EDUCATION: Appendix
Tips for how to Learn a Dialect
- Only ever listen to recordings of native speakers-Non-native speakers cannot ever completely imitate the intonation pattern of a native. N.B. Many of the best known materials for dialects do not use native speakers.
- Work not only with the phonetic substitutions, but also with the placement of the mouth: how the mouth is shaped, whether the lips are spread or rounded, tongue placements, whether the soft palate is lowered or not, whether the air flow hits at the back of the throat, or at the front. Having the correct placement will create the resonance of the accent, whereas sticking to your native placement but substituting sounds will not sound like the accent.
- It is best to doctor your script before you start, write in all the substitutions, so that you will learn how it sounds rather than looking at the spelling, which will interfere with your ability to pronounce it correctly and spontaneously. Know exactly which sounds change and which do not. Read in rehearsal from a doctored script.
- If it is a foreign accent, make a decision with your director as to whether the character learnt American English or British English. Nowadays, educated Europeans and East Indians all learn British English. Generally you have to pronounce the word as a Brit would, then overlay it with the foreign accent. Less educated immigrants to America and Latin Americans learn American English.
- If you are having trouble with pronunciation and the intonation pattern, sing it. It is extremely effective.
- Listen to folk music. For example, the musicality of folk musicals comes from the intonation pattern of the dialect in which they are sung.
- Listen to as much of the accent as you can. Go to the library, there are lots of materials. There are many plays and other materials recorded by some of the great actors. The BBC broadcasts on NPR. N.B. Buying materials where 50 accents are on one tape, usually means that only one minute of each accent is recording, which is not enough and probably does not contain all the sounds which have to be changed.
- One of the most effective ways is to listen to a recording with headphones and talk along with it, taking that nanosecond to figure out what they are saying .Or listen to a recorded play and read the script while speaking the lines. Watch BBC TV and talk along with it, using headphones. It is physiologically impossible to maintain one’s own accent while one has head phones playing.
- Before you try to work on an accent, have a good vocal warm-up with particular attention to articulation exercises. When Americans (who generally speak from the back of their throats with a raised back of tongue and a lowered soft palate) try other accents, they simply do not have the muscularity in the tip and blade of the tongue, so they can’t do it, just like a dancer wouldn’t be able to do jumps if they hadn’t done their plies. Fortunately it takes less time to build up tip and blade of tongue muscularity, that the muscles for plies.
Blade and tip of the tongue exercises will miraculously allow you to make sounds, you could not otherwise make.
Accents Website
www.ku.edu/idea/
IDEA: International dialects of English Archive was created in 1997 as a repository of primary source recordings for actors and other artists in the performing arts. Its home is the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas in Lawrence KS, USA. All recordings in English are of Native speakers
www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html
IPA: Alphabet of International Phonetic Association
Useful Books
Non English Accents. If you are leaning, for example a Russian accent, look at the introduction of a first year Russian text-book written for American studenst. It will list all existing sounds in Russian. i.e. the phonetic vocabulary of Russian speakers. Any sound which is not part of the Russian vocabulary will create difficulty and they will substitute approximations. All first-year foreign language text books contain a section giving the sounds of the target language.
Be very careful about some of the accent books available.
Pronouncing Dictionaries
English Pronouncing Dictionary by Daniel Jones, Revised by A.C. Gimson, JM Dent & Sons, London SW 4 7TA, United Kingdom. ( Pronunciations of British English in IPA)
Accompanying tapes recorded by native speakers are available.( Daniel Jones and A.C. Gimson were professors of phonetics at University College London.)
A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott.
( Both were professors of English)
Accent Books
International English, A Guide to Varieties of Standard English, by Peter Trudgill and Jean Hannah
English Accents and Dialects, by Peter Trudgill and Hughes
(Both these books were written by professors of Phonetics, they are informative rather than how to learn the accents; however many of the accents books I have seen have made huge mistakes in their basic knowledge of dialectology.)
The downtown Public Library has a large selection of recorded books, plays and folk music. (always good for learning a dialect)