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1

GET STARTED

IN THIS CHAPTER…

We introduce you to three areas that you need to be on top of before you begin work on any accent:

1	Knowing your equipment. Accents are physical. They are made by your body. In order to adapt you will need to have some basic knowledge of the physical equipment you have and how it works. In this section we introduce you to those basics.
2	Making and using a Resource Recording. One essential practical requirement when learning a new accent is a resource recording. You cannot learn an accent out of thin air. In this section we show you how to find, make and use a resource recording to get the most from yourself and this book!
3	Getting 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. You name it: somewhere along the line external influences have had and continue to have an effect on the way we speak. Contextualising your accent is a vital step towards owning it and making it real.

If you are about to study a specific accent make sure you have the following before you start:

1	A good resource recording of the accent.
2	A recording device that you can also play back on.
3	A mirror.
4	A notebook.
5	This book. (Obviously.)

KNOWING YOUR EQUIPMENT

Our lips, jaw, tongue, soft palate and cheeks are always on the move, flicking, tapping, gliding and making contact with one another, dancing their way through thousands and thousands of different shapes and sounds, and yet we don’t give it a second thought!

In order to understand how all these shapes and sounds are made it helps to be familiar with your own bits, the Articulators, and to know what the various parts are called, which part is being used, and how the various parts make contact.

In other words, to do accents you will need to know which active articulator is doing what with which passive articulator!

Throughout this book we will be using this simplified diagram of the 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.
●	As you work through this book we will give you examples of specific sounds and combinations of sounds on the accompanying downloadable tracks. These are the sounds to listen for on your resource recording.
●	Listen to the same phrase on your resource recording many times over for your ear to identify the element you are listening for, both for your mouth to accurately mimic it, and for your brain to retain it. Once simply won’t be enough!

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

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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).