Why Do People Talk Weird in Old Movies?

It’s not quite British, and it’s not quite American – so what gives? Why do all those actors of yesteryear have such a distinct and strange accent?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain
Stuff is 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.

(00:23):
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

(00:45):
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,

(01:08):
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 clear.
They'll also use softer British vowels daunce instead of dance,
for instance. Another thing that stands out is the emphasis

(01:31):
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 tea 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

(01:53):
of English that's hard to place, and that's part of
why Hollywood loved it. There's also a theory that techno
logical constraints helped mid Atlantic's popularity. According to Professor j Oberski,
this nasally clipped pronunciation is a vested from the early
days of radio Receivers had very little based technology at

(02:14):
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

(02:36):
Atlantic 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

(02:59):
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. Check out the Brainstuff channel on YouTube,
and for more on this and thousands of other topics,

(03:20):
visit how stuff works dot com.