So I could imagine a single Hollywood director could possibly start a trend (if everybody'a speech center were as spineless as mine).
Nit-pick, but everyone speaks with an accent :)
(I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but I have met people who genuinely think that they don't have an accent and are 'unaccented', and it's just other people who do...)
This is in stark contrast to the UK, or just England, where you have an incredible amount of linguistic diversity in a very small geographical area. RP is theoretically "standard", but in reality it's a niche upper class thing.
So this was actually the kind of thing I was hoping to address with my comment. The idea that there's a "neutral" accent is, linguistically speaking, nonsense. That said, there probably isn't too much harm in it, in that if you're an American talking to other Americans there's probably not much ambiguity.
The problem is more that it could create the mistaken idea that, say, "General American" is somehow "normal" and therefore anybody speaking with a different accent becomes "the other", for whatever that may mean. It becomes a reference point to judge other accents against, when that's not necessarily helpful.
And there's a lot of accent prejudice out there... ask anyone who's gone for a job interview, for example, who's been very well-qualified but has an accent that the interviewer didn't expect (this can be due to regional or social backgrounds, or even gender – e.g. so-called "valley girl speak"/high rising terminal). Just something worth thinking about, that's all. I know I've dismissed someone before off-hand based on how they sound, which is not a good thing, and something I'd like to be more aware of myself.
The misguided part here is that thinking because it sounds neutral/unaccented to you means it is the "right" one. That path potentially leads to xenophobia and tribalism.
And you ended with another appeal to consequences.
That is not all that unlikely an explanation, really. Newscasters are shared figures of authority. But it may also be deeper than that. We watch sit-coms or soap operas and share their stories in a similar fashion we might trade tribal social cues. We interact at a very young age with educational TV programming like Sesame Street. There's a lot of pop culture jokes about many of us being raised by TV in the last several generations, but there is a lot of truth there too.
«And you ended with another appeal to consequences.»
Only because I read that you were inquiring about specific possible consequences. My apologies if that is not what you were asking.
I doubt you really know what accent you spoke with when you were three or four. As to why you picked up an accent somewhere close to SAE, it's most likely for reasons of prestige.
Not sure what you mean here. There are rhotic dialects which lack a rule of 'r' deletion and non-rhotic dialects which don't. It has nothing to do with letters. It has to do with the presence or absence of a particular phonological rule. The relevant feature most certainly is fixed in time, in the sense that speakers of non-rhotic dialects consistently delete /r/ phonemes following a vowel whereas speakers of rhotic dialects do not.
>I think the standard accent just doesn't alias nearly as much among all the vowel sounds, and I think that's meaningful.
This is simply false. There are non-standard dialects that make more distinctions between vowels than standard dialects.
Personally, though I tend to think of it as the "American Chameleon" accent as I, like the poster above, find that it trends to adapting to regional variances (often without a conscious intent to do so). I have a hunch that this is a feature of the "accent" rather than a weakness in the speaker, but this is merely lay speculation. It's weird to think of a defining characteristic of an accent being its flexibility rather than rigidity to preferred forms, but I think that helps account for why this "General American" accent is so common in America at this point, because it seems to be sort of an American "Borg" accent: your regional distinctions will be assimilated.
Not sure if Cleese had a point, but it's an interesting take on his fellow actor and that he finds "having one's own voice" important, to some extent.
"CLEESE: Yes, I do. And it just showed why he was such a wonderful impersonator. But it showed that in a very strange way because he'd overslept. And his chauffer Bert said, sorry, boys, Peter's overslept. I'll make you coffee. He'll be out in a bit. And we just sat there sipping coffee. And when Peter came out, he was still in his dressing gown or his robe. And he was apologizing for having overslept, but apologizing in a voice that was not his own. And suddenly, he switched into a rather sort of plumy upper-class voice and was talking to us like this as he walked towards us. And at a moment, he was talking a bit like that. And then he went into another voice, sat on the sofa and 10 seconds later, he was talking to us in his own voice. And see, we were the first persons that he'd spoken to that morning. He'd only just been up a few minutes. And we realized when Graham and I - Graham Chapman and I - sort of compared notes afterwards, we realized that Peter Sellers in the morning had to find his own voice.
DAVIES: So he wasn't trying to impress you. It's like somebody tuning in...
CLEESE: No, no...
DAVIES: ...A radio dial and finding the station.
CLEESE: There was a lack of real personality at his core. And the people who were very good impressionists are often rather like that. Similarly, people who write very good parodies but don't write such great original comedy, those people often lack a certain emotional life. They're very clever, their observation is good, but emotion doesn't inform their work in any way. So their work tends to be brilliantly observed, but not very - what's the word? - not very powerful. They don't tend to be terribly funny. They tend to be terribly clever. So this kind of personality type - a person who has a weak sense of their own identity - they're frightfully good at copying other people, whether it's other writers or other performers.
But we realized that Peter literally had to find his own voice in the morning. And to that extent, he was a sort of personality that he'd had to manufacture himself from different parts. And I - one of the Pythons was ever so slightly like that. And we could always tell when he had been spending time with one of his Beatles friends because he would have a slight Liverpool accent for the next 24 hours."