Dialect coach and self-professed voice geek Katherine Littrell walks us through history and the human body to learn the basics of British RP.
Dialect coach and self-professed voice geek Katherine Littrell walks us through history and the human body to learn the basics of British RP.
Let me tell you a story. You mentioned prestige accents. Can you explain a little bit about what that means? It came quite trendy really.
Speaker 2:I mean, it really was like a trend that became fashionable and so there were a couple of what? Okay, wait, I got to wrap my head around that People are becoming more accepting of regional accents, particularly in the UK. There are so many regional accents.
Speaker 1:Well, the tongue is such a weird Like, can we just talk about that for a second?
Speaker 2:To keep in mind, and I'm going to call this the new standard English accent. I think that's accurate to what we're doing. So every individual person has an idiom note which is their personal to them accent.
Speaker 1:That's so beautiful. Hey there, welcome to the Nomad Narrator. I am your host, emily, an award-winning producer, director, narrator, general lover of all things audiobook and I have to say I have been waiting for weeks now to finally get to share today's episode with you. I don't know how much I've shared exactly about the production process for these things, but I tend to record these pretty well in advance and I remember getting off of this call and just thinking I don't feel like I've ever heard a podcast episode quite like this Quite, like this conversation that we just had, and ever since I have just been looking so forward to the day when I would finally get to hit, publish on this one and share it. As just a little preface to what you're going to hear today, I want to answer a question some of you have had about the episode structure of the show. So, as it stands right now, the Nomad Narrator has four different episode types and they basically run in a cycle. The first kind is the Keystone episode, second is the Coaches corner, third is the Dialect Deep Dive and fourth, open Mic. So our Keystone episodes are sort of the original vision of the podcast. They are the in-depth interviews out across America with professional audiobook narrators and some really compelling author narrators, exploring how these places that we live that shape us, shape our work as storytellers. These episodes are incredibly labor-intensive and, frankly, quite expensive to produce. So during this first season, while the pod is sort of finding its feet, I've got a few other types of episodes to fill out the rotation. The Coaches corner is a remote conversation with an audiobook coach about their career and narration, and it also features some live coaching to give listeners a chance to experience their working style sort of firsthand the Open Mic. So I'm skipping forward one here. The Open Mic is kind of like a bit of a grab bag. It's really just an opportunity to share whatever seems fitting for the moment. And then today's episode, the Dialect Deep Dive, is an opportunity to hear what I think is just a truly incredible discussion of any given dialect, a chosen dialect for that episode, between myself and this expert who I have somehow managed to wrangle into being a recurring guest for the foreseeable future dialect coach, catherine LaTrell.
Speaker 1:Now, as anyone who's listened to or narrated an audiobook knows full well, facility with accents and dialects can absolutely make or break a performance, but what really goes into working on these skills? And perhaps even more importantly, what goes into the history and culture and development of the characteristics of an accent to begin with. That's what we're going to explore today, and the dialect that we are starting out with is British RP. Rp meaning received pronunciation, and our guest today will explain a little bit more about what that means.
Speaker 1:She is hailed as an international voice, an Australian actor, voice and dialect coach and audiobook narrator, who has lived and worked across Australia, the US and the UK, and currently hails from Edinburgh, scotland. She has studied the Knight Thompson style of speech work and is currently working toward an MFA in voice studies from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. When she isn't talking out loud to herself, she enjoys writing, dancing and taking her dog on long walks. Without any further ado, I present to you a fascinating conversation about British received pronunciation with Catherine Littrell. Hello, so you'll notice I'm wearing my doing my best shirt and then I tried to get my fancy pearl necklace out, but I don't know if this happens to you. It's tangled up in all my other necklaces. Yes, so we'll just set these to the side and they'll be fancy, right?
Speaker 2:over here.
Speaker 1:It can be a vibe. Yes, exactly. So I think if you want to give me like a quick little overview of sort of what you have planned in terms of the order or the structure, what would you like to do?
Speaker 2:Well, I think this idea of contemporary RP as a dialect coach, if somebody comes to me with their request for a British accent, what does that mean? What do they mean? What am I teaching? I think is something I'd love to talk about, like how to ask for what you actually want, because there's a lot of confusion about what does RP mean and the way that we're using it is actually maybe slightly incorrect. The word or the phrase received pronunciation. I don't think people are really clear about what that is. So what are other things that people call it? What are other sort of prestige accents that are a bit overlap? Because with this particular accent or sort of set of overlapping accents, it's really important to be specific about time period loss, even geographic location to an extent, even though it's not a geographic accent.
Speaker 1:You mentioned prestige accents. Can you explain a little bit about what that means? Sure.
Speaker 2:So one of the things about accent training and coaching is, if you look at a drama school syllabus, often the accents that actors are taught will be some version of general American or standard British. The word standard or general sort of gesturing towards this idea of prestige, because of course, none of them are what everybody speaks. So what have we decided is the standard? And these decisions get made around places of power, whether that's financial power or military power or cultural power, and then those accents get disseminated into the world as the standard. But it came from a particular place, racial background, time. So with this particular accent, what is contemporary RP? We have to talk about sort of what's now called conservative RP or historic RP or sometimes the Queen's English, something along those lines. You might also hear RP called BBC English. They use it as a broadcasting standard Oxford English because it's associated with the universities.
Speaker 1:That's what I was going to ask about too, when we had talked about this before. You mentioned that it was like a way of speaking that was taught in the English boarding school system.
Speaker 2:Yes, so from the early 1800s this accent starts to be taught in what's sort of misleadingly called the public schools of the UK, and the public schools are actually extremely expensive. Private boarding schools, like Eaton is the really famous one, and that would be where this accent was initially taught as a prestige accent, because it had a lot of prestige, and so if you wanted to sound educated, higher class, even if you wanted some social mobility, you had to speak this way, and so this was the accent of aristocratic families sending their male children and being taught to speak this way. So you'd have nobility in the north of England who would sound like the nobility in the south of England, and so that's why it's not a geographic accent, it's a class accent, it's an accent of power. I think partially.
Speaker 2:With this history it's important to sort of locate at what point are we talking about this accent, because it's changed a lot since the early 1800s. The accent that we talk about as being RP was originally a London area accent, london being the powerful city, lots of money, and so how the aristocracy in London was speaking became quite trendy really. I mean, it really was like a trend that became fashionable, and so there were a couple of things happening in the dialect at the time that were recent. So this is the early 1800s, so this is after the US was colonized, and so that's one reason why American accents sound different from what we think of as a British accent.
Speaker 1:So this didn't even exist when America was colonized.
Speaker 2:Yes. So some of these more recent features that we think of as being distinctively British features were literally sort of speech trends at the time among aristocratic people. So things like the lack of rotisserie, that Irish quality that Americans have and Brits who speak this particular dialect don't have after, is a great example of that. There's no R on the end of that. That was just a fashionable trend that stuck because then it got spread through the education and schooling system.
Speaker 1:I noticed that there's also, like certain words that don't have an R on the end, that it gets added to.
Speaker 2:One of the things we always have to talk about with a dialect is rotisserie.
Speaker 1:Rotisserie is a really fancy word for Irishness which almost sounds like Irishness, which has its own rotisserie features.
Speaker 2:So with that, yeah, there's like linking ours or intrusive ours. What is an intrusive are? So the idea of a linking or an intrusive are, it's an R that occurs in rapid spoken speech. So if you're really slowing speech down you won't hear it. They're both features that occur in my accent, australian, and you give an example of it. So in this phrase, like after a while. But if I slow it down after a while, well that's a linking are actually, because there actually is an R and after an intrusive are might be, for example, in words like pouring, like P a W, I might say the dog is pouring at me. This is the difference between phonemic realization of something and phonetic realization of something. So the phoneme.
Speaker 1:The OK. Wait, I got to wrap my head around this. Those words are spelled the same, just with an M and a T, different right, phonemic and phonetic. Ok, so a phoneme is sort of the mental unit of sound, the idea of a T, so that I feel like is when you know like, instead of British it's got a glottal stop like British.
Speaker 2:Right, you can tell that, because when you ask people, oh I didn't catch that, can you say it again? They'll often get closer and closer to this mental idea of a T versus phonetic realization, the actual sound that the person produces that may not match the phoneme that they themselves are thinking of. So we think about the difference between the phoneme T and the phonetic realization of a T. In words like political is a good one, because in some dialects it will be political. That sound, in some dialects it would be political political that's me, I recognize that. Or in some dialects it'll be political with a glottal stop, different phoneticizations of the phoneme, and so that's like in that word we're talking about pouring.
Speaker 2:I don't have a phonemic idea of there being an R there, even though phonetically there is some Irishness. If I were not a dialect person, I, an Australian, would say there's no R in that. What are you talking about? There is no R there, but you can hear it and I can hear it now because we're talking about it. It's almost subconscious. It's not necessarily a conscious level and I think this is sometimes why, when you ask people about their own dialect, they're not always the best people to learn the dialect from, because there are these subconscious things that are happening or these sort of phonetic realizations of phonemes, like when you ask people do you say a word this way or this way?
Speaker 2:If they just talk they'll say whatever they normally say. But if you ask them to think about it, I find a lot of the time they'll go with the prestige version of what they think it should be, because that sounds better, it sounds proper to them. So you'll get this sort of confusion in the individual about is it France or France? I'm not sure. I'm not sure which one. I do. France sounds fancier. Do I say it that way? I think I say it that way, so you can get into that. And also, people aren't always consistent. Sometimes they will say France and sometimes they'll say France, depending on who they're talking to.
Speaker 1:Maybe as you're saying, this I'm trying to think of. I don't even know if this would be an example, because I'm not sure what the prestige one would be, but umbrella or umbrella, I'll put the emphasis on a different syllable and I don't know if it happens to just be the placement of where it is. Let me get my umbrella, or I need to take an umbrella.
Speaker 2:I think that can be the case. Like stress, position in a sentence changes sometimes, but I believe one of those is the more accepted British pronunciation and one of them is the more the accepted American pronunciation.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:And isn't there also a difference between what is the more accepted Southern pronunciation versus Well?
Speaker 1:that's what I was wondering, because I grew up in Kentucky, which it's like the very northernmost part of the South, but if you live here, if you grow up here, very culturally it's the South and yet I don't have a Southern accent. I never have, which is a little bit of a heartbreak for me. But also I think in many ways, as we're talking about the prestige stuff, I can fit in pretty much anywhere in the country without people having certain preconceptions about me because I don't have that accent, naturally.
Speaker 2:I would say your accent carries a degree of power. When people talk about not having an accent, or when casting directors talk about wanting a neutral accent, what they're usually referring to is some kind of, I would say, standard accent. These prestige accents like received pronunciation, which was literally taught to be a marker of prestige, that's a prestige accent. The standards that we're being asked for in the sense of this is neutral, are absolutely not neutral. They carry various connotations of class and race and geographic location. But if you're saying I have a neutral accent, I can blend in. It's just that we also have to acknowledge and then maybe look a little bit deeper into what are we actually saying when we're saying that this is neutral because it's not the idea of American standard.
Speaker 2:It's also called generic or general American, or the night Thompson speech work calls it so-called general American, just to call out this fact that it is not in fact general in the sense of there are lots of Americans who don't speak this way. But it is a standard and there is, historically there's been this emphasis on speaking well. A lot of these things do come from wanting to differentiate class, background, educational background, all this sort of stuff, and so it becomes standardized. Because of the attraction of that, and I think in contemporary theater and film and stuff people are becoming more accepting of regional accents. Particularly in the UK there are so many regional accents it's becoming much more common to hear on the BBC these regional accents.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you've encountered this at all as a dialect coach or thinking of dialect casting in projects, but something that has always confused me on a personal level is I know what someone means when they post that they're looking for a Kentucky accent. It actually really matters if you're from the West, the East or the middle part of the state. They actually speak pretty differently from East to West. Someone might not notice that as much if they're from outside, but I think there's a pretty noticeable val difference. But I always feel like, well, I talk the way I am and I'm from Kentucky, so that is a Kentucky accent. Like I understand the lipstick but I'm sort of like how is that not accepted, as I should be able to just speak as myself, because I am authentic and legitimate and real.
Speaker 2:Well, I think we've sort of talked about this a little bit. It's the same with me when people ask for an Australian accent. I am Australian, that's my primary identity, but I've lived in enough places now that my accents definitely become influenced. And now that I'm speaking to you, I hear Americanism scraping back into my voice and it's funny how that happens, isn't it?
Speaker 1:That we kind of take on. It's like a bonding thing that whoever we're talking with, we start to take on their stuff.
Speaker 2:Psychological mirroring. I want you to accept me all of that, but I feel that a lot Like. I feel that I'm Australian and that should be enough, but I'm really interested in this idea, both of sort of hybrid accents. Or, in your case, there is the creep of the standard, like before, media broadcasting was. You know, before the radio, before television, there were a lot more regional accents because people weren't exposed to these standards. This is why the influence of, like the BBC or spreading RP, rp was the BBC accent for like 50 years, officially, that you had to speak this accent, and that's why I think these standards are referred to as, like newscaster English If you look up American TV anchors, reporters and things that tends to be a certain generic sound.
Speaker 2:But back to your point, I absolutely agree with you that you would be an example of a contemporary you know 2023 Kentucky speaker born in the year that you were born in, and all this sort of stuff. What I find with accent coaching, though, is what people are looking for Are these signature sounds of the place, so that we can listen to that person and say, oh, they're from there. It's interesting sometimes the distance between what is real, what is authentic, and then what is a performance expectation?
Speaker 1:You know what I've found with that too. That's really funny to me now that we're talking about the creep of Genericon is, I have narrated a couple of books set in Kentucky and the characters that were closer to my own age or generation, I knew that they were supposed to have more of that country sound and so I gave it to them. And yet the older characters, the characters that were like the mama on the papa, I was totally comfortable going like really deep with an accent for them because they're from I guess a couple of generations removed and I'm just used to I mean, that's the way my grandma and grandpa talked or change of time.
Speaker 2:So I think of accents as part of character building. It's actually very hard for me to teach an accent, like removed from a character, because you could ask me to teach a French accent. But then there's all these questions Like, ok, what gender is this character? How old is this character? What time period is this set in? Where specifically is this character from?
Speaker 2:So, without getting more specific, it's like, yeah, I can help you brush up on sort of this general idea of a French accent, but then we're getting into a stereotype, and not that stereotypes don't have utility in the, especially in the world of, let's say, audiobooks, where you're sort of throwing out a quick character and they have to be recognizably from a place. That depends what the purpose of the accent is and it depends really what standard of portrayal you're trying to get to. So it's OK for it to be a stereotype for certain purposes, but if we want to have something that feels really authentic, we need to do more work and we need to be more specific, because the accent tells you a lot about all facets of that character, including what generation they're in, and so it makes complete sense to me that you would be like, well, yeah, the younger generation sound a little bit more generic and the older generation sound a little bit more, maybe stereotypically subtle, Stereotypically southern, because those accents have changed over time and that's just true to your lived experience and observations.
Speaker 1:Speaking of just putting an accent together for a character that might be a little bit more along the stereotypical lines. I'd like to move into talking a little bit more about what we're going to do today, which is we want to give folks a little bit of a brief overview of what it might look like to work on an accent. So, to be clear, this is more along the lines of what does it look like to even begin to try to scratch the surface of this dialect?
Speaker 2:work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how do we work on an accent, particularly if we've never worked on accents before?
Speaker 2:I have a lot of people come to me and they're worried about being a caricature and they're worried about getting it wrong, because I think, you know, we're all reasonably empathetic as actors and we don't want to offend people and we know that if we get it wrong it can be offensive. So, within the bounds of a dialect class, I think the first thing to do is to try to free yourself to make some mistakes. It's OK to make mistakes because that's the journey towards, like retraining your brain and your mouth. And it can be really helpful to start in a more extreme place, and I think an authentic accent often is lighter. But when you're practicing, it's good to start practicing with a heavy accent often, because then you get the feel of it and then you know how to dial it back. If you think about the sort of fine motor skill required just to speak, it's really a tiny space in the mouth and the various articulators coming together and the tongue moving around and all that the tongue is such a weird Like.
Speaker 1:Can we just talk about that for a second? The tongue is bizarre.
Speaker 2:It's not like any other muscle, it's slippery and the tongue is the magic beanbag you push one place and it goes another place. Did you learn that in school? I sure did. This is what you learn when you go to school for a dialect speaker.
Speaker 1:The magic beanbag. That really makes a whole lot of sense. But yeah, I've always felt like the tongue is just so strange. There's just a lot going on there.
Speaker 2:So going on, there's a lot going on. We're asking to do an accent, we're asking you to do something that's already quite complicated, that you've already learned a really efficient way of doing, and we're saying, okay, now do this and change it very slightly and very precisely, and if you don't get this extremely high degree of accuracy, it's going to sound ridiculous.
Speaker 1:And then there are those people, catherine, that they can just pick something up immediately, and I don't really get how that works, because it's such a big combination of I mean, because it's not even just the motor skills of your face and your mouth, it's also the ear to be able to hear the change in sounds, and it's a lot. Those people are very naturally skilled in a very interesting way.
Speaker 2:And those people don't need dialect coaches. If you're somebody who has a really great ear and a really great ability at mimicry, I mean that's an amazing gift towards accent performance. I am not one of those people. Entering this world from a more technical standpoint, from an anatomical standpoint, is really helpful for me, and so that's sort of how I approach it with my clients as well. So we talked about getting into a contemporary RP accent as we covered a little bit. I think if you're coming to a dialect coach with any character from the British Isles, which.
Speaker 1:Let me just clarify this for people, because I had this mistake. Catherine, I can't believe I didn't know this. I went to Scotland for the first time last year. I thought it was its own country and I was really shocked when I got off the plane and I was there. They were like no, we're part of the UK and I was like, oh my God. So I just want to clarify for people that don't understand what the United Kingdom is, since apparently I was one of those people, that it's Wales, northern Ireland, england and Scotland. Right? Am I missing something?
Speaker 2:Yes, the United Kingdom is that, and so, if you have a character from anywhere in the United Kingdom, here are the important things that you need to tell the dialect coach so that they can help you get the accent that is accurate. Time period is massive. Gender can have some impact on accent. Geographic region matters, but more than geographic region, education level and class matters a lot. So I live in Edinburgh which has a very light Scottish accent light, as to say, it's been very heavily influenced by this standard British sound.
Speaker 1:I was actually going to ask about that. So you mentioned that when this RP dialect was kind of invented at these boarding schools that it started to change the way that people across England spoke. But I am curious, did those other entities of the UK Wales and Northern Ireland and Scotland did they also send their children to these schools and then that disseminated across other? Because I know, I mean, india has a very British sounding accent and I know that a lot of other countries where there was a British presence they tend to have.
Speaker 2:So there's a distinction between this conservative RP that is based on this southern British London sound that was then taught in the boarding schools. Initially, an RP speaker could only be one of those people, but of course, as it became wider spread, people started copying their accent or being taught that accent so they could blend into that world. The legacy of the British Empire is massive, and one of its legacies is the influence of RP on many, many, many dialects from places that used to be part of the British Empire, including mine, australia.
Speaker 1:Is it more the cockney accent or the? I guess I don't know if that would be an appropriate synonym for like the lower class accents, Because wasn't it primarily prisoners that came to Australia, or am I getting that wrong?
Speaker 2:That's just an anecdote, that has been oh yeah, white Australians were convicts or the dregs of the soldiers, because they had to go and guard the convicts and the island that was so far away from everything that it was an effective prison without any walls. So an Australian accent definitely had much in common with cockney as well. It's big blend Cockney Irish and this sort of RP sound. Rp also had an influence on American movie stars in the 50s, so the sounds of RP had a global reach and a global impact. And now one of the things about Genericon is that it's having a global impact on dialects, including this contemporary RP sound.
Speaker 1:That's such a weird full circle phenomenon.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Accents influence each other. Okay, so that RP sound was created, invented in the 1800s.
Speaker 2:It was more codified in the 1800s. It was a sound that already existed and then was codified as the sound of prestige and power and privilege and deliberately taught in boarding schools like Eaton.
Speaker 1:So before that we have Shakespearean English. It evolves a little bit. It moves over to America. It keeps evolving on its own over in America. Meanwhile there are sort of the lower class sounds that are moving over to Australia. They're evolving on their own over there. And then we've got RP starting to influence more across all of the British Isles and then across all of the British Empire, and so there are the American sounds, the Australian sounds, but then the British sounds kind of influencing all of the other languages that might be learning English.
Speaker 2:Anybody learning English as a foreign language would have been learning this, and many people still are, even though it's slightly an outdated sound system. It sounds formal, it sounds old school now, but people are still being taught these sounds. And then it had a lot of influence even on the international phonetic alphabet. The international phonetic alphabet is intended to be able to be applied to any speech sound system and it can be. But there is bias within the IPA towards this RP sound because that's the group of people who created it. If you're familiar at all with the IPA and you look at the vowel quadrilateral, people still teach the cardinal vowels as being sounds associated with RP.
Speaker 1:I'm imagining then that when I learned IPA, I probably was given different example words because you said the bath, the bath vowel, To me that was father. Yes, we learned father.
Speaker 2:Okay. So with vowels and with all English dialects, there's this idea of lexical sets, which is sets of words that have evolved the same way over time, and this is only about vowels, this is not about constants. So like the kit set, so kit myth build, not related to spelling at all, it's just about how these vowel sounds have shifted over time and sort of formed these groups of words that all share this pattern. So the way that I would realize that vowel set kit ship, even in an American accent, still kit ship. We can think of other accents where that's not how it's realized. Kiwi is more like kit ship.
Speaker 1:So this would be an instance of where, when people talk about like a vowel shift, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:But this idea of lexical sets is essentially this idea of patterns in speech and so sometimes like, okay, so in American the bath set and the trap set are merged lexical sets. It's bath and trap, same vowel sound. So sometimes when Americans or other speakers with merged lexical sets try to learn an accent that has split lexical sets, they don't have this innate sense of when it splits An innate sense that makes so much sense to me all of a sudden why, when I think I'm doing a good job, it still doesn't sound right.
Speaker 1:Because that set is split and so I might be using what I think would be the right vowel shift, but because there are two sets on one side and only one set on the other it just changes based on your sort of native linguistic background.
Speaker 2:If I'm learning an accent that has a split, there are rules and you can look up which words go into these lexical sets. There are lists. So if I'm learning an accent that has a split, I can look up the words in the lexical set and sort of keep them in mind as I'm preparing my script.
Speaker 1:If you're not working specifically with a dialect coach, where would you be able to find the resource of these lists?
Speaker 2:You can Google lexical sets and find these lists, so that's a real resource in figuring out what the patterns are. That might be different, because so much of dialect performance is just figuring out what the gap is. What can I keep the same and what do I need to change?
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's just overview this real quick before we move on to the next section of actually kind of the practical working on it. If you're going to a dialect coach, let's say you're an audiobook narrator and you've got 10 different characters that need different British dialects what would be the most helpful information for that dialect coach to know?
Speaker 2:I think the information that's useful is the same information that's useful to any audiobook narrator prepping a character, because an accent is character. So if you can tell me any linguistic detail about this person upbringing, age, gender, class especially if there are people you're trying to differentiate who are quite similar, we can talk about strategies to do that. So let's say you have a family and it's 10 people and they should all really sort of have the same dialect. Okay, well, maybe the grandmother has a slightly archaic sound and maybe the kids have more of this what we would call estuary. Then these are some differences between them and this is how we can differentiate them.
Speaker 1:Let's clarify, because I know you and I have talked about the word estuary, but what would you say that would be in relation to RP?
Speaker 2:Often, if people are asking for estuary, they're asking for this specifically London, contemporary middle class usually sound, and so the relationship between RP and estuary is that estuary is picking up a lot of qualities from Cockney, and Cockney is a dialect that, again, is pretty historic. Almost no one speaks that way anymore but definitely has influence on many dialects of English, mostly in London and surrounding areas.
Speaker 1:What would you say today would be called sort of the modern working class equivalent of Cockney, because estuary seems like it's a little more toward the RP side.
Speaker 2:This might be about characters, right. I think you can sort of think of these accents as being on a spectrum, like on one side we've got the really posh like if you're the prince of England, and the other side is maybe like Cockney. If you're from the south of England, you'll fall somewhere in the middle of those two. So there's a great resource online called Accent Bias Britain and it's this link to British accents. Today focuses on these five different, basically standard accents in contemporary England, because of course, wales and Scotland and Ireland have different accents, but we're talking really about English accents. So they have these little sections of the same bit of text and they show you the received pronunciation, which is RP estuary English, which is this modern hybrid between RP and Cockney. Multicultural London English, called MLE, which is associated with people from a working class background and ethnic minorities.
Speaker 1:How would it be a shared set of sounds if you have someone coming from Ukraine, or versus someone coming from Taiwan, versus someone coming from North Africa?
Speaker 2:It's not that the individual's accent won't differ from each other, but the idea of MLE is that it's spoken by people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. The key to this accent is that it's formed by people who have formed these multi-ethnic friendship groups and languages have come into contact with each other and blended, and so it's associated with specifically Afro-Caribbean, white, working class, British, asian linguistic features.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's pretty common dialect in London. Now in contemporary London. Oh Kira, sorry my dog.
Speaker 1:I also love that, just randomly, like a dog will make an appearance being lifted across the screen.
Speaker 2:That's probably going to be involved. Yeah, so that is a really great resource just for hearing some of the variety of English dialects, contemporary English dialects. So let's look at the main things to keep in mind, and I'm going to call this the new standard English accent.
Speaker 1:I think that's accurate to what we're doing and you would say that if someone comes to you and is like I need to learn RP, and then they say generally, the more proper way of British people speaking today, you would say, okay, rp, slash. This the new standard.
Speaker 2:English accent. What I usually do first is play a sample of the accent target, particularly if it's an accent you might be unfamiliar with. You might come to me and say, hey, I want to learn a Romanian accent, and I could say to you okay, have you ever heard a Romanian person talk? And you might say, no. Well, it's very hard for you to replicate something you've never heard, so it's always useful to start with an accent analog, like who is the person that you would like to sound like For the purposes of this character? Let's say that you want to sound like Carrie Mulligan because she has the accent that we're looking at, and so I'm going to hit play on Carrie.
Speaker 1:Lots and lots of sort of skincare things and less makeup. So I suppose I just wear makeup or work a lot, but at home I'm sort of obsessed with skincare.
Speaker 2:She has a pretty posh accent and as we listen to it usually, I would ask my student to watch the mouth movement to see what they can see from the outside, and also listen to things and see if you observe differences from your own accent.
Speaker 1:Okay. So one thing that I'm noticing right off the bat is that her jaw is not nearly as involved in talking as I feel like mine is when I talk. She has a much smaller range of movement with opening her mouth and more of her words are toward the front of her mouth and shaped, I think, even more with the lips. I rely a lot on my entire vocal cavity. When I look at her it feels like a lot of it is very. It's much smaller, it's much more refined.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that we can talk about is sort of the mouth, brain and learning through imitation. So one of the first things we can do, without any sort of technical thing, is what we're talking about, that mimicry. We don't have to know everything about the accent to start. This anatomical observation is a good place to start. A lot of this observation is about looking at where is she holding tension versus where do you hold tension? And Carrie has her ideolect. Say that again ideolect. So in every individual person has an ideolect which is their personal, to them accent. That's so beautiful. So, carrie, we're observing some things about her that may or may not be true for all speakers of this dialect. Now, if we go to a different speaker, lily James, we can look at what she's doing and if some of these patterns are the same, so we'll do that.
Speaker 1:But what I think perhaps is even worse, which is happening to me more often is when you go to security and you've lived too long and it's cold that I can't actually recover from. So her jaw is more involved. She has more motion and space there, but it's still like her word shaping is more of it still keeps it much narrower than I feel like my natural shaping of things, I think.
Speaker 2:One of the American dialect things is that there tends to be a lot more jaw movement to get that American sound, and so, as a result, there's sort of a smile quality. I feel it in my cheeks a little bit.
Speaker 1:So that makes sense. I feel like my cheeks are more active up here and I feel like their cheeks are more active right here. It's like right at the smile lines.
Speaker 2:Yes, pointing at things and sort of using these observation techniques is a great way in, and you're right, you said that the words feel like they're formed further forward.
Speaker 1:It's almost like it's right behind the teeth, it's the teeth and it's right in front of the teeth, whereas for me it feels like it's really the whole, all the way back to the back of the throat.
Speaker 2:The old school method of dialect coaching is this sort of substitution method, where we would take a sound and we'd substitute the sound. And that's sort of what we're talking about, for, like the lexical sets, this is coming at it from an anatomical perspective where, instead of focusing on, oh, this sound moves to this sound. We're saying I usually hold tension here, and what happens if I hold it here? Instead, you immediately get some of those pronunciation changes without having to think about it. You're just asking yourself to do something new. And so I think a lot of dialect coaching is encouraging people to just try, because I have this too. When I try on you to me dialect, I'm like oh god, I'm awful, this sounds awful, I'm embarrassed, but we've got to get past that, like this is awful, and practice, and then it will start sounding better. But you have to be bad first and that's okay. So part of this too is again these ideolex. They have a similar accent, not the same accent, a similar accent, and they might be using slightly different positions or strategies to get there. So we're just sort of trying to discover these strategies, and then we're also drawing generalizations about what these speakers are doing. So we've talked about this lip positioning. I think that's probably something that we could refine through active listening and copying.
Speaker 2:The jaw position tends to be quite loose. There's not a lot of jaw tension. There's a permanent space between the teeth which comes from this release in these muscles of the face, the tip of the tongue lying on the floor of the mouth. So it's not right up against the back of those bottom front teeth, it's just a little bit back, and that means that the body of the tongue is slightly raised. The tongue root is relaxed, the vealum, the soft palate, is raised, often suspended. It's quite flexible. So to raise the vealum you can think of a yawn. This sort of tongue position and more relaxed jaw, combined with that raised vealum position, creates this space. The vocal cave just has a different quality of sound. I'm not changing anything about my pronunciation on purpose and it's already sort of getting a bit of a quality of this accent without us having to do anything else. So if we want to keep those things in mind, we'll listen to Carrie.
Speaker 1:You want me to mimic it a little bit this time? Yeah, we'll mimic it, we'll see how we do. That's very important, just to let everyone know. I'm still moving my mouth a lot this way.
Speaker 2:With audiobooks, one of the nice things is that you can use sort of physical cheats to remind yourself. So with this accent you can hold your fingers to the side of your lips just to remind yourself that you don't want to go too lateral. We haven't yet gotten into anything about prosody, which is the music of the accent. We haven't gotten into pronunciation or we've been talking about as posture. I do think it's the most foundational part of an accent. So, adding to this posture idea, eddysharp and Jan Hagen-Rolls have this idea of zones, which is their sort of way of talking about placement. So they have seven zones.
Speaker 2:This accent's in zone two, which is not the teeth, it's right behind the teeth, which is sort of what you identified immediately when you were watching both of these women is the sort of focus of the accent is quite forward in the mouth. That's where a lot of the sounds are being created. So if we want to move forward, we might hear more samples, we might copy more people, we might really figure out who our accent analogue is and what we're aiming for, because it's important to be clear about what we're aiming for With what we're doing right now. I've just pulled up a text which is a very common speech text because it includes all of the different sounds that we might need to do, so we can work on posture using this fairly arbitrary text just to see how it feels, would you?
Speaker 1:want to give that a go. Yes, I think that's fine. I would just like to apologize first to all my British friends. Okay, great, please be gentle with me.
Speaker 2:Before you dive in, let's just remind ourselves about what it is so relax, jaw tip of the tongue lowered, middle raised, back lowered, Not a lot of lateral movement and let's just focus on those things.
Speaker 1:There once was a young rat named Arthur who could never take the trouble to make up his mind. Whenever his friends asked him if he would like to go out with them, he would only answer I don't know. He wouldn't say yes and he wouldn't say no either. He could never learn to make a choice. It's not Helen's, okay. First, how does that feel? It feels like there's something stuck in my lip, like there's. I want my lip to move so much more than it is, and in trying to keep it still, I'm sort of forcing awareness of these other areas that feel very uncomfortable. My heart is racing right now.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's all new, so much of accent is then practicing. So what I would have done is sort of give you this rundown and I would have been like, great, go away and practice for a week using what I've just said, and then come back because it gives you time to sort of assimilate what I've just said, this information download, because this is a ton of information I've just given you. There's a task and a half, and so in an ideal situation, we would slow down a little bit, we would layer them. I would say, okay, focus on this thing, and now just focus on that, and now we're going to add. You know, we would just layer and layer and layer and layer until it becomes sort of natural. I could hear that you were creating more space in the vocal cavity the Arthur, Arthur. There's already more space happening. You already sound more towards this accent target. The things that aren't hitting are the things we haven't covered yet the rotisserie and these lexical sets. Okay, so how would ask be ask, ask after dance, as we talked about? There's no innate sense necessarily of this trap bath split. So this is something that you would gain through practice. I'm giving you the concept and then you have to go away and practice it, because in an hour we only have time for concepts. So this accent is non-rotic and your accent is rotic. With a non-rotic accent, r is not pronounced except if it's at the start of a syllable.
Speaker 2:Depending on the accent. These linking or these intrusive hours we can fight. So the sentences whenever his friends asked him that H can act as a consonant or it can be dropped and so it become a vowel. So it could be. Whenever his friends. If we're dropping that H, which some speakers of new standard English accent do for a speaker that doesn't drop the H, we would not do that necessarily. Whenever his friends the thing about rotisserie is again figuring out this sense of when do you put the R in when you're starting. It's a good rule to just not like, don't worry about this intrusive R and this linking R. That's sort of an advanced accent thing. It gives it a flavor of authenticity to do it. But if you only have an hour let's not confuse ourselves.
Speaker 1:Would you like me to read through it again, keeping the rotisserie in consciousness this time?
Speaker 2:Sure, and don't worry too much about linking Rs. If they happen, great, just try to remove them where appropriate.
Speaker 1:Where would you like me to start? His aunt Helen. His aunt Helen said to him no one will ever care for you if you carry on like this. You have no more mind than a blade of grass. Arthur looked wise but stupidly said nothing. One rainy day, the rats, the rat. What would rats be?
Speaker 2:The rat and you're already hearing. I think Carrie does it and Lily do it. A little bit of vocal fry adds something to this.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm also sensing a tiny bit of nasality.
Speaker 2:Yes, you're getting more and more specific. I would say keep raising that vealum and dropping that droid in. Just a little bit.
Speaker 1:One rainy, rainy day, the rats heard a great noise in the loft where they lived. The pine rafters were all rotten in the middle and at last one of the joists had given way and fallen to the ground.
Speaker 2:So that's all sounding good with what we've laid on, but then we're going to talk about this bath trap thing.
Speaker 1:So there are definitely certain worries that as I approach them, I'm like it's like a blank there's just my mouth doesn't know what to do. Like rats does not feel right. When it comes out, it doesn't feel right.
Speaker 2:Rat is in the trap, rat trap it's in that set versus rafter, like it's just unfamiliar. So the rats, we've got rafters all at last, last, and that's all good. If we were doing this longer we might go through. We might underline the words that have this trap valve versus the words that have this bath valve different colors so that you can really start analyzing these patterns for yourself and developing the sense of when it might be trap and when it might be bath. Okay, so we thought there was once a young rat named Arthur.
Speaker 1:Rat named Arthur Right, you could never take the trouble to make up his mind. And I think his friends asked him asked him if he would like to go out with them, he would only answer I don't know. He wouldn't say yes and yes, how do you say yes?
Speaker 2:He wouldn't say yes, yes, it's all just a little bit more, because it's a little bit more forward.
Speaker 1:Yes. He couldn't say yes and he wouldn't say no either. He could never learn to make a choice. His Aunt Helen said to him no one will ever care for you if you carry on like this. You have no more mind than a blade of grass. Grass, blade of grass. Arthur looked wise but stupidly said nothing.
Speaker 2:One, okay. So yeah, we're already getting into. So I think those are probably the two key sound changes. What's the prosody yet? But like that's important, britt's used pitch to emphasize, I'm going to use volume as a sort of a generalization.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness, this makes so much sense. That's why it feels like British people are more reserved when they're speaking, but they're not. They're just using a different thing to emphasize things. We're just not shouting yeah like Americans, which is just we shout over, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pitch and volume as emphasis often go together.
Speaker 2:It's not that Brits don't use volume at all, but pitch is more of a tool of emphasis.
Speaker 2:So one of the things you can do is figure out what is the operative word in the sentence and you're going to use pitch to emphasize that word.
Speaker 2:Basically, we've covered most of what I feel like we would be able to cover in an hour. There's so many details, like, if you wanted to be able to narrate a book first person in this dialect, it would take a lot of work, a lot of listening, a lot of trial and error and we would start to get into much more subtle accent features, things like liquid use, things like different affricates, things like dropping the H or dropping the G and glottalized T's and velarized L's and all of these things. But there's so many features to get to sounding more authentic that we can sort of start with the broad brush ones and then start refining once the foundation of the placement feels really secure. Because once the foundation of placement feels much more comfortable, a lot of these sound changes are going to feel a lot more natural, whereas if I just try to do them they feel really wrong, they feel really weird because it's not natural to that setting.
Speaker 1:Even just getting my mouth around the words, like two or three times, it was already starting to feel more. Different shapes repeated themselves and it felt like it was clicking more, just even from one to three times of reading through it.
Speaker 2:And I think so. This is how it would work if you had maybe a moderate character in a book and you could go forward and do it with some confidence. You know we might want to refine some of it but yeah, it was already getting a grasp of this dialect and how it sounds and the patterns of it. You know I could already hear you starting to play with pitch and we hadn't even talked about it. So this is really something that, with practice, five minutes a day can just help you get a little bit more confident and really a lot of accent.
Speaker 2:Performance is about confidence and audio books themselves are a great tool. You know you can listen to an entire audio book of Kerry Mulligan and pick up her ideolect if you want to, and with any accent of English to perform it convincingly. There is such a level of detail that we sort of require from the performer to feel like they're being authentic. So it's very different. Standard of this is a first person narration. I need to sell you that I'm from London versus this is a character from London. You know we're already at the point where you could convincingly do this is a character from London in my book set in Kentucky. I mean, if they really don't have very many lines, you can also bring the dialect coach the lines and then work very specifically.
Speaker 1:That would actually make a lot more sense, yeah.
Speaker 2:I could be like, oh okay, this, this sounds interesting to this. Whatever what we're doing is building the foundations of you being able to use this accent moving forward, so hopefully that has been useful in some way.
Speaker 1:I think this has been incredibly educational.
Speaker 2:Is there anything else that you want to wrap up with, any particular thoughts, or I think the overview is, once you get a feel for the vocal setting of an accent, it's much easier to get back into it than trying to memorize all of these shifts and like this valve moves to this valve. But when I perform an accent I remind myself of those things before I get into it. But holding on to the setting is what helps me get there and that's what helps me stay there and that's what helps me feel confident in the accent performance. So if we were to do a second session, what we would look at is some more of the consonant changes that we didn't get into today, like the H dropping some of the G, dropping the, it's called th fronting. So when, like the th, changes into an F or a V, anything you want, that's sometimes part of the dialect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we might go into consonants a lot more. We haven't talked about vowels or we talked about the bath set, but we could spend a lot of time on that because those can be hard to hear. We would work with practice sentences. We would work with trying to feel where those changes are and what the difference is. Probably would talk a little bit more about strategies different speakers use, looking at people from different class backgrounds. Just make this accent a little bit more flexible. Like I said, I think that this sort of exists on a spectrum from extremely posh to extremely working class. We might get clearer about what can audibly differentiate those class differences so that you can make educated choices for your characters.
Speaker 2:And then, beyond that, it would be about practice, it would be about adjustment. You know, you might send me some samples. I might be able to sit down and listen and analyze them and give my thoughts about things that you might have missed or things that we need to go over again. Often you would bring in a script and we could work on the scripts together and I could help you with a section of it. Either you had pre recorded it and I have listened to it and I'm now giving you feedback, or you do it in the session, but at this point we haven't quite gotten to enough of the the handholds that I would say go away and record something and send it to me, because I feel like there's a few more things I would want you to have.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, this has been incredibly informative. I hope that, for anyone that's listened to this, that they have a sense now of what it might be like to not only begin to work on RP, but to begin to work with a dialect coach on something. And there's just so much fascinating information when it comes to the way people talk, and it says so much about where we come from, who we are, what stories we have. There's just so much to it. So I it's such a treat to have been introduced to you. I'm so glad that we had the opportunity to do this, and I really can't wait to share this with everyone. Thank you so much for your time. This was really really fun. Well, I had a great time. Wow, that was so much. I'm going to try to narrow these down to just 10 takeaways for this episode. This is tough because there was so much good stuff in there, but let's give it a shot.
Speaker 1:Number one prestige general and standard accents. These are dialects that come from a particular set of circumstances that often have to do more with power and class than they do local culture. Number two British received pronunciation, or RP. This is a prestige accent that developed in London in the 1800s was taught in English boarding schools to separate the aristocracy from the other classes and eventually influenced how English was spoken around the world. Number three rotisserie is a really fancy word for Irishness. Number four a phonemic realization is the idea of a sound we have in our heads, while a phonetic realization is the actual sound that a person makes. Number five IPA. This is the International Phonetic Alphabet, and it is a system of symbols that is supposed to be able to be used to represent any sound in human speech. But even this has been influenced in some ways by the British RP dialect, because the British RP dialect influenced the people who created it.
Speaker 1:Number six lexical sets. These are lists of words that follow a certain pattern of vowel pronunciation and sometimes they are split or merged in different dialects, which can make it harder to intuit how certain words are pronounced from one dialect to another. But for help with that you can always google them. Number seven the tongue is the magic beanbag you push one place and it goes another place. That is official fact. Number eight where to start with learning a new dialect? Let's just go over a couple of the things that I did with Catherine in this episode. First, identify a target who speaks the way that you want to, then watch that, observe that, find YouTube videos of them or watch movies, that kind of thing. Notice where their face moves or holds tension versus where your face moves or holds tension, and pay attention to what you need to change versus what you can keep to get closer to your target. This postural awareness is going to do you a world of good as a foundation before you move forward with layering other aspects of the dialect.
Speaker 1:In Number nine, practice. Any coach is limited on what they can do with you in an hour, so the key is to practice, practice, practice and let all of these things that you've learned start to assimilate. Because, remember, if you already have the natural ability to pick up an accent, then you don't even need an accent coach. So it's completely natural, if you're working on a new dialect with a coach, to make mistakes. You really just need patience with yourself to practice and improve over time. And finally, number 10, you can learn more about Catherine on her website, catherineletrellcom, that's k-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e-l-i-t-t-r-e-l-lcom, or you can contact her at her email address, catherine Letrell at gmailcom. This podcast was created, hosted and produced by me, emily, for Imperium Productions, expanding the universe of storytelling. Thank you again so much to Catherine for being our guest today and to you for being our audience. If you liked what you heard, please share with a friend and leave us a kind review. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you on down the road.