Before the days of movies, radio, and TV, there was no “Standard American” accent in the sense we use the term today. The closest thing to it was an upper-class Eastern accent. That’s what Franklin Roosevelt was speaking in the newsreels, and it’s what elocution teachers taught people who wanted to “lose their accent”.
In those days, in American elocution classes you were taught to speak in an accent that to a modern ear sounds like some mixture of an upper-class New York or Boston accent and an upper-class British accent. This wasn’t too far off from what Roosevelt (born in New York and educated at Harvard) spoke anyway.
As movies, radio, and TV became more common, there began to be a notion of Standard American English that wasn’t so class-based. Something closer to the most common American accent began to be considered as the standard American accent. This is the accent that’s spoken in much of the Midwest and the West. It’s always been my contention that the purest version of this accent is spoken in rural northwest Ohio - to be exact about two miles northeast of Mt. Cory, Ohio, which, hey, just happens to be where I grew up.
Seriously, it seems to me that my accent is pretty close to what is now is considered Standard American English, and that certainly can’t have started as a class-based accent. Most of my ancestors were ignorant hicks.
I recall reading that there was some rear-guard action by speech teachers in New York (in the '40’s, perhaps?) as it became clear that Midwestern American English was becoming the standard. They insisted that the r-ful accents of the Midwest were just dialects while the r-less ones of New York were standard.
Essentially all of the currently common accents in the U.S. existed in their current forms in the early 20th century. The main difference is how these accents are treated socially. The one exception may be some of the Californian accents. I suspect that some of their distinctions may have arisen during the middle 20th century. Even these are older than we might think. I remember a co-worker telling me that as a teenager in the early ‘50’s in Southern California, he recalls using the term "bitchin’".
Doghouse Reilly writes:
> I read somewhere that when they were
> working on the Tennessee Valley Authority
> project in the 1930s, government workers
> ran across isolated villages in the Ozarks
> (? or somewhere else?) that had been
> largely cut off from society. Villagers
> reportedly spoke identical dialects to
> whatever colonial English was supposed to
> have been two centuries earlier.
Something like this is a common myth. A claim is made that the accent spoken in isolated portions of the Appalachians or Ozarks or wherever is supposed to be identical to English as it was spoken several centuries before. This is wrong on two counts. First, several centuries ago English had just as many different accents as it has today. Different accents today reproduce features from accents of centuries ago.
Second, it doesn’t appear to be true that there are such things as archaic accents. Every modern accent has kept some features of the older language and changed some others. People think that there is such a thing as an archaic dialect because they hear a dialect spoken that is considerably different from the one that they speak. They notice a few features in it that (as they can tell from old books) have been kept in this dialect but not in the one that they speak. They don’t bother to notice that their own accent has kept some older features which have dropped out of this other dialect.