While accents do shift, part of what you are hearing may be due to the simple fact that audiences have gotten geographically larger, so that regional accents - which would be noticed by segments of the audience - gradually came to be seen as a drawback.
Further, there is another separate but similar phenomenon: the style of speaking. Radio news readers (if that's the correct term) in the 1930s had a nasal quality; perhaps it came through more clearly over the crackly ether. In the 1940s and 50s, a strident delivery and a youthful, all-American tone of voice were prefered. In the 1960s and 70s, after t.v. acquired widespread popularity, deeper-voiced, almost grandfatherly newscasters predominated. These are merely fads.
Regards,
That’s an interesting observation. That styles of speaking for announcers changed from the assertive to the grandfatherly and comforting.
FDR’s accent was interesting. I can’t say exactly what it was.
I taught a seminar once and in it were three young women from various parts of the country and they all spoke exactly alike -— that awful Valley Girl accent. One was Janapese-American from Hawaii, one was a native-born San Antonian (Texas) and a third was from Michigan. They all spoke Valley Girl.
It has become the standard.
As for the NY accent in New Orleans, there is a Deep South way of speaking that says ‘choice’ for church and ‘noisse’ for nurse. That is in Mississippi and new Orleans both.
It seems to me there is a coastal pehnomenon of lack of R’s -— final r’s at any rate, that streches from New Jersey to New Orleans, right around the lowland coasts of the Atlantic.
But I am no expert.
I once got off a train in Jacksonville Mississippi andthe taxi driver that had been sent to pick me up said, as I thought ‘How was your dead rat?’
I finally figured out he was saying ‘How was your train ride?’