Mastering Accents: A Comprehensive Guide to Vocal Transformation
Accents are more than just a quirk of speech; they carry cultural significance, reflecting the speaker’s background and sometimes even their social class. Recognizing different accents allows for a deeper understanding of a person's origin and even their emotional state. For actors, mastering accents expands opportunities and adds realism to character work. Imagine Mike Myers’ Shrek without a Scottish inflection, or Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell in “The Wire” speaking with a natural English lilt. This article provides a detailed guide on how to learn different accents effectively.
Laying the Foundation
Mental Reconnaissance: Understanding the Context
When embarking on your accent journey, take a page out of your acting book and do some mental reconnaissance, or, investigating. Begin to think about everything that this person goes through in their daily life and how they live. Does your character live in a hot or a cold climate? Is the air clean? What is the culture like? Is it easy and laid back or more conservative and regimented? All of these things can affect the general default placement of an accent or a dialect. So if we’re building a house then this is your foundation.
Placement and Oral Posture: The Physicality of Accent
Every accent or dialect has its own unique placement of the jaw, tongue, lips and mouth. This is such an important part of developing any accent because if you get this right the rest will feel and flow naturally as it will all make sense. The placement of an accent has a lot to with what we discussed before in regards to how it is affected by its surroundings.
As an example let’s take a note from our very own Patrick Cullens playbook and have a crack at RP. Take your tongue and put it behind your top teeth, feel the hard palate. Good. Now move it back and feel the soft palate, nice - now lift the back of your tongue and feel the roof of your mouth at the very back there. Imagine, that you have an egg in the back of your mouth, sitting on top of the very back of your tongue, you should feel a lot of space in the back of your mouth. Good - now - think about your upper lip, make it tight and set in stone. Know in your heart that all of the sounds that you make from here on out will use a lot of lip rounding. We want to keep the sound coming forward, with a stiff upper lip and absolutely no width in the mouth. Finally, take a breath in, and really contact your chest resonance, try and work for a nice baritone sound encapsulating all of that chest power you have. If you ever get lost, just realign your placement!
Different accents require different tongue and articulator placement. For example, the French accent generally requires rounded lips and forward tongue placement, while the British accent uses a dropped, relaxed jaw and lowered tongue.
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Pitch and Rhythm: The Musicality of Accent
Pitch Rhythm is the musicality of someone’s accent. A great example of this is Southern Irish. There’s a beautiful melody to the way they speak as it varies in pitch and speed.
Vowel and Consonant Sounds: The Building Blocks of Speech
Without getting too deep into the bowels of the phonetic alphabet we’ll take a little look at vowel and consonant sounds. These are our vowel sounds. In acting, vowel sounds are how we show emotion. Now a consonant is any sound, that is not a vowel sound. That’s pretty straight forward right? In acting consonants are how we convey information so they are equally as important, but especially when it comes to accents.
The Learning Process
Immersion: Submerging Yourself in the Accent
Immerse yourself in films, TV shows, social media videos, radio, podcasts, and anything you can get your hands (and ears!) on to truly get a feel for each accent. “Put one earbud in or one side of headphones on and have your sample speaker playing, but really low,” suggests voice and dialect coach Rebecca Gausnell. “You kind of create a café effect. You know when you’re in a café and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Why do I sound Scottish? Oh, I was sitting next to a Scottish person.’ We do tend to mold our accents, some people more than others, into someone else’s.
Research: Gathering Samples and Resources
Once you know the exact accent you’d like to start with, hit the internet to begin gathering video and audio samples of native speakers who use this accent.
A fantastic resource for actors is The Accent and Dialect Archives of the Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts. They’re free and open to anyone with a passion for accents. There is a treasure trove of accent gold in here. A note on this: It’s always best to pick someone who’s actually a native speaker of that accent and always to pick just one person, or it can get a bit muddled. An amazing book to get you started is Paul Meiers: Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen.
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Listening: The Key Component
Whatever reason you have for learning how to do new accents, the starting point remains the same: listening to people who authentically speak with the accent you are trying to learn. “I always encourage people to find authentic speakers, not actors in television shows or movies, because they aren’t always the best representation of the accent,” says Sammi. “I go to YouTube and search the region of the accent I want to learn - for example - ‘actors from Atlanta, Georgia,’ and I listen to interviews with the actors to hear their authentic, natural accents,” Sammi continues. Listening is a key component toward beginning the process of learning any new accent.
Spontaneous Speech: Naturalizing the Accent
The only true way to learn a new accent is by speaking with that accent. Although this seems like a simple tip, there is much more to speaking in an accent than simply reading a few lines. Sammi refers to her technique of mastering an accent as “spontaneous speech.” “I work with clients on specific texts, but also on spontaneous speech. To truly master an accent you have to be able to speak without pre-planning what you are going to say. It has to be natural,” Sammi says.
Spontaneous speech could involve talking to yourself out loud in the accent for an entire day, or even chatting with friends and family as you test out the accent. There is no better way to learn an accent authentically than to speak using that accent as often as you can. “I talk in accents a lot with my friends,” Sammi tells us. “Talk to yourself or your friends and allow yourself to make mistakes and build that muscle memory. Seek out a dialect coach: it’s always good to have someone else listening to your speech.”
Practice: The Path to Mastery
The more time you take practicing accents, the better you’ll be. Practice daily to make an unfamiliar accent feel instinctive-and don’t be afraid to work with a vocal or dialect coach. Otherwise, your best friend for this process is a tape recorder. “Play the recordings of yourself and find where you’re not quite matching,” says Jim Johnson, voice and dialect teacher at the University of Houston. “Don’t wait until you get it before you start using it.
When all is said and done and you’ve come this far it’s time to practice practice practice. In any way, you can! Practice on your mates. Practice answering the phone (Unless it’s professional, I can’t endorse that).
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Finding Native Speakers: An Invaluable Resource
This can be a tough one but can be ideal for learning any accent. If you or someone you know are friends with or knows someone who is a native speaker of that accent, see if you can get in touch! Listen to the way they speak. Ask as many questions as you think is fair to ask them. Maybe even ask if it’s okay with them if you record them for later use. My favourite part of this one is you might even make a new friend!
Seeking Professional Guidance: The Accent Coach
Now I know this won’t be accessible to everyone, be it financially, geographically or otherwise but I would be out of my mind not to mention the importance and value of a good accent coach. What an accent coach provides you that you can’t necessarily provide yourself, is another set of highly trained professional accent tuning ears. An accent coach can listen to all of your little minuscule bits and bobs in your accent that you might be missing or overworking or whatever, and help you fix them!
After practicing your accent, now’s the time to take your accent acquisition to the professional level and hire a private dialect coach. To make the most of your lessons, discuss your reasons for choosing the accent; let them know what steps you’ve taken so far. Send them a recording of your own accent, and a second tape of your best shot at the accent you want to learn. Find a quiet place and use your smartphone to record yourself reading aloud. Be sure to use the same passage with your own accent and the target accent.
If you’re starting with a private dialect coach straight away, be sure to budget time and money for 12 to 14 hour-long sessions over the course of six to eight weeks, with plenty of daily practice on your own in between.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Now, like all things in life, nothing is set in stone. There will be bits and bobs to an accent which are inconsistent, and this is where the real mastery work starts. None of those has an ‘r’ at the end of the word in the way that a General American accent has. But what you might get wrong if you were studying an Australian accent is rhotic ‘r’s used to connect words. Mostly words that both end with vowels. Did you hear it? It sounds weird, right? There are all sorts of these little gems just waiting to be found in any accent or dialect.
Let me ask you this: when you speak, in whatever accent you may have, is it hard? Or does it just flow naturally? This is ideally where we wanna get to with any accent we’re working on. It should feel and sound natural, and this means not labouring every sound we make.
Accent Acquisition for Voice Actors
The Importance of Authenticity
When it comes to voice over, listening experiences are more personal. Listeners use earbuds, car stereo speakers, home radios, or a smart speaker (among other things) when they encounter voice over, as opposed to a voice actor who may be positioned at a distance, like on a stage. Because of this, audiences can hear every detail of the actor’s performance, and if they falter even a single word, it will stand out and blemish the illusion of the entire spot.
Quality Over Quantity
We asked Sammi whether it’s more advantageous for a voice actor to try to expand their breadth by learning as many new accents as possible, or whether to focus on perfecting a select few. She tells us that it varies based on the voice actor and the industry in which they’re seeking work, but that she generally recommends quality over quantity when it comes to learning new accents. “I would lean toward perfecting a few, rather than trying to gain a general sense of a bunch,” Sammi explains. “But, first and foremost, I’d say that it’s important for voice actors to simply develop the skill of knowing how to learn an accent - whether it’s in general for repertoire-building, or for a specific role - because just being able to learn accents is a talent on its own.”
Sought-After Accents
Certain accents are more sought after than others. In Sammi’s experience, as mentioned above, General British (RP) accents tend to be popular. She generally trains voice actors in a standardized version of the accent, unless the voice actor is auditioning for a specific role. In that case, she will look more closely at the regional accents for that specific place to pin down the nuances of a particular accent.
“I would say my number one is a general British accent, like a middle-to-upper-class British that you hear in a lot of commercials. In some cases, casting directors are looking for someone who has a genuine British accent, but it really depends on their budget and the extent of their reach,” Sammi clarifies. While British is an optimal accent for North American voice actors to have at the ready, Sammi explains that many people presume they can easily fake the accent without any training. With voice over, however, it doesn’t take audiences long to identify when an accent is fake, and it typically spoils the entirety of the work.
“I would also say some kind of general Southern accent,” adds Sammi. “Not even a strong Southern, but more so that hint of a Southern sound, with a little bit of twang, or a Southern drawl. I’m thinking particularly of truck commercials. Casting directors want a little bit of that: ‘I’m driving in my truck.’ It’s not really a strong accent, but they want a flavor of it because of who they’re marketing to.”
Overcoming Difficulties
The difficulty of picking up on new accents largely depends on your native accent. Sammi has a natural Midwestern American accent and says that, generally, the French accent can be a bit more difficult for Americans to pick up. “The French ‘R,’ which is a back-of-the-mouth sound, tends to be harder, especially for Americans. Americans never make that sound,” Sammi says. For Sammi, who also has an Eastern European background, the hardest accents for her to learn are any of the Spanish language accents. “If you don’t have the right oral posture it can lean toward sounding a bit more Eastern European. My Spanish accent sounded really Russian at first,” she says. You can listen to other voice actors doing Russian accents too.
Avoiding Inauthenticity
When auditioning for a job in an accent that doesn’t come naturally, you should spend some time speaking in that accent before you even step up to the microphone. “Before you record the audition, talk in the accent for 20 minutes. Don’t get too hard on yourself if you accidentally go off accent, and just continue to talk to yourself in the accent - it’s really the only way to learn,” Sammi advises.
It is also important to avoid sounding too stereotypical. Sammi recognizes that there may be a degree of truth in the sounds of stereotyping an accent, but it’s important to avoid silliness and character voices when learning a new accent. Sammi once produced a viral video in which she slips into different accents in a short span of time. The dialect coach recalls receiving comments like: ‘Not everyone from Scotland sounds like that!‘ Her response: “Of course not. I had three minutes to do the video, so I chose the most standard version of each accent. For a specific role or show, I will get as specific as possible into the accent and dialect of that region.” Stereotyping the soundsof the accent you are learning is not an issue so long as it is coming from a place of research and having carefully listened to authentic speakers repeatedly.
The Global Accent
We asked Sammi whether she’d been approached by students who want to adopt a ‘global accent‘ -defined as “a mode of pronunciation that blends the sound of all the major English-speaking dialects in order to form one ambiguous style of speech that is easily understood by people across the globe while containing no vocal characteristics associated with any particular region.”
“In that case,” Sammi outlines, “I would still tend to lean a little more British because that’s such a pervasive accent around the world. Not that it necessarily aligns with the population of the world, but especially in media and entertainment, General American and General British accents are the most commonly heard.”
“I would suggest leaning a bit into the British,” Sammi continues. “It’s important to know that the British accent is really broken down by class. A posh, upper-class voice may sound a bit too much like it belongs in a Jane Austen adaptation, while a Cockney accent can occasionally veer into character voice territory. When you’re performing animation, those contrasting sounds are both great to know. However, I’d recommend leaning somewhere in the middle of them, so that instead of sounding too class-oriented, the accent comes off sounding more global.”
Additional Tips and Resources
Budgeting Time and Money
Learning an accent is not instantaneous. If you’re starting with a private dialect coach straight away, be sure to budget time and money for 12 to 14 hour-long sessions over the course of six to eight weeks, with plenty of daily practice on your own in between.
Exploring Free Resources
There are many more resources you can try to learn a new accent in a much easier, effective, and fun way. And many of them are completely free like Youtube where you can find thousands of videos that will help you learn a new accent, or you can also try listening to music by artists who are native speakers of the accent you’re learning.
Determining Your Needs
The first thing you will need to do is to determine exactly which dialect(s) you’ll want to learn. Perhaps your agent keeps sending you in for roles for Chinese businessmen, or Serbian immigrants, or Saudi Arabian royalty. If there is a pattern you see emerging, start your quest there. If you aren’t sure which accent will be the most marketable, find someone who is experienced in “dialect fitting,” which approaches accent acquisition as an extension of your overall brand.
Language Training
If the accent you wish to learn is influenced by a language outside of English, it can be valuable to take some entry-level language training as well. As you are learning the vocabulary and grammar, pay attention to pronunciation. When people speak in a second language, they often borrow sounds from their first language. Learning the basics can exercise your articulatory anatomy, give you insight as to why the accent sounds the way it does, and give you the skills you’ll need if a director asks if you can throw in a few snippets of ad-libbing on set.
Scaling Back Exaggeration
When you’re more advanced into your journey of learning a new accent, try to gradually scale back the exaggeration.
Personal Favorites
“The easiest to teach is the Londoner accent or Standard British. I really love teaching more complicated ones like French or Australian, which are hard because most people tend to lean toward British sounds or Irish sounds when trying to master a new accent,” Sammi says.
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