Is English different now than it was 60 yrs ago?
 

When it comes to pronunciations it seems that in both English and American movies from the 30's and 40's they are speaking a bit differently than in 2009. It sounds more formal and perhaps a bit more stiff. News reels are a typical example. But did ordinary people really speak like this over 60 years ago or was it just a way they spoke in movies?

Language is always evolving and english is definitely less formal, but I think the difference you see in those old movies has more to do with Acting style and training.

It used to be that actors started in the Theatre and were trained to "project" so that the back row could hear and understand the words just as well as the front. Seen close up in a film, it's not very natural but that's what audiences were used to.

Radio plays were another influence on early film and those actors had to exaggerate thier voices and emotions to help paint the scene.

It wasn't until the birth of "method" acting that a more natural style became dominant. It's what set apart Actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean. Directors also learned to to pull away their styles from the stagey influence of broadway and radio.

I'm no film historian so perhaps another member can fill out my theory better but I think that's the gist of it.

It's also to do with a film industry that looked to English theatre for its credibility - and at the time English theatre taught actors to use Received Pronunciation (AKA "BBC Englinsh", "The King's/Queen's English") and emulate upper class, southern home counties voices, so all of our actors (and consequently all of yours) sounded like well bred southern englishmen - basically the way I do (not that you've spoken to me). Think David Niven or Noel Coward, then tone it down a notch, and you get Dirk Bogarde.

In the 60's America found the Beatles and the Stones, and realised that England has more accents than you do in 50 states, in a country smaller than most of your individual states.

In the 70's US cinema found its voice, and method acting as mentioned above.

what frensnelly & daniel said.

i'd add first that it's not easy to write dialogue that doesn't sound written. try it.
i wonder the role played by documentary and then by improvised films like cassavetes' in changing the conventions of representing spoken english...you'd be surprised at the impact of documentary. in nouvelle vague films, the improvised documentaries that jean rouch made were a huge influence even though they weren't screened that often. this had alot to do with the way cinema culture (i suppose) operated in france, the role of cinema clubs and occaisonal screenings played...they worked like a kind of informal underground. something parallel happened in the late 50s with french novels as well, stuff like zazie dans le metro, which was written in a kind of transcribed spoken/street french. i mention the last bit because there's a class dimension to the representation of spoken language. film is a written form, so assumes a particular type of relation to writing, to "legit" culture and so forth. working-class folk had a different relation to writtencult, in in which facility in a written world often functioned as an exclusion mechanism. so moving from one space to another is an interesting shift. not as obvious as you'd think.

cassavetes stuff is parallel. the situations would be outlined, but the actors would improvise their way from point a to b to c. so the dialogue is quite different than you'd find in an entirely scripted film. i can't say much about the influence these films had though. like with documentary in the parisian scene of the late 50s, it's a matter of networks and not necessarily of commerical success.

that's put the shift into the 60s really. but this potted summary has to do with film conventions more than the nature of english.

btw...i dont think method acting has much to do with this, btw: that's more an approach to character, so a way of working with what's written. it's not a way of thinking about writing itself, or about questions about the conventions that shape representation in general.

It's also important to note that there was a great shift in culture and society between that time and today, namely, the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism. With that you get a whole host of effects on language, amongst other things. The Modernist period had already seen a shift away from classical/Romantic approaches to language. They began to question everything on the philosophical level and on the level of basic meaning, and so the exploration continued with Postmodernism, but this departure saw an even greater shift away from the classical. Well, not so much a shift away...rather a mash-up if you will.

New language was created to explain the function of existing language. We relaxed our view of how we use it. We created more of it to use in our rapidly changing daily lives.

The written gave way to the spoken; text gave way to the visual.

The combination of such factors has seen a change in our language unlike anything seen since the Norman invasion of England.

I respectfully disagree. England has as many different accents as some U. S. regions, but some U.S. states have more accents than England as a whole. Going from mountain ranges in southern states to the coast, you can encounter a variety of differences. Getting to the coast of North Carolina for instance, there are the baronial settler's accents, which sound like southern conjunctions mixed with slight English accents. Next door to that person is one with the Gullah lexicon, born of the mixture of slaves, natives, and interlopers.

And that's all in a hundred mile stretch of coastline. Further inland, the Sandhills have disregarded the letter i and substitute a narrow a, as well as the letter R used in the middle of a word. You take a rat tun, speak a wuhd, and delivuh. Then i shows up where it doesn't belong, words like power, are simply shortened to pie. Is yuh pie out? Prubly took out by the stum.

A huge swath of central Kansas is populated by low German and Swedish descendants who speak with an accent unlike anything you'd see in "Fargo". New York alone has as many different accents from borough to borough as the rest of the state.

The idea that the U.S. has southern, mid-western, Minnesotan, and Chicago accents is an extremely dubious extreme simplicity.

I'm truly amazed by the difference you hear crossing the border from Niagara Falls Canada into Niagara Falls New York.

"Oat Back" suddenly becomes "Owt Bayak" over the span of a river.

what does oat back mean?

That would be "out back" as phoneticized for Canadian vs. Upstate New York pronunciation.

Contrary to popular belief... Canadians don't pronounce "out" "oot". Rather, it sounds like, "oat".

lets go oot and aboot, aye.

I agree, I never here the 'oot' sound. It sounds like 'out' to me, like the word "ouch" with a 't' at the end rather than a 'ch'. Sounds different from the 'oat' (like saying ote) that Fresnelly claims to hear and, I agree, way different from the New Yorkers just across the river who stretch the sound out into what seems to be 2 syllables (aowt, or owt)

I think "oot" it comes out in some cases. I've caught myself saying it. It might also depend on which Canadian accent you have.

Oddly enough, the Southern accent is the most closely related to any English accent left in America. Southern culture is historically based on Cavalier migrations from the south of England in the mid-1600's. Most of the stereotypical Southern mannerisms - such as undying good manners, lofty prose, gentlemanly behavior towards women, and the unshakeable image of the landed gentry slowly fanning themselves in the heat - come directly from Cavalier culture. I have read several volumes that suggest if you simply added a lisp to the refined Southern accent, you would basically have the old Cavalier accent.

EDIT: Here's one of those volumes. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer.

You're not wrong.

I remember watching a great comic routine explaining that the Aussie accent is basically Cockney slowed down by the heat.

I'd respectfully disagree with that statement. Language tends to vary, to create more distinct dialects of itself, the longer it has been in situ (without the impact of mass media as occurs today, of course). We've seen this in many areas of the world and it is a prominent component of linguistic archealology. English having been present in England for a minimum of 1500 years (and possibly longer depending on which theory you follow) has created a greater diversity of dialects and accented language, heavily impacted by immigration from the Continent and Ireland (and more recently, from other parts of the world).

Also, I have heard it say that the accent of the English spoken in Newfoundland most closely resembles that of the english spoken by the Brits in the 1800's. Maybe due to the relative isolation of the island.

Just as long as you don't think we sound like the Monty Python Bruces sketch:

Bruces

Hey, it was that sketch what taught me to correctly pronounce Woolamaloo.