The Mid-Atlantic Accent of English(1837b-6)

　　纠结于学英音还是美音？不如考虑一下“大西洋中部口音”。

　　The Mid-Atlantic Accent of English

　　The Mid-Atlantic accent, also known as the Trans-Atlantic accent, is a way of speaking English that is halfway between American and British. These pronunciations were, at one time, common in English-speaking theatre and film, and were used by members of the upper classes of American society. It also is commonly found amongst the Anglophone expatriate community, many of whom have adopted certain features of the accent of their place of residence.

　　The accent came from American boarding schools in New England (新英格兰地区), where students were taught to speak English with a Received Pronunciation (RP)*, or high-class British way. Thus, in the U.S., the Mid-Atlantic accent is also known as the “boarding school accent.”

　　There is no place in the world where people grow up speaking English with the Mid-Atlantic accent. Instead, people get the accent in one of three ways:

　　* Learn to speak with the accent intentionally (such as for stage, used by many Hollywood actors of the past). A codified version of this accent is widely taught in acting schools as American Theater Standard (美国戏剧标准口音).

　　* Develop it by spending extended time in various Anglophone communities outside one’s native environment, most typically in North America and the United Kingdom.

　　* Learned at a boarding school in America before the 1960s.

　　If you start with a mainstream American accent, then Mid-Atlantic accent goes like this: drop your r’s at the end of words, like in “car” and “winner;” say all your t’s as t’s not d’s (like in “water” and “butter”); use RP vowels, so “dance” is pronounced as  /d1:ns/ instead of /d7ns/. If you start from a British accent, the rules are different.

　　The Mid-Atlantic accent is a good choice for non-native English speakers. It makes you sound like you have a good education but no one can tell where you are from. Some learn it for doing business overseas.