#my TEFL certification course notes haunted me about his exact pronunciations

[neptunerunaway]

Alastor's Accents & Linguistic Analysis

I love linguistics and I ended up getting really fixated on Alastor's accent so here's an analysis I cooked up

In the series, Alastor speaks with a Mid-Atlantic accent, also known as a transatlantic accent. It is a blend of English that seeks to blend American and British (specifically Received Pronunciation) accents. This accent was mainly used by two groups of people. 1) the wealthy, upper-class, who often learned to use it in private preparatory schools. And 2) entertainers.

(It was also commonly used to teach non-native English speakers)

This accent was very commonly used in the entertainment industry in films, theater productions, and radio broadcasts, which explains why Alastor would use it.

(It's not that important, but while listening to the character, I noticed that the pilot va and the series va have slight variations of the accent. Particularly, pilot Alastor avoids the rhotic r sound almost completely, while series Alastor only occasionally cuts the rhotic r, so you hear them a lot more.

If you want to hear it, listen to the words than end in -r. Can you actually hear the r sound or is it a vowel that implies an r?)

The thing about a Mid-Atlantic accent though, is that it is a learned accent that speakers need to be trained in. No one used it natively except maybe those raised in the wealthy elite.

(I have a slight fascination with accent training bc I'm from an area that has an accent that people train to use. Newscasters used to be sent here in order to learn the accent)

So Alastor would not have grown up using that accent, but rather had to learn it for his job as a radio host. He may have taken to using it in everyday life as an adult, but we can't be sure.

So what is his natural accent? We can't be 100% certain, but we can take a guess, so lets' look at the facts we have about his life.

We know he was born and raised in New Orleans and he's 'mixed race Creole' which narrows it down quite a bit. Now, New Orleans is actually quite linguistically diverse, but to untrained ears (myself) they sound very similar. Here's a video about a few of the accents:

So there it is, that is possibly the accent Alastor would naturally have. Of course, there are a few other factors to consider, such as the time period, but I'm not sifting through research papers to figure out if there were any distinct differences.

As I leave us here, let me say that I am in no means an expert in anything I talk about here, I am merely someone who really enjoys languages and linguistics and all notes here are from an amateurs observations.