Pylimitics

People who live in different places, even though they speak the same language, tend to have different accents. Accents are not as diverse as they used to be, probably because everybody now listens to the same voices on TV, radio, and digital media. Even on local radio and TV stations, announcers seem to mostly sound about the same. But if you listen to recordings from decades ago, the announcers different than today. It’s almost like they have, instead of a regional accent, a temporal accent. 

This is all by design, at least to some extent. In the US, which covers too large an area for any one radio or TV station to reach everyone, there have for a century been networks of radio and TV stations. The networks would distribute radio and TV shows to their affiliated stations so that in effect, large parts of the country were experiencing the same media at the same time. The networks decided it would be a good thing to standardize pronunciation — accents — throughout their own shows. At least one of them, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC),  started publishing a guide in the 1940s. It was called the NBC Handbook of Pronunciations. It begins:

“When a broadcaster speaks over a powerful station or nation-wide hookup, he will be most readily understood by the majority of his listeners if he uses the pronunciation called by phoneticians “General American.” That is the standard presented in this book.”

The guidelines in the handbook show that in the 1940s the “General American” accent pronounced “happy” and “silly” with the same vowel sound; it’s the same short “eh” you hear in the word “kit.” It’s a temporal accent — saying “happy” like “heppy” nowadays would be unusual. The book also advises that the “day” at the end of every weekday be pronounced “dee,” as if “Tuesday” was spelled “Tuesdee.” And pronunciation of “r” differs from most modern use as well; it used to have a bit of a stop in it, making “marry” sound more like “maddy.” You can hear a lot of this in old movies, too.  

In a typically corporate manner, the NBC Handbook also protested that it wasn’t doing what it obviously was doing:

“It should be pointed out that this book does not pretend to prescribe how words should be pronounced according to some arbitrary standard; it merely records how they are pronounced by educated speakers across the greater part of the United States. Americans have never consented to have ‘correct’ pronunciation laid down for them by a government academy, as is done in several European nations.”

It’s true that there’s no US government academy of pronunciations — don’t need it; NBC and the rest were ready and willing to provide arbitrary standards of their own. As far as I know the networks no longer maintain pronunciation guides, but if you really want to know how to pronounce a word, just go to an online reference like Wikipedia. You can click a button to hear how at least somebody thinks the word should be spoken.