Good American Speech, a Mid-Atlantic accent,Boberg, Charles (2021). "Accent in North American Film and Television". Cambridge University Press. p. 126.MacNeil, Robert; Cran, William (2007). Do You Speak American?. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. p. 51. or a Transatlantic accent is a consciously learned accent of English that was promoted in certain American courses on acting, voice, and elocution from the early to mid-20th century. As a result, it has become associated with particular announcers and Hollywood actors,Boberg, Charles (2020). "Diva diction: Hollywood’s leading ladies and the rise of General American English". American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 95(4), 441-484: "Kelly was from Philadelphia. Rogers, from Independence, Missouri, and Shearer, from Montreal, are about half R-less. Adoption of /r/ vocalization by these actresses from r-ful regions presumably reflects both formal dramatic training and the generally high prestige of this feature in the early twentieth century" (455); "Rogers, Kelly, and Shearer produce an [a:] quality in words out of respect for the British or Boston standard" (465). most of whose work dates from the 1920s through the 1950s. This speaking style was largely influenced by and overlapped with Northeastern elite accents from that era and earlier. Due to conflation of the two types of accents, both have become commonly known as Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic accents. Proponents of such accents additionally incorporated features from Received Pronunciation, the prestige accent of British English, 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 in the U.S., linguistic prescriptivists who felt that it was the best or most proper way to speak English. 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".Knight, Dudley. "Standard Speech". In: Hampton, Marian E. & Barbara Acker (eds.) (1997). The Vocal Vision: Views on Voice. Hal Leonard Corporation. pp. 174–77. 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,"Hollywood's "Fake" Mid-Atlantic Myth DEBUNKED!" YouTube, uploaded by Dr Geoff Lindsey, . while others adopted them more permanently in their public lives. After the mid-20th century, the accent became regarded as affected and is now rare.

Terminology No consistent label exists for this type of speech, particularly in its own era. It has increasingly become known as a Mid-Atlantic accent,Boberg, Charles (2021). "Accent in North American Film and Television". Cambridge University Press. p. 126. or Transatlantic accent, terms that refer to its perceived mixture of American and British features. In specifically theatrical contexts, it is also sometimes known by names like American Theatre Standard or American stage speech. Its promoters variously called it World (Standard) English, Good (American) Speech, Eastern (American) Standard, or simply Standard English.Deacon, 2007.

History Origins According to the vocal coach and drama professor Dudley Knight, 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.Knight, Dudley. "Standard Speech". In: Hampton, Marian E. & Barbara Acker (eds.) (1997). The Vocal Vision: Views on Voice. Hal Leonard Corporation. p. 159. He also asserts that, when the 20th century began, "American actors in classical plays all spoke with English accents",Knight, 1997, p. 171. due to the high prestige of English Received Pronunciation (RP), the standard accent of England, a label that emerged in the 1920s. One of the most notable RP features is non-rhoticity, or R-dropping: the deleting of the phoneme everywhere except before vowel sounds. The authors of the 2006 work Atlas of North American English describe non-rhoticity "as a characteristic of British Received Pronunciation, was also 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. It was the standard model for most radio announcers".Labov, William et al. (2006). "The restoration of post-vocalic /r/". The Atlas of North American English Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Mouton de Gruyter: "The basic vernacular of New York City was consistently r-less in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. r-less pronunciation, as a characteristic of British Received Pronunciation, was also 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. It was the standard model for most radio announcers and used as a high prestige form by Franklin Roosevelt". Linguist Geoff Lindsey argues that another major contribution to the RP elements in early Hollywood sound films is the simple fact that many of the actors themselves originated from around the British Commonwealth, throughout which RP was the educated standard.

Even before the early 20th century, ordinary Eastern New England accents as well as Northeastern elite accents spoken by groups like the New York elite and the Boston Brahmins, the coastal New England upper class, already shared notable features with RP such as non-rhoticity and the trap–bath split. Boston was the American center for training in elocution, public speaking, and acting in the very early 20th century;Knight, 1997, p. 159. therefore, these Northeastern-originated accents also likely contributed to those features becoming popular in American theatre and cinema. Educated Northeastern American and RP accents already were regarded as prestigious before, and during the early decades of, the 20th century.

The codification of a Mid-Atlantic accent for American classrooms was largely initiated by the Australian phonetician William Tilly (né Tilley), who championed a version of the accent that, for the first time, was standardized with an extreme and conscious level of phonetic consistency. Teaching in Columbia University's extension program in New York City from 1918 to around the time of his death in 1935, he sought to popularize his standard of a "proper" American pronunciation for teaching in public schools and using in one's public life.Knight, 1997, p. 163. A proponent of precise phonetic transcription, Tilly was perhaps the most influential speech instructor in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century.Deacon, 2007, pp. 74, 78. Calling his new standard World English, he mostly attracted a following of English-language learners and New York City public-school teachers.Knight, 1997, pp. 157–158. Ordinary Americans have the tendency to perceive World English as sounding British, which Tilly's students sometimes acknowledged and other times denied.Knight, 1997, p. 161. According to Dudley Knight:

Popularity in American entertainment Linguistic prescriptivists, William Tilly and his adherents emphatically promoted his World English (and their slight variations on it) in their courses. While Tilly did not specifically work with actors himself, several prominent students of his ended up doing so, establishing this type of pronunciation among classical actors in the U.S. for roughly three decades. Among Tilly's several disciples who popularized Mid-Atlantic accents in the American theatre were, most prominently, Windsor Daggett, Margaret Prendergast McLean, and Edith Warman Skinner.

Windsor Daggett was a Northeastern American speech teacher and theatre critic who campaigned for this accent in the American entertainment world in his weekly Billboard column from 1921 to 1926. During that decade, he also dominated the New York City market for theatrical speech improvement.Deacon, 2007, p. 73.Knight, 1997, p. 172. Daggett viewed the accent, which he simply called Standard English, as neither regionally American nor an "affected ultra-British class dialect" but rather a cultured, intelligible, transnational accent of English that avoided all features that could identify its speaker's upbringing.Deacon, 2007, pp. 73-74, 80. Margaret Prendergast McLean from Colorado became one of the most influential speech teachers for East Coast actors by the late 1920s, distinguished for her work at Boston's Leland Powers School and New York's American Laboratory Theatre.Knight, 1997, p. 174. She published her text on the accent, Good American Speech, in 1928 and later taught in Los Angeles, California.Knight, 1997, pp. 165, 174. Canadian-born Edith Skinner, brought to the Laboratory Theatre by McLean, rose to prominence by the 1930s, best known for her own instructional text Speak with Distinction, published in 1942. These Tilly-trained speech instructors referred to this accent as Good (American) Speech, which Skinner also called Eastern (American) Standard and which she described as the appropriate American pronunciation for "classics and elevated texts". She vigorously drilled her students in learning the accent at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now, Carnegie Mellon) and, later, the Juilliard School. By the 1930s, largely due to Tilly's influence, nearly all texts on the topic of American speech and oratory contained phonetic notation.Knight, 1997, p. 159.

Decline From the 1920s to 1950s, the Mid-Atlantic accent was a popular affectation onstage, in many New York City schools, and in forms of high culture in North America. American cinema began in the early 1900s in New York City and Philadelphia before becoming largely transplanted to Los Angeles beginning in the mid-1910s, with talkies beginning in the late 1920s. Hollywood studios encouraged actors to learn this accent into the 1940s. Hollywood over time became less of a New York City-influenced enclave as it grew and attracted actors from everywhere, plus the film industry moved away from studio control over its artists, causing Mid-Atlantic speech to fall out of fashion by the mid-20th century. Since then, the majority class of rhotic accents, General American English, has dominated the American entertainment industry.

Examples of performers