my 94 year old grandmother in Dallas, Texas would pronounce the word "toilet" as "tawlet." Almost no one in Dallas pronounces that word that way in 2024. The language changed on its own.
Fantastic debunking! I wish the rest of Wikipedia could be similarly debunked and sunk to the bottom of the mainstream information and media cesspool.
Using Cary Grant to bolster their argument is silly. His accent was unique to him. He created it. He wanted to get away from his working class Bristol accent and so he used bits of actors he admired.
I think there are 2 important takeaways from this video: 1. that old Hollywood accent was NOT fake and 2. be skeptical, even when your source seems authoritative. They may be repeating "facts" from someone who either didn't know the truth or was pulling their leg.
Give whoever edits these a raise!
I prefer the term Transatlantic to Mid-Atlantic. The latter term should apply to the speech of the Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia area. The Delmarva Mid-Atlantic is very rhotic.
Okay, I'm confused though. Where did "WWII radio voice" come from?
Thank you for this! All these "fake accent" videos were driving me crazy. My grandmother totally had the "Katherine Hepburn accent" and I miss hearing it.