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A Northeastern elite accent is any American English accent used by members of the Northeastern elite, born between the 19th century and early 20th century, which shares significant features with Eastern New England English and Received Pronunciation (RP), the standard British accent. Some scholars argue that these upper-class accents emerged naturally, while others argue that they were prescribed or affected ways of speaking taught in elite schools of that era. The late 19th century first produced recordings of and commentary about such accents used by wealthy East Coast and Northern Americans, particularly New Yorkers and New Englanders, sometimes directly associated with their education at private preparatory schools.

No consistent name exists for this class of accents. It has been occasionally called Northeastern standard or cultivated American speech, and is sometimes recognized as a Mid-Atlantic accent, a term that in American popular culture refers to speech used by early 20th-century actors and announcers. A similar accent that resulted from different historical processes emerged in Canada, Canadian dainty, existing for a century before waning in the 1950s.

History

In the 19th century through the early 20th century, formal public speaking in the United States primarily focused 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 several phonetic qualities of Received Pronunciation—the standard accent of the British upper class—as evidenced in recorded public speeches of the time. One of these qualities is non-rhoticity, sometimes called "R-dropping", in which speakers delete the phoneme /r/ except before a vowel sound (thus, in pair but not pairing). This is also shared by the traditional regional dialects of Eastern New England (including Boston), New York City, and some areas of the South. The precise amount of variation depends on location, social class, and other demographic factors. Sociolinguists like William Labov describe that non-rhoticity, "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 elite 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. However, presidents William McKinley of Ohio and Grover Cleveland of Central New York, who attended private schools, clearly employed a non-rhotic, upper-class 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 archaic affectation of a "tapped R" at times when R is pronounced, often when between vowels. This tapped articulation is 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 elite accent, though without the merger or the tapped R.

In and around Boston, Massachusetts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a similar accent was associated with the local urban elite: the Boston Brahmins. In the New York metropolitan area, particularly in its affluent Westchester County suburbs and the North Shore of Long Island, other terms for the local Transatlantic pronunciation and accompanying facial behavior included "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. The type of accent is also linked with the Philadelphia Main Line in this time period.

Decline

The accent rapidly declined following the end of World War II, presumably as a result of cultural and demographic changes in the U.S. entering the postwar era. This American version of a "posh" accent has disappeared even among the American upper classes, as Americans have increasingly dissociated from the speaking styles of the East Coast elite. If anything, the accent is now subject to ridicule in American popular culture. The clipped, non-rhotic English accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr. were vestigial examples.

Marianne Williamson, a self-help author and a 2020 and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate raised and educated in Texas, has a unique accent that, following her participation in the first 2020 presidential debate in June 2019, was widely discussed. For instance, an article from The Guardian stated that Williamson "speaks in a beguiling mid-Atlantic accent that makes her sound as if she has walked straight off the set of a Cary Grant movie".

Example speakers

Wealthy or highly educated Americans known for being life-long speakers of a Northeastern elite 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, John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who began affecting it permanently while at Miss Porter's School), Louis Auchincloss, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland (though her accent is somewhat unique), C. Z. Guest, Joseph Alsop, Robert Silvers, Julia Child (though, as the lone non-Northeasterner in this list, her accent was consistently rhotic), Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, and Gloria Vanderbilt. Except for Child, all of these example speakers were raised, educated, or both in the Northeastern United States. This includes just over half who were raised specifically in New York (most of them New York City) and five of whom were educated specifically at the independent boarding school Groton in Massachusetts: Franklin Roosevelt, Harriman, Acheson, Alsop, and Auchincloss.

Examples of individuals described as having a cultivated New England accent or "Boston Brahmin accent" include Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Eliot Norton, Samuel Eliot Morison, Harry Crosby, John Brooks Wheelwright, George C. Homans, Elliot Richardson, George Plimpton (though he was actually a life-long member of the New York City elite), and John Kerry, the last of whom has noticeably reduced this accent since his early adulthood toward a more General American one.

U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came from a privileged New York City family, had a non-rhotic accent, though it was not an ordinary New York accent but rather an elite East Coast one. In one of Roosevelt's most frequently heard speeches, the "Fear Itself" speech, he uses non-rhotic pronunciations of words like assert and firm along with a falling diphthong in the word fear, all of which distinguish his accent from other forms of surviving non-rhotic speech in the United States. Also, in the same speech, linking R appears in his delivery of the words "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; this pronunciation of R is also famously recorded in his Pearl Harbor speech.

Phonology

• Non-rhoticity, or "R-dropping", occurs in words like oar, start, there, etc.
• Trap–bath split: the vowels in trap and bath were often not the same, most consistently a feature of the New England upper class, the Boston Brahmins. However, unlike in RP, the BATH vowel does not retract and merge with the back vowel of PALM . It is only lowered from the near-open vowel to the fully open vowel .
• Father–bother variability: The "a" in father is traditionally unrounded, while the "o" in bother may be rounded, like in RP. Therefore, father and bother may fail to rhyme for some speakers, like in New England for example, but it rhymes for others, like Franklin Roosevelt from New York, who merges the two vowels.
• Lot–cloth split: Speakers like Franklin Roosevelt tended to have a LOT-CLOTH split, with the CLOTH vowel aligning to the THOUGHT vowel. This deviates from modern RP, which has a merger.
• Thought–force variability: The vowels in thought and force–north are possibly distinguished by some ( versus . However, Franklin Roosevelt and the Boston Brahmins often merged THOUGHT and FORCE and their vowel was often more diphthongal than in RP.
• Lack of happy tensing: Like in conservative RP, the vowel /i/ at the end of words such as "happy" (listen), "Charlie", "sherry", "coffee", etc. is not necessarily tensed and is pronounced with the kit vowel , rather than the fleece vowel . Some speakers though, including some Boston Brahmins, did participate in happy tensing.
• Dropping of /j/ rarely occurs: only after /r/, and optionally after /s/ and /l/, but not elsewhere. The word duke, for instance, is pronounced like upper-class British [djuːk] rather than middle-class British [dʒuːk] (the first variant versus the second one here), and also not like General American /duk/ . Similarly, dew is not a homophone of neither do nor Jew. All of this mirrors (conservative) RP.
• Intervocalic /t/ is sometimes preserved (thus, more fully pronounced in a word like waiter, so that it does not sound exactly like wader), theoretically avoiding the General American phenomenon of flapping.

References

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53. Pearl Harbor speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (sound file)

• English language in North America