It’s part carnival barker, part auctioneer. It still makes use of General American, but it has a more nasal quality, and makes use of a lilting, singsong quality that is useful both for keeping the audience’s attention and packing in quite a bit of information. It’s this period that the actor Hank Azaria parodies in his sitcom and podcast Brockmire, about a disgraced baseball announcer who uses his baseball announcer voice even when he’s not actually working (to humorous effect, as you can imagine). Sticking with baseball, it was in the 1970s that the Generic Baseball Announcer Voice was born. Sports announcers, however, play a very different role, and so the accent changed to fit that. This General American accent communicated authority, and that’s why even today, pretty much every newscaster still uses it. If you compare a baseball broadcast from 1944 and one from 1960, it’s easy to hear the change from the r-dropping, nasal Mid-Atlantic accent to the deeper, more Walter Cronkite-like General American accent.
This isn’t to say that there was a magic change from one to the other, but there was certainly a slow shift in how announcers sounded. Sports announcers were a part of this phenomenon. And because the history of broadcasting in the United States is very white and male, the accent is also the one most identified with white men. It’s an evolving standard used by newscasters and anyone else trying to sound “professional,” because (unfortunately) regional accents often come with stereotypes and preconceptions. People on the radio and on television started to use General American, an accent that is clearly American but doesn’t have any features that would make it clear what region a person is from.
Tv show about baseball commentator professional#
Whereas before, professional newscasters and the like would use something called the Mid-Atlantic accent - a hybrid of American and British accents that was known as the “professional” announcer voice - the 1950s ushered in a more American sound. How Sports Announcers’ Accents DevelopedĪfter the end of World War II, the way people talked on the radio shifted. Where did this accent come from, and does it affect the way people experience sports? Let’s tee off into the world of sportscasting. And with a career like sports commentator, where the voice is the most prominent feature, the accent used becomes all the more important. Because while we usually think of accents and dialects as regional, the way someone talks is influenced by a number of factors like age, class, race and, yes, career. That might sound like a silly question, but there actually are a few common speech traits that can be tracked across sports commentators. It’s enough to make you wonder, is there a sports announcer accent? And while there are certainly some distinctive announcers, if you watch or listen to a lot of sports, you might start to note similarities in the ways they speak. It’s no wonder that people who watch enough games will develop strong opinions as to which announcers they like and which they don’t. They’re tasked with giving the play-by-play of the action in front of them, but they’re also expected to provide historical insight, color commentary and amusing anecdotes. Sports announcers have one of the most important jobs in the world.
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