How To Do Accents. Jan Haydn Rowles
articulators:
It may be that you already have a good understanding of all this, but if this is all new to you, or you feel in need of a refresher, go to ‘Knowing Your Equipment’, Useful Stuff, page 202.
WORKING WITH A RESOURCE RECORDING
In order to have something to mimic it is essential to have a good resource recording: a recorded example of at least one real speaker speaking in the accent you are looking to learn. (After all, children don’t learn to speak in a vacuum!)
It’s amazing the number of actors we meet who say, ‘I’ve tried to do a Welsh accent (or Irish, or Newcastle, etc) and I’m rubbish!’ – only to discover the only time they’ve ever actually heard it was when they went there on holiday ten years before. People have such high expectations of their poor old brains: they seem to expect to be able to do an accent without giving their eyes, ears and mouths a chance to really absorb and learn it. Give yourself a break. You could be brilliant if you had the right tools and practised in the right way!
This book comes with downloadable tracks of 17 accents of English. You can find them on tracks 84-100. They are;
| ● | Norfolk (TRACK 84) |
| ● | Yorkshire (TRACK 85) |
| ● | Standard Canadian (TRACK 86) |
| ● | Standard Australian (TRACK 87) |
| ● | Standard American (TRACK 88) |
| ● | Northern Ireland/Belfast (TRACK 89) |
| ● | Southern Ireland/Cork (TRACK 90) |
| ● | Scottish/Glasgow (TRACK 91) |
| ● | Newcastle-upon-Tyne (TRACK 92) |
| ● | Manchester (TRACK 93) |
| ● | Liverpool (TRACK 94) |
| ● | South Wales/Swansea (TRACK 95) |
| ● | West Midlands/Walsall (TRACK 96) |
| ● | Cockney (TRACK 97) |
| ● | Neutral Standard English (TRACK 98) |
| ● | Contemporary ‘Street’ London (TRACK 99) |
| ● | Cornish (TRACK 100) |
If you want to learn a different accent from these you will need your own resource recording, and here’s how to get one…
Making your own resource recording
Sometimes the best way of getting what you want is to do it yourself. Here’s how.
Find a willing candidate or candidates to record. Two examples are better than one, as you will then have more information to work from. Try places like cultural centres, universities, acting schools, embassies and tourist centres to find the people you want. Remember to be as specific about age, gender, cultural background, etc, as you can: these things can make a huge difference.
Here’s what you will need:
| ● | a portable recording device (it doesn’t matter how up to date it is so long as it works!) |
| ● | the KIT LIST (see Useful Stuff, page 179) |
| ● | Major Player Elicitation sentences (see Useful Stuff, page 181) |
| ● | the Standard Text (see Useful Stuff, page 180) |
| ● | questions to elicit conversational speech (see Useful Stuff, page 181). |
Practise using your recording device: it really doesn’t help someone to be at their ease if you fumble about with microphones.
This may be obvious but…do a test to make sure it’s recording! (Jan has several old dialect tapes with nothing on them because her pause button was still on.)
Make sure the device is next to them and not you. You want their voice, not your own! (Edda has many a tape from her early days where she is loud and clear and the person being interviewed can be heard faintly in the distance.)
Where to find existing resource recordings
It is possible to find good commercial recordings, though they more than likely don’t have the KIT LIST or Standard Text in them. There are plenty of helpful booklets with CDs on the market (Allyn Partin and Gillian Lane Plescia and Penny Dyer, for example, produce a wealth of good recordings with basic vowel information and native speakers) and this book will enable you to use those materials more successfully.
Needless to say, the internet is an invaluable resource. With good broadband facilities you can hear the sounds of the world, and, where copyright allows, even burn them onto your own CDs. We have given a list of some of the websites that we have found most useful in the Appendix (page 219).
How to listen to your resource recording
Once you have found or made your recording there are ways and means of listening to it to get the best out of both it and you.
Unstructured listening
| ● | To begin with, let yourself respond intuitively to get your juices flowing! You may well find yourself wanting to mimic immediately, so do. Always remember to encourage that instinct. |
| ● | Write down anything – and we mean anything – you notice: perhaps the tune strikes you first, maybe it sounds ‘flat’, or a bit ‘choppy’; or perhaps you notice specific words, either because they are unusual words or because they say them in a very different way from you. You’ll probably find you are noticing a lot in this unstructured way. As you work through this book you will be able to put these initial discoveries into the structure of your new accent. |
| ● | If you have a video or DVD recording you can also look at the shapes the speakers are making, how the mouth is held, how much the jaw, lips and cheeks move, or don’t. These are all things worth noticing. |
Structured listening
| ● | Unstructured listening only kick-starts the process. What this book will show you is the next vital step: how to listen in a structured way. |
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As you work through this book we will give you examples of specific sounds and combinations of sounds on the accompanying downloadable tracks. These |