Northeastern elite accent

A Northeastern elite accent is any of the related American English accents used by members of the Northeastern elite born between the 19th century and early 20th century, which share significant features with Eastern New England English and Received Pronunciation (RP), the standard British accent.^[1][2][3][4] The late 19th century first produced audio recordings of and general commentary about such accents used by wealthy East Coast and Northern Americans, particularly New Yorkers and New Englanders, sometimes directly associated with their education at private preparatory schools.^[5] Scholars traditionally describe these accents as prescribed or affected ways of speaking explicitly taught in elite schools of that era,^[1][2][6] though the linguist Geoff Lindsey argues that such accents emerged naturally as an upper-class sociolect;^[7] the linguist John McWhorter expresses a middle-ground possibility.^[8]

No consistent name exists for this class of accents. It has occasionally been called Northeastern standard^[4] or cultivated American speech,^[2] and is sometimes recognized as a Mid-Atlantic accent,^[9][10] a term that in American popular culture tends to refer to related speech patterns used by early 20th-century actors and announcers. A similar accent that resulted from different historical processes emerged in Canada, Canadian dainty, existing for a century before waning in the 1950s.^[11]