Accents

I just recently returned to the library a good book on accents by Robert Blumenfeld, titled Accents: A Manual for Actors.

What I found interesting was that accents change over time, and the late-nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century accents used by the American and British upper classes are all but extinct. Two CDs accompanied the book, and there was a sample of such an American accent, in which the speaker pronounced Philippines as Philippins, and abdomen as abDOmen.

I plan to post more later.

http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/accent.html

One post here mentions the accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley.