Good American Speech

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Good American Speech was a consciously learned accent of English promoted in certain American courses on elocution, voice, and acting from the early to mid-20th century. As a result, it became associated with particular announcers and Hollywood actors,^[1][2][3][4] mostly in recorded media from the 1920s to 1950s.^[5][6] This speaking style was especially influenced by and overlapped with Northeastern elite accents from that era and earlier.^[5][2] Due to conflation of the two types of accents, both are most commonly known as a Mid-Atlantic accent or Transatlantic accent.^[2][7] Promoters of such accents additionally incorporated features from Received Pronunciation, the prestige accent of British English,^[2][5][7] in an effort to make them sound like they transcended regional and even national borders.

During the early half of the 20th century, Mid-Atlantic classroom speech was designed, codified, and advocated by certain phoneticians and teachers, linguistic prescriptivists who felt that it was the best or most proper way to speak English.^[8][7][9] 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".^[9] During the period when Mid-Atlantic accents acquired cachet within the American entertainment industry, certain stage and film actors performed them in classical works or when undertaking serious, formal, or upper-class roles,^[10] while others adopted them more permanently in their public lives. Since the mid-20th century onwards, the accent has become regarded as affected and is now rare.