For a little fun, here is a YouTube playlist of clips spanning sixty years of Star Trek.
Star Trek takes place in a space-faring future, so it’s a good place to look for clues about how industry storytellers might use speech choices to appeal to a mainstream audience without suggesting a specific real-life setting. What sorts of speech are “believable” for a 23rd-century starship crew?
The characters in Star Trek are generally highly-competent, educated professionals, traits traditionally associated with standard speech. Although Star Trek takes place in a post-scarcity future when humanity has ostensibly overcome race and class differences, there are still hierarchies apparent in the show. The captain is the leader of the ship and may lean toward a more dominant, prestige speech variety. Supporting characters convey more or less prestige or social dominance in their speech depending on their role. “Character” roles tend to have the most variance from a contemporary standard.
The speech world of Star Trek has changed a lot in sixty years, and those changes reflect broader social changes in American society. Listening to the clips chronologically, we can notice not only pronunciation shifts, but shifts in the visible identities we see in the captain’s seat, shifts in the level of speech formality that conveys leadership or professionalism, and an overall broadening of the “general” umbrella.
Just as important, we hear quite a bit of variety within a single show or cast, from today’s series all the way back to 1966. Once again, with close listening we can verify that “standard” or “general” speech is not and has never been one monolithic and immutable speech pattern. Instead, it’s an umbrella term for speech that, dramaturgically, avoids telling unintended stories–a choice which, of course, tells a story of its own.
For more context on “standard” or “general” American speech, please visit this handout.