Same as they are now, I'd imagine. You'd do much better with an audio demonstration on youtube or something. Not sure how we'd be able to type out how accents sound for all 50 states.
And even within states there are different accents. People in Rhode Island who live on the west or north side of either street (I assume there are only two, if there were more there'd be no room for houses and businesses) speak differently than those on the east or south
The Library of Congress has sound recordings available online. I've listened to a collection of spiritual hymns from the 1930s rural south when researching for a story (unfortunately, their accents were so thick i couldnt understand the words and there were no transcripts). This is the link to a collection of "American English Dialect Recordings" "contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects....The collection includes recordings from forty-three states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and parts of Canada. They were made from 1941 to 1984, with the bulk being recorded between 1968 and 1982" I'd explore that collection
Damn... never forget, ladies, gentlemen, and non-binaries, that we are in the presence of a librarian!!!!
That's no shit. All that inbreeding has refined accents and speech patterns from one town to another. And plenty of rare genetic diseases. Second cousin? Barely worth a dispensation from the Catholic diocese back in the day.
1960s was just a millisecond ago on the scale that accents take to change. They'd be identical to what they are today. The only exception I can think of would be the Mid-Atlantic Accent that was still being taught in elocution schools and voice coaching schools. You may know it as the old-timie Hollywood accent of the 50's and earlier. This wasn't a true regional accent, though. It was an affectation, an attempt to create an American analog to R.P. It didn't last. It goes too much against the grain of the American perception (if not remotely the reality) of egalitarianism.
I agree with most of the preceding, but that effort of attempting to standardize American English did have its effect. Dan Rather talks about how he had to subdue his Texas twang in order to be acceptable to network broadcasting. And Maureen Corrigan, who reviews books for NPR, told about how she had to eliminate a distinct Brooklyn accent as part of her preparation for a career in radio. It still seeps through from time to time, though. As for that speech pattern being an artificial construct, I would instead call it a standardization of the midwest accent already in use. That accent stretched from the Ohio valley westward through the Plains states. I suppose the theory was that it was so uninflected that people everywhere would have a better chance of understanding it than they would a southern or north-eastern accent. ( I'm not sure what constitutes a "Mid-Atlantic" accent anyway. I've lived in Virginia and Maryland for many years, and can tell a Baltimore accent from a mile away. And I've heard at least three regional accents in Maryland alone, some of it barely intelligible to outsiders, and another four or five in Virginia.) Being over seventy, I've actually heard accents change over the years. But the change has mainly been a flattening and dilution of distinctive accents as the result of radio and television, as Wreybies noted. Our mobile culture, where people move a lot from one area to another in search of better job opportunities has also accelerated a mixing of dialects. As an army brat, I'm used to it, but many corporations feel that it's important to move their employees to different cities as a ladder to advancement, and the kids of these families are exposed to other accents from an early age. I've talked with old friends who have moved from one part of the country to another. Over time, they've lost much of their original accents and adopted components of the speech of the area they're living in now. God knows whether their kids have any accent identifiable with a particular region. And there's been intrusion of different vocabularies and speech patterns as a result of social trends. Think of "Valleyspeak" ... the jargon and inflections of Valley Girls that have seeped into everyday use. I don't know how long kids will say 'what-Everrr" in years to come, but it seems to have found a niche and I hear it from time to time.
No, no. The Mid-Atlantic Accent was never found in any region or area of the U.S. as a natural accent, and it's not the flat Midwestern accent I think you are referring to. The term Mid-Atlantic is a somewhat humorous acknowledgment that the accent is borrowing heavily from British RP, hence an accent that feels like it falls somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic between the US and the UK. The standard rhotacism (every R paid its due) present in the Midwestern accent would be heavily muted into a near-non-rhotic (wotah rather than watER). Think Niles and Frasier Crane from their sitcom. They are most certainly lampooning the Mid-Atlantic accent (Niles especially) as part of their upper-crust, prep school backstory, though the actors themselves in real life do not speak that way, thus it is only an approximation. Wiliam F. Buckley Jr. is likely the most committed real-life aficionado of the Mid-Atlantic accent I can think of in more modern times, though even his version is somewhat informed by accent trends in New England. In his famous debate with James Baldwin at Cambridge, he has the gall to call Baldwin out on having adopted a vaguely Briticized accent, the irony being that Buckley is doing the exact same thing, just ratified through his prep school education. Or here - skip to 5:00 minutes and hear Kristen Wiig lampoon the gravy out of Katherine Hepburn's famously exaggerated version.
When I watch movies from the sixties like Breakfast at Tiffany's, I feel like they speak in a different way. It's not their accent, per se, maybe it's their tone. You can watch famous movies from sixties: Psycho, West Side Story, Bonnie and Clyde, etc
They reflect the accents used by actors of the time, not accents spoken by everyday people. If you watched British black and white movies, you'd think everyone in Britain spoke like Lawrence Olivier.
As Emily Litella used to say, "Oh! That's very different! Never mind!" I never heard that definition of "Mid-Atlantic" before. Maybe that's because I spent so much time in the geographic Mid-Atlantic region, and am used to seeing the term applied to the general Delaware-Maryland-Virginia seaboard.
I believe that I read somewhere that the mid-atlantic accent was more a result of technology than anything. They way I remember it, microphone technology wasn't very good for a long time and a natural speaking voice didn't pick up and record correctly. It came from how telephone operators were trained to speak when early phone lines were extremely poor quality. That's why actors in early movies seem to unnaturally enunciate everything and why they say certain words in a certain way to be picked up by the audio equipment. By the 60's, the technology had caught up, but it'd already become engrained in the Hollywood culture. If you want a true example of how people spoke, don't look at people who spoke on camera professionally. Find interviews with real people, and I'll bet you'll notice that the interviewer and interviewee speak differently. I actually remember something relevant from a long item ago. There was an episode of The Honeymooners where at the end, Jackie stopped the curtain from closing and addressed the live audience. I remember it being strange, and it may have been a style choice, but Jackie Gleason didn't speak the same way as Ralph Kramden, he slurred and mumbled more naturally.
It goes back earlier than that, I think. Acoustics in theaters used to be terrible in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and actors needed to be clear and loud, projecting their voices so that the people in the cheap seats could understand them. The actors who were most successful when radio and the talkies came in were the ones who'd already had that kind of training. As for telephone operators, I remember reading that one of the reasons that Nebraska was one of the most popular place for 800 numbers was that the Strategic Air Command was located there, and there were lots of telephone lines connected to it for communications in time of war. When there wasn't a war going on, those lines were idle, and someone got the bright idea of establishing 800 numbers there for businesses to use. Another advantage of Nebraska was that there was a ready pool of operators who spoke in the flat accent of that part of the country, and could be most readily understood. (I read that in a Straight Dope book by Cecil Adams, but couldn't find the column on his site now.) I'd agree with that. By the 1960s, there were plenty of recordings of ordinary people speaking in whatever accent they'd been brought up in. And there were enough tape recorders in the hands of the general populace to eliminate the need for professional interviews; maybe your family has some reel-t0-reel tapes that were made back then. Or check the local historical society for recordings they may have on file. As for getting a fix on how that accent has changed over the years, the best route would be to listen to the direct descendants of those ordinary people, living in the same town. I know that my relatives in Syracuse still speak with the distinct accent of central New York, although not with the same distinction that their grandmothers and grandfathers had.
Well, he was real enough. It was a pen name used by three different authors, but almost all of the column were written by Ed Zotti, the ostensible "editor." And I found the quote. It's in the first anthology of columns, succinctly titled The Straight Dope. Regarding the use of Nebraska as a hub for toll-free calls, he wrote: The entire column, which is question #2 in the chapter, can be found here: https://lib.convdocs.org/docs/index-3119.html?page=25 Bear in mind, of course, that the above column was published in 1984, and that subsequent improvements in telephone technology have eliminated the need for separate toll-free numbers.