Mid-Atlantic English (less ambiguously known as 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 vernacular typical 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 is associated with such people as Cary Grant,[1] Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Calvin Coolidge, William F. Buckley, Jr.,[2] Gore Vidal, George Plimpton,[3][4] Roscoe Lee Browne,[5] Norman Mailer,[6] Diana Vreeland,[7] Maria Callas, Patrick McGoohan, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV,[8] John Houseman, Angela Cartwright, and Jonathan Harris. The monologuist Ruth Draper's recorded "The Italian Lesson" gives an example of this East Coast American upper-class diction of the 1940s.
The terms "Transatlantic" and "Mid-Atlantic" are sometimes used in Britain to refer, often critically, to the speech of British public figures (often in the entertainment industry) who affect a quasi-American accent. The fictional Radio Norwich DJ, Dave Clifton, from the BBC television comedy series I'm Alan Partridge, speaks with a Transatlantic accent.