"Stage English" in Irene Worth obituary

[AAllan at AOL.COM]

Steve Kl. wrote -

<< Someone at the recent ADS meeting (or was it 2 ago?) did a paper
comparing the r-fulness and r-lessness of actresses over the past several
decades... I don't know if she spoke of "stage English" per se, but it's
that kind of thing. >>

It was Nancy Elliott. Her research hasn't yet been published (I think), but
you can find an article about it at

http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/rless.htm

She spoke at the 2001 ADS annual meeting. This is the abstract:

This paper presents the results of a sociolinguistic study of rhoticity in
the speech of over two hundred actors and actresses in a variety of genres of
American films from the mid-1930s to the late 1970s. A steady decrease in the
rate of r-less pronunciations was found in the speech of both individual
subjects and the group as a whole. This decade-by-decade change indicates a
shift in the prestige norm that actors and actresses imitated, from the
non-rhotic model of British or New England speech to the rhotic model of
Midwestern and Western speech. Female speech exhibits the characteristics of
the prestige norm to a greater extent than male speech.

Conditioning factors in rhoticity variation include, in addition to time
period of film and gender of subject, sociolinguistic accommodation to the
pronunciation of a co-star, pronunciation modification towards the prestige
norm by male speakers when addressing female co-stars, and the use of
different pronunciations to portray a character’s status, moral qualities,
and in a few cases, regional origin. Finally, shifting of pronunciation
styles by a subject was used to express dramatic intents such as strong
emotion and relational attitudes towards other characters.


She was also on the program for the 2002 annual meeting, to talk about Bette
Davis. Unfortunately, she couldn't attend. Here is the abstract:

This study expands on research presented at ADS-LSA 2001 on changes in
rhoticity of American film actors and actresses from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Results of that study showed a steady decrease in r-lessness as a practice of
Hollywood pronunciation, particularly by female subjects under the age of 45,
during the 5-decade period. A few of the subjects were studied at older ages
as well: they were followed across several decades to see if individual
rhoticity habits followed the trend of the group over time or remained
stable. It was found that, indeed, all three actresses (and four of the five
actors) studied across more than two decades modified their rhoticity in the
direction of more r-ful speech across time, following the pattern of younger
subjects. The present study examines just one subject in many films over a
very long period of time, actress Bette Davis, who appeared in 88 films from
1931 until her death in 1989. With her long career and copious output of
films, it is possible to observe a single subject in a large number of films
per decade and to investigate her speech output in every decade from the
1930s to the 1980s.


Here is also a statement she made, maybe in response to a question:

Theatre (and theater) vocal coaches use the term "Transatlantic" for a
conservative variety of stage speech still taught to stage actors today. It
preserves many low-back vowel distinctions, has the voiced-voiceless W
distinction, is either non-rhotic or prescribed as having "weakly
articulated R", and has a released instead of flapped intervocalic /t/. It
is called "Transatlantic" because, in the words of one prominent voice
trainer, it is "the kind of speech that might be heard somewhere in the
Atlantic Ocean exactly halfway between New York City and London" (Robert L.
Hobbs, 1986, Teach Yourself Transatlantic: Theatre Speech for Actors, p. 6).
Having examined some actor speech training manuals, I think that
Transatlantic most closely resembles non-rhotic Eastern New England speech
with the addition of British intervocalic /t/.

And finally, if you happen to have on your shelf a copy of that fascinating
book _How We Talk: American Regional English Today_ by Allan Metcalf
(Houghton Mifflin, 2000), in the chapter about dialects in the movies, you'll
find two pages discussing her research (179-180).

- Allan Metcalf