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The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the American upper class and entertainment industry of the late 19th century to mid-20th century, that blended elements from both American and British English. Specifically, it blended features from both prestigious coastal Northeastern American English and from Received Pronunciation, the standard speech of England. The accent was embraced in private independent American preparatory schools, especially by members of the Northeastern upper class, as well as in schools for film, radio, and stage acting, with its overall use sharply declining after the Second World War. The Mid-Atlantic accent 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". A similar accent that resulted from different historical processes, Canadian dainty, was also known in Canada, existing for a century before waning in the 1950s. More broadly, the term "mid-Atlantic accent" can also refer to any accent with a perceived mixture of American and British characteristics. Elite use History In the 19th century and into the early 20th century, formal public speaking in the United States focused primarily on song-like intonation, lengthily and tremulously uttered vowels (including overly articulated weak vowels), and a booming resonance. Moreover, since at least the mid-19th century, upper-class communities on the East Coast of the United States increasingly adopted many of the phonetic qualities of Received Pronunciation—the standard accent of the British upper class—as evidenced in recorded public speeches of the time, with some of these qualities, like non-rhoticity (sometimes called "r-lessness"), also shared by the regional dialects of Eastern New England and New York City. Sociolinguist William Labov et al. describe that such "r-less pronunciation, following Received Pronunciation, was taught as a model of correct, international English by schools of speech, acting, and elocution in the United States up to the end of World War II". Early recordings of prominent Americans born in the middle of the 19th century provide some insight into their adoption (or not) of a carefully employed non-rhotic Mid-Atlantic speaking style. President William Howard Taft, who attended public school in Ohio, and inventor Thomas Edison, who grew up in Ohio and Michigan in a family of modest means, both used natural rhotic accents. Yet presidents William McKinley of Ohio and Grover Cleveland of Central New York, who attended private schools, clearly employed a non-rhotic, upper-class, Mid-Atlantic quality in their public speeches that does not align with the rhotic accents normally documented in Ohio and Central New York State at the time; both men even use the distinctive and especially archaic affectation of a "tapped r" at times when r is pronounced, often when between vowels. This tapped articulation is additionally sometimes heard in recordings of Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's successor from an affluent district of New York City, who used a cultivated non-rhotic accent but with the addition of the coil-curl merger once notably associated with New York accents. His distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt also employed a non-rhotic Mid-Atlantic accent, though without the tapped r. In and around Boston, Massachusetts, a similar accent, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, was associated with the local urban elite, the Boston Brahmins. In the New York metropolitan area, particularly including its affluent Westchester County suburbs and the North Shore of Long Island, other terms for the local Transatlantic pronunciation and accompanying facial behavior include "Locust Valley lockjaw" or "Larchmont lockjaw", named for the stereotypical clenching of the speaker's jaw muscles to achieve an exaggerated enunciation quality. The related term "boarding-school lockjaw" has also been used to describe the accent once considered a characteristic of elite New England boarding-school culture. Vocal coach and scholar Dudley Knight describes how the Australian phonetician William Tilly (né Tilley), teaching at Columbia University from 1918 to around the time of his death in 1935, introduced a version of the Mid-Atlantic accent that, for the first time, was standardized with an extreme and conscious level of phonetic consistency. Linguistic prescriptivists, Tilly and his adherents emphatically promoted their new Mid-Atlantic speech standard, which they called "World English". World English would eventually define the pronunciation of American classical actors for decades, though Tilly himself actually had no special interest in acting. Mostly attracting a following of English-language learners and New York City public-school teachers, he was interested in popularizing his standard of a "proper" American pronunciation for teaching in public schools and using in one's public life: World English was a speech pattern that very specifically did not derive from any regional dialect pattern in England or America, although it clearly bears some resemblance to the speech patterns that were spoken in a few areas of New England, and a very considerable resemblance ... to the pattern in England which was becoming defined in the 1920s as "RP" or "Received Pronunciation". World English, then, was a creation of speech teachers, and boldly labeled as a class-based accent: the speech of persons variously described as "educated," "cultivated," or "cultured"; the speech of persons who moved in rarefied social or intellectual circles; and the speech of those who might aspire to do so. As a phonetically consistent version of Mid-Atlantic pronunciation, World English (known at the time by a variety of names) was advocated most strongly from the 1920s to the mid-1940s and was particularly embraced during this period in the Northeastern independent preparatory schools accessible to and supported by wealthy American families. However, the prestige of Mid-Atlantic accents had largely ended by 1950, presumably as a result of cultural and demographic changes in the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. Example speakers Wealthy or highly educated Americans known for being life-long speakers of a Mid-Atlantic accent include William F. Buckley Jr., Gore Vidal, H. P. Lovecraft, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, George Plimpton, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who began affecting it permanently while at Miss Porter's School), Louis Auchincloss, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland (though her accent is unique, with not entirely consistent Mid-Atlantic features), C. Z. Guest Joseph Alsop, Robert Silvers, Julia Child (though, as the lone non-Northeasterner in this list, her accent was consistently rhotic), and.... Discover the Amz Companion Game Guide popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Amz Companion Game Guide books.