While deliberate practice can apply to many things, the basic understanding is that it is a specific type of practice that is both purposeful and systematic. ​For this specific deliberate practice project, I will be teaching myself how to use a transatlantic or mid-Atlantic accent. This is a self-guided project for one of my final courses in my applied linguistics master's program. 

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For this project, I plan on learning the transatlantic or mid-Atlantic accent of American English. While this accent is purely made up and lost its popularity around WWII times, I think it is an interesting language variant. 

 

For some background for those who may not be familiar, the transatlantic accent was purely made up and was consciously learned by children in boarding schools to socialites and educational elitists to establish a difference between upper and lower-class societies. This accent was extremely popular in films as well in the 1920s and 1940s. 

 

This is particularly interesting because it has some aspects of British English, being an r-less variant, and some aspects of New England English at the time of its creation. It was created by Australian phonetician William Tilly. 

For my audio sample, I went through quite a bit of searching to find something I saw fitting that had clear audio and video quality along with not having a lot of lexical aspects from the 1920s-40s. I ended up settling on a clip from the movie The Aviator, which was released in 2004. The movie was based on real events from Howard Hughes’s career from the 1920s through the 1940s and the characters are using a transatlantic accent throughout the movie.

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From here on out, you'll be able to come back and see the progress I've made in achieving this variant of English!