How To Do Accents. Jan Haydn Rowles
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GET INTO THE SCENE
Accents don’t exist in a vacuum. They are made by living, breathing communities, subject to the vagaries of history, politics, peer pressure, climate, culture, economics and more. Contextualising your accent is a vital step towards owning it and making it real. Remember, as the world gets smaller, authenticity becomes ever more important.
Putting it into a cultural and physical context
| ● | It sounds obvious, but know where you are on the map! Everywhere exists in relation to somewhere else: you have to know your neighbours to know yourself (one of those clichés that happens to be true). When you see how close they are on the map it’s hardly surprising that when you do a Newcastle accent you can sometimes sound Scottish. It can even be reassuring. |
| ● | Find out as much as you can about the music, dance, art and culture of an area. These influences may directly affect or indeed reflect the way people speak. Either way, immersing yourself in them helps you to feel the heartbeat of the people: think of Irish dancing and the rhythms of the bodhrán; Country and Western songs bending the notes on the sliding guitar; Yiddish klezmer music with its minor keys, fast trills and sliding notes (to name just a few significant examples). |
| ● | If you possibly can, visit the area. Nothing compares with being immersed in the accent, meeting the people and breathing in the landscape. If you can’t get there, many organisations produce websites and tourist videos which can give you a flavour of the same experience. |
| ● | You may find cultural centres, organisations and community groups in your own area that have the accent you are looking for – for example, the London Welsh Centre or the New York Irish Centre. Visit them! |
| ● | We have to give a mention to the Wikipedia website. It is an incredible resource for geographical, historical, cultural and even linguistic, phonetic and phonological information on communities and their dialects. |
Putting it into historical context
| ● | Accents change over time. Influences come and go and it is important to know the period of the play you are doing and how your character fits into the social mix of the time. The accents in much of London today bear little or no relation to the accents of 50 years ago. Today in the early days of the 21st century some young people of London have an accent heavily influenced by the sounds of African, Jamaican and Bengali, whereas the influences in the early 20th century were French, Irish and Jewish. New accents appear with the arrival of another wave of incomers: accents such as Arabic/Chicago or Bengali/Bradford. We can’t always be totally historically accurate, but knowing where your accent comes from and even where it’s going will enable you to make informed choices about what to do and how to do it. |
| ● | Where you can, find a sample speaker from the right period for the play/character you are doing. It may take a bit of searching through historical sound archives. A 50-year-old speaker recorded in 1920 is giving you a window into an accent that reaches back to the 1870s. It would be inappropriate to use the accent of a present-day 17-year-old for plays such as The Bright and Bold Design (1930s Stoke-on-Trent), Men Should Weep (1930s Glasgow) or The Accrington Pals (First World War Accrington). |
2
THE FOUNDATIONS
IN THIS CHAPTER…
You will learn how to lay the Foundations of an accent. Solid foundations hold the whole structure of the accent in place.
When asked what makes one accent different from another, most people will point to differences in tune (what we will call the ‘groove’, page 149), two or three vowels (the ‘shapes’, page 113), and maybe one or two consonants (the ‘bite’, page 55). These are all valid, important observations, but underpinning all of these are the foundations on which the groove, shapes and bite sit.
One day we were sharing our stories of how we each discovered that we had a passion for sounds and accents. When Jan was young, she and her friend Julie Brown used to pretend they were French. This didn’t involve any French language, just gobbledygook using a generally ‘French’ sound. They also pretended to be the ‘Fonz’ doing an American accent, and Liza Goddard in Skippy doing an Australian accent. At the tender age of ten, Jan taught Julie what the difference was between those accents, explaining that:
| ● | ‘American’ was in the back of the mouth. |
| ● | ‘French’ needed to have a particular tone to it. |
| ● | ‘Australian’ was similar to ‘London’, but you needed to smile and grit your teeth. |
Contained within these apparently naïve early descriptions are the first three of the four building blocks that are the foundations of an accent.
To establish solid accent foundations, you will need these three elements to be firmly in place:
| ● | The Zone – Where the sound is placed. |
| ● | The Tone – The resonant quality of the accent. |
| ● | The Setting – The setting of the muscles of the face and mouth. |
With these in place, and because the voice is not a static building, you will need one more element…
| ● | The Direction – The direction in which the voice is sent. |
Without these foundations your accent will be unfocused and difficult to sustain, but with all four elements working together you create the solid foundations on which the rest of the accent is built.
So before we go any further let’s learn how to:
| ● | Focus the voice in a specific Zone. |
| ● | Hear and create a specific Tone. |
| ● | Feel and sustain a specific Setting. |
| ● | Send the voice in the right Direction. |
…and thereby build your Foundations.
THE ZONE
Each accent has a resonant focal point, or ‘placement’, in the mouth that we call a Zone.
Small changes in the shaping of the throat and mouth, tongue and soft palate affect which zone the