Is there an American accent that's comparable to received pronunciation in the UK?

[raccoon]

If there is, maybe I can learn it. When I tried speech recognition software about 10 years ago, it didn't respond very
well to a Southern accent.

[Denninmi]

1. Talk like da Yoopers, eh!

Ain't no ting to it.

[femmocrat]

2. I read (long time ago) that the NC/Appalachian accent is similar to Elizabethan England.

How would anyone know, since the Elizabethans are all gone now?

[Aristus]

5. That's a good question. And it has been answered.

Years ago.

As part of Edwin Newman's PBS series on the history of the English language. Linguists reviewed written documents from the Elizabethan period to reverse-engineer what the accents would have sounded like. Because standardized spelling didn't exist at the time, and most people wrote phonetically based on their internal perception of a word's pronunciation, and what they heard from others, a rough idea of what particular accents sounded like can be inferred from the spelling.

In this way, for example, language scholars were able to deduce that the accent spoken by London aristocrats of the Elizabethan Era was very similar to today's working-class Cockney accent. They figures this out through the spelling of words like "chynes", meaning "chains".

It was a very interesting documentary.

[RebelOne]

3. Maybe a Philadelphia accent.

I moved to Florida from Philadelphia when I was a child and to this day still have the accent. Someone once told me that they thought I was British.

[mainer]

4. California is the equivalent of RP in the UK

Because it's the accent of newscasters and Hollywood.

[Jenoch]

6. That may be the impression now,

but the upper midwest generally has the most neutral accent and newscasters from say Texas, (Dan Rather) lose their southern accent and pick up a more midwest acctent.

The movie Farge represents Minnesotans' accents the way Valley Girls represent California accents. Sure, there are some who talk in those accents, but it is not the majority.

Tom Brokaw is from South Dakota and his problem was not his accent, it was his speech impediment. Remember the Achille Lauro?

[HereSince1628]

7. A map of the dialects of the US.

[marzipanni]

10. I couldn't see that one very well, so I found its whole website- interesting!

http://aschmann.net/AmEng/

[StanGr]

8. Many years ago Sun Microsystems made the Sparc IPC with voice recognition.

The company was owned by Australians and absolutely none of the Australians could command the machine. All it recognized was American English. It was pretty freaky.

[47of74]

9. The northeast mainly?

I just read something where at the time of the Revolutinary War the British accent was very similar to our own. It was after the war that their accents started to change, one which mainly began in the upper classes. It also said the NE was the most similar to the modern British accent. If I remember I'll see if I can find the document.

[mainer]

11. perhaps your question is being interpreted in two ways

I assumed by RP, you meant "the current gold standard for proper pronunciation" in its own country.

Or did you mean the American accent that's closest to what UK's RP currently sounds like?

[raccoon]

15. That's what I meant, "the current gold standard for proper pronunciation" in its own country. nt

[MrScorpio]

12. You're talking about the Mid-Atlantic English accent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_English

This article is about the dialect of English not localised to the Mid-Atlantic United States. For the dialect spoken in New York City, see New York dialect. For the dialect spoken in Philadelphia, see Philadelphia dialect. For the dialects spoken in New Jersey, see New Jersey English dialects. For the dialect spoken in Baltimore, see Baltimore dialect.

Mid-Atlantic English (sometimes called a Transatlantic accent) is a cultivated or acquired version of the English language once found in certain aristocratic elements of American society and taught for use in the American theatre. It is not a typical vernacular of any location, but rather blends American and British without being predominantly either. Mid-Atlantic speech patterns and vocabulary are also used by some Anglophone expatriates, many adopting certain features of the accent of their place of residence.

Mid-Atlantic English was popular in Hollywood films from the 1930s to the early 1960s, and continues to be associated with people such as Cary Grant,[1] Katharine Hepburn, William F. Buckley, Jr.,[2] Gore Vidal, George Plimpton,[3][4] Roscoe Lee Browne,[5] Norman Mailer,[6] Maria Callas, Patrick McGoohan, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV[7] and John Houseman. The monologuist Ruth Draper's recorded "The Italian Lesson" gives an example of this East Coast American upper-class diction of the 1940s.

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. That's not "comparable to Received Pronunciation", though

RP was at one time considered as a standard accent (it was the accent of BBC announcers), and was used by people across the UK who belonged to the educated upper middle classes. It's the "reference" accent; if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, the pronunciations given are RP.

The American equivalent would be "General American".

[Demoiselle]

14. Ohio?

I heard years ago that the American accent most sought after for announcers was spoken by Ohioans.
Think Hugh Downs.
Keith Olberman, too.