Speech was a lot more varied than what was shown in the movies of the thirties and forties, particularly since those movies romanticized the lives of the rich. What are some things the average citizen on the street would have liked to hear from a different kind of person? My grandparents were born in 1919 and 1925, and these children would have been around in the mid 40ties. How do they respond to this? They were from Brooklyn and came from simple backgrounds (my great grandfather was a fireman, so he had about as much in common with some highborn socialite as a rock has with a piece of cheese.) My grandparents actually sounded a lot more like Bugs Bunny than any character in the Philadelphia Story; they had every feature of Bugs’s speech except pronouncing ur sounds like oi, so that “turkey” became “toikey”. … and he grew up as a native of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which during the war and the depression was heavily populated by eastern European Jews and their American born children. (Another good example would be Mel Brooks, who is still alive and was only a little younger than my grandmother; his speech is to this day peppered with idoms and expressions

from Yiddish) People from other areas, the average person, sounded very similar to the way they do today. I have been studying a man named Babe Heffron on YouTube. He was a soldier in a famous company during WWI (the same one that invaded Normandy as paratroopers and marched on to free Dachau). Babe Heffron sounds like a typical guy from Philadelphia and his speech is not much different from the way his grandsons (men in their twenties now) talk today. Louisana’s accent had a stronger French component than it does in the present owing to a heavier concentration of Cajun French speakers. Black people injected more southern humour into their speech until the 1950s. Their speech was almost always black but mostly white. The only big difference I can think offhand might be the Boston accent; in that it was a lot thicker in the late thirties mainly becaue it had been isolated for so long, there were not as many people moving in from other areas of the nation (they used to call a fountain a bubbler, but few people I know do this any more, and some rhoticity has come in, though not total)