Neutral accent

>>Travis, I would tend to agree with you on most points, but class isn't just the accent or dialect, it's a variety of things. Accent and language do influence potential employers and possibly upward mobility, imo. I've been hired on the basis of my languages and accent. This is a little funny because my primary job skills are not in languages...<<

I wasn't saying that it was just dialect at all. Rather, I was saying that one's idiolect is only tied to social class *for some* here, and that for many, it is more just a function of where one grew up.

As Brian Ferry stated once; art can overcome the class obstacles.

i live india i know work for american project if you give some tips for having an netural accent

>>I think the biggest difference is that class is something you're essentially stuck with in the UK, whereas in North America you can move up fairly easily (if you've got the money, the job, the education, etc.). So in the UK, your accent (which doesn't really change) is tied to your class (which also doesn't change), but in the US, class changes much more easily, so it can't be directly tied to accent.<<

It depends. On one hand, yes, if you're middle class or have been raised as such, simply getting a better paying or more prestigious position can change one's social position. On the other hand, if you've grown up as being lower class, you generally have little to no social mobility to speak of, just like in the UK.

For instance, a poor student submerged in debt can still socially be middle class despite their economic position at the present, and can still definitely have good long term prospects even if they're on a week-by-week basis financially and living primarily off of ramen. On the other hand, someone who has lived in the inner city their entire life has little to no chance of improving their position at all, one way or another, even if they are financially are in no worse a position than said student. And conversely, said student would be completely out of place if thrown into a truly working class environment even if they are no better off financially than anyone else in said context.

And just one one can have no money and still be middle class underneath it all, gaining a lot of money does not truly make one middle or upper class in the US either, even if it makes people likely to ignore such until you lose said money or make too much of a disgrace of oneself for such to be ignored. One can definitely see this in the case of many recording artists or athletes who may have a very large amount of money, but still have not truly become socially upper class nonetheless and may be an embarrassment at times to others with similar wealth but different social mores. The thing is that there is still a notion of being nouveau riche in North America, even if it is not as pronounced or explictly stated as in the UK.

This all goes to show that there really is such a thing as social class independent of mere wealth in North America, contrary to what people often state. It may not be as firmly entrenched as in the UK, but it is still definitely there. Probably the strongest division, though, in North America is between the lower and working classes and social classes above such; it is much easier to go from being a middle class person with little money to being an upper class person provided the right circumstances than it is to even go from being a lower class person to being a middle class person.

Of course, though, there are exceptions, particularly new immigrant populations, where there may be more social mobility; one likely has a much better chance for oneself or one's family as an immigrant without much money than as a lower class person in the inner city, illegal immigration aside. The matter, though, is that being an immigrant without money does not automatically make one part of the real lower class (what Marx called the lumpenproletariat), and one likely will have more social capital with other immigrants than one would have as an actual lower class person.

There's no such thing as ''neutral accent'' in the USA. I guess every accent that's not too Southern or too BackEast souding is considered ''neutral'', even it has some regional features ar ''Northern Cities vowel Shift''...
It's not easy to hear the ''neutral accent'' in Hollywood, most movies and sitcoms use either Californian accent or NYC accent.

I don't know about CNN, I don't watch it. They have newscasters from all around the world, including Canadians with Canadian raising and Canadian Vowel shift.

<<Aside from the racial underclass does anyone really believe that a rednecked, slack-jawed yokel from Mississippi could get a job on Wall St..>>

Rick, one of the most pervasive generalizations I see here on Antimoon is that Southerners have some kind of pan-Southern accent--undereducated, drawled, "white-trash". Nothing could be further from the truth. I once read that the South has 43 (if I remember correctly) distinct dialects.

Even in Mississippi, there are different accents. If you want to think in terms of geography, parts of Mississippi are non-rhotic and parts are rhotic. There are further distinctions in terms of social class. The upper crust in MS speaks differently from the "white trash" of the area, who speak differently still from the African-Americans. There are even age distinctions; older people from Virginia, for example, speak in a decidedly different dialect from the young ones.

A redneck from MS might not be able to get a job on Wall Street, but an old-guard "uppercrustman" from MS certainly could. Shepard Smith isn't an uppercrustman, but he does just fine on Fox News.

You are right about all the rest, though; as unfair as it seems, we are all judged on our accents.