Exploring the Diversity of Spoken English in Britain: Regional Voices and Language Change, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Exploring the Diversity of Spoken English in Britain: Regional Voices and Language Change e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! Sounds Familiar? Accents and Dialects of the UK Do you call a ‘bread roll’ a cob, batch, bread cake, barm cake or scuffler? How do you pronounce the words cup and plant? And are you sitting or sat at this computer? The UK is a rich landscape of regional accents and dialects, each evidence of our society’ s continuity and change, our local history and our day-to-day lives. This site captures and celebrates the diversity of spoken English in the second half of the twentieth century. This area of the page should contain Adobe flash content, please make sure that Flash Player is installed and JavaScript is enabled. If JavaScript or flash are disabled or blocked by your firewall please use the text only version of this page. What you can hear You can listen to 71 sound recordings and over 600 short audio clips chosen from two collections of the British Library Sound Archive: the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank. You'll hear Londoners discussing marriage and working life, Welsh teenagers talking with pride about being bilingual and the Aristocracy chatting about country houses. You can explore the links between present-day Geordie and our Anglo-Saxon and Viking past or discover why Northern Irish accents are a rich blend of seventeenth century English and Scots. You can study changes in pronunciation among the middle classes or find out how British Asians express their linguistic identity. What you can do In addition there are interpretation and leaming packages relating to the dual themes of language variation and language change within spoken English. These themes are explored using audio clips, supporting texts and interactive maps to illustrate the lexis (vocabulary), grammar and phonology (pronunciation) of contemporary spoken English as well as introducing the concept of social variation. Three case studies are included to provide an in-depth look at specific varieties of English. 7 recordings and a series of audio clips focus on Received Pronunciation, while a set of audio clips is provided to investigate Geordie Dialect. A further 9 recordings feature speakers with Ethnic Minority backgrounds, alongside a series of audio clips to demonstrate the lexis, phonology and grammar of speakers in the UK's Asian and Caribbean communities. In Regional Voices you can explore the differences that exist in spoken English as you move across the country, while Changing Voices gives you the chance to hear how English has changed in different parts of the country over the last fifty years. The Case Studies section provides an in-depth look at three specific varieties of contemporary English: Received Pronunciation, Geordie Dialect, and English as spoken in the UK's minority ethnic communities. A selection of suggested activities and research tasks will help you investigate speech in your own community. Your Voices offers you the exciting opportunity to contribute your recordings and language investigations to the site, as part of the BL Sound Archive's ongoing survey of speech patterns across the UK. Tuesday, July 20, 1999 Published at 11:41 GMT 12:41 UK UK Curse of the British Along with fish and chips and wet weather, Britain is now being characterised as a nation of bad language. Apparently, we just cannot help it. Many of us in the UK are "virtually dumbstruck" without recourse to a four-letter word. The Lonley Planet travel guide has published a phrasebook preparing foreign visitors for the colourful side of British culture. It says the British seem to "love swearing" and seem to swear "more than other nations". Potential visitors to the UK are told that "large numbers of the British people" drape their entire discourse around popular four-letter words and resort to even more colourful descriptions with regular aplomb." Estuary English guide It also taps into the consciousness of two of the nation's favourite pastimes: football and drinking. Tourists are told that at most football matches, the terraces will resound to expletive-filled refrains. There are also 65 different descriptions for being drunk and synonyms for fantastic, idiot or fool and ugly or smelly. A spokeswoman for the publisher defended the book, and said: "We are not saying people should swear but we want visitors to know what to expect." And for those who want more of a cultural tour than the Tower of London can afford, there is a guide to Estuary English. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is cited as having dropped his ' Ts' while speaking of a "better Britain". Mandem is a collective noun for a bunch of boys or men, particularly your own group of mates. Multicultural London English Michael Rosen, Dr Laura Wright and Ismail Einashe talk about Multicultural London English 5. Galdem (or gyal dem) e.g. “Thank God fi the gyal dem” - Konshens The female equivalent to mandem; a group of girls. 6. Rude boy (or rude boi) Dizzee Rascal e.g. "I heard you gotta problem with me? Rude boy listen” - Dizzee Rascal Originally Jamaican slang, this describes a bad man or someone who is hardened by the street. A rude boy might be an armed gangster or just a teenager with an attitude. 7. Safe e.g. “He's safe blud, let him kotch” If something is safe it is cool, good, sweet. Safe is also used to signify agreement: “Yeah safe, blud.” “safa” is a superlative version of safe, denoting the coolest of the cool. 8. Bare e.g. “This tune is bare sick” In Standard English this means sparse, but in MLE it has the opposite meaning. It means “very” or “lots of. 9. Swag e.g. “Nah, that film Jaws was bare swag” Swag is usually associated with something valuable or coveted, but has recently come to mean extreme or scary. 10. Peng (Gia l(e iper oEN SIETE e) (STIA SI SITO gi RTS IER ae] A EN e.g. “She's well peng!” This word is used prolifically but is relatively new, Ismail says. It's a word that people use casually to describe anything positive: chicken can be peng, a pretty girl is peng, or a tune might be peng. 11. Hench e.g. “That bodyguard is hench, man” If someone is hench they are strong-looking or muscular. 12. Nang e.g. “Stormzy is bare nang” Nang, a word that originated in Hackney, refers to something that's cool. 13. Mans (or manz) e.g. “The girl told me, ‘take off your jacket.’ I said, ‘Babes, man's not hot’ - Big Shaq Man has often been used to describe people in general, them or you, but now it's being used as a first person pronoun — it's a way to refer to oneself. 14. Creps e.g. “Check out mans creps” Creps are shoes, specifically a pair of good-looking trainers. 15. Chirpse e.g. “I chirpse her just for fun, I never ever call her phone” - Tinie Tempah If you are chirpsing someone then you are flirting with them, or chatting them up. 16. Long e.g. “Nah man, getting the bus is long tings” A negative description for a task that involves more effort than it's worth, or something or someone that is considered arduous or annoying. To “long off’ someone or something means to avoid it: if you've been “longed off’ you've been stood up. 17. Yout e.g. “Skeng chat, kick up the yout, man know that I kick up the yout” - Stormzy Short for youth, this means a child or young person. The yout of today are speaking MLE! British Accents The United Kingdom is perhaps the most dialect-obsessed country in the world. With near-countless regional Englishes shaped by millennia of history, few nations boast as many varieties of language in such a compact geography. (NOTE: This page uses the International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA). For information about this notation, please visit my page ofIPA Resources.) The below lists several important types of British English. While not a complete account by any means, this page provides an overview of the accents and dialects most often discussed on this site and elsewhere. Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation (a term by 19th Century linguist A.J. Ellis1) is the probably the closest the United Kingdom has ever had to a “standard accent.” Although originally related to the upper-classes in London and other areas of Southeast England, it is largely non-regional. You've likely heard the accent countless times in Jane Austen adaptations, Merchant Ivory films, and Oscar Wilde plays. It emerged from the 18th- and 19th-Century upper classes, and has remained the “gold standard” ever since. Features: =» Non-rhoticity, meaning the r at the ends of words isn't prounounced (mother sounds like “muhthuh”). = Trap-bath split, meaning that certain a words, like bath, can't, and dance are pronounced with the broad-a in father. (This differs from most American accents, in which these words are pronounced with the short-a in cat. = The vowels tend to be a bit more conservative than other accents in Southern England, which have undergone significant vowel shifting over the past century. Speech Samples: «= Actress Dame Judi Dench «= Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher «= Author Christopher Hitchens Cockney Cockney is probably the second most famous British accent. It originated in the East End of London, but shares many features with and influences other dialects in that region. Features: =» Raised vowel in words like trap and cat so these sounds like “trep” and “cet.” = Non-rhoticity: see explanation above under Received Pronunciation, above. = Trap-bath split: see explanation above under Received Pronunciation. Features: = Usually non-rhotic. = English is generally modelled after Received Pronunciation or related accents, but with many holdovers from the Welsh language. = Syllables tend to be very evenly stressed, and the prosody of the accent is often very “musical”. =» The letter ris often trilled or tapped. Some dialect words imported from the Welsh language. Speech Samples: «= Singer Tom Jones «= Actor Rhys Ifans =» Rocker Gruff Rhy (Cardiff Accent Scottish English This is the broad definition used to describe English as it is spoken in the country of Scotland. Note that Scottish English is different than Scots, a language derived from Northumbrian Old English that is spoken in Scotland as well. That being said, Scots has a strong influence on how English in Scotland is spoken. Features: =» Rbhotic, with trilled or tapped r's. = Glottal stopping of the letter t when in between vowels (similar to Cockney and related accents). = Monopthongal pronounciations of the /ei/ and /ou/ dipthongs, so that that face becomes IPA fe:s and goat becomes IPA go:t. Speech Samples: «= Actor Peter Mullan (Glasgow «= Actor Ewen Bremner (Edinburgh Conclusion This list is woefully incomplete. I can't count the smaller dialect areas that aren't covered here (East Anglia, Urban Cardiff, Cornish English, Northumberland, etc.) However, I've attempted to list the accents and dialects you?’ll see referenced the most on this blog and elsewhere. 1 Case Studies: Received Pronunciation: The British Libren: Cockney DIALECT WRITTEN BY: Adam Jacot de Boinod Cockney, dialect of the English language traditionally spoken by working-class Londoners. Cockney is also often used to refer to anyone from London—in particular, from its East End. The word Cockney has had a pejorative connotation, originally deriving from cokenay, or cokeney, a late Middle English word of the 14th century that meant, literally, “cocks’ egg” (i.e., a small or defective egg, imagined to come from a rooster—which, of course, cannot produce eggs). That negative sense gave rise to Cockney's being used to mean “milksop” or “cockered child” (a pampered or spoiled child). The word was later applied to a town resident who was regarded as either affected or puny. To most outsiders a Cockney is anyone from London, though contemporary natives of London, especially from its East End, use the word with pride. In its geographical and cultural senses, Cockney is best defined as a person born within hearing distance of the church bells of St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, in the City of London. It has been estimated that, prior to the noise of traffic, the sound of the Bow Bells reached about 6 miles (10 km) to the east, 5 miles (8 km) to the north, 4 miles (6 km) to the west, and 3 miles (5 km) to the south. The vast majority of the hospitals of London's East End fall within that jurisdiction. Cockney as a dialect is most notable for its argot, or coded language, which was born out of ingenious rhyming slang. There are as many as 150 terms that are recognized instantly by any rhyming slang user. For example, the phrase use your loaf—meaning “use your head”—is derived from the rhyming phrase /oaf of bread. That phrase is just one part of London's rhyming slang tradition that can be traced to the East End. That tradition is thought to have started in the mid- 19th century as code by which either criminals confused the police or salesmen compared notes with each other beyond the understanding of their customers. The manner in which Cockney rhyming slang is created may be best explained through examples. “I'm going upstairs” becomes /'m going up the apples in Cockney. Apples is part of the phrase apples and pears, which rhymes with stairs; and pears is then dropped. In this example, a word is replaced with a phrase that ends in a rhyming word, and that rhyming word is then dropped (along with, in app/les and pears, the and). Likewise, “wig” becomes syrup (from syrup of figs) and “wife” becomes trouble (from trouble and strife). Omission of the rhyming word is not a consistent feature of Cockney, though. Other, more-straightforward favourites that are recognizable outside the Cockney community and have been adopted into the general lexicon of English slang are the use of the Boat Race for “face,” Adam and Eve for “believe,” tea leaf for “thief,” mince pies for “eyes,” nanny goat for “coat,” plate of meat for “street,” daisy roots for “boots,” cream crackered for “knackered,” china plate for “mate,” brown breadfor “dead,” bubble bath for “laugh,” bread and honey for “money,” brass bands for “hands,” whistle and flute for “suit,” septic tank for “Yank" (i.e., Yankee, or an American), and currant bun for “sun” and, with a more recent extension, “The Sun” (a British newspaper). Less known are expressions whose meaning is less straightforward, such as borrow and beg for “egg” (a term that enjoyed renewed life during food rationing of World War II), army and navy for “gravy” (of which there was much at meals in both forces), and didn't ought as a way to refer to port wine (derived from women who said, when asked to “have another,” that they “didn't ought”). Light and dark took the place of “park,” an oblique reference to a past directive by the London County Council that a bell be sounded and the gates locked in parks at dusk. Lion's Jair came to stand for “chair,” in reference to the danger of disrupting a father's afternoon nap in his easy chair. Likewise, bottle and stopper originated via the word copper (a policeman), with bottle meaning “to enclose” and a stopperreferring to someone who prevents another person from doing something. Many of the rearrangements used in Cockney phrasing became harmless nicknames rather than sinister code words. By the 1950s many working-class Londoners, fond of a bit of wordplay, were trading those phrases among The word cockney has resolutely resisted any simple etymology. It is first noted in 1362, when it meant a ‘cock's egg'—that is, a defective one. However there was an alternative use, first recorded in Chaucer and defined in the second edition of the OED (1989) as ‘a mother's darling’; a cockered child, pet, minion; ‘a child tenderly brought up’; hence, a squeamish or effeminate fellow, ‘a milksop'. Hence the equation, presumably coined by self-aggrandizing countrymen, of the weakling with the townsman, a use initially recorded in 1521. And from the general to the specific: in 1600 appeared the first such usage, in which the reference is not merely to the working-class Londoner, with which it would henceforth be allied, but to a Bow-bell Cockney. What is a Cockney? One who has been born within the sound of Bow bells, a reference not, as often believed, to the eastern suburb of Bow, but to the church of Saint Mary le Bow, Cheapside, in the City of London. Further to a study carried out in 2000 to see how far the Bow Bells could be heard, it was estimated that they would have been audible six miles to the east, five to the north, three to the south, and four to the west, an area that covers Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Stepney, Wapping, Limehouse, Poplar, Millwall, Hackney, Hoxton, Shoreditch, Bow, and Mile End, as well as Bermondsey, south of the River Thames. Given the post- war emigration of many Cockneys to Essex, that area can now be seen as substantially larger. Nor were the original Cockneys invariably working class. All sorts of individuals would once have spoken the London dialect, even if the great push for linguistic ‘purity’ during the seventeenth and eighteenth century prohibited such ‘vulgarisms’ from the aspirant middle class. The OED's first recorded use of Cockney language is dated 1776. But it has been suggested that a Cockney style of speech is much older, with Matthews offering examples from the sixteenth century onwards (William Matthews, Cockney Past and Present, 1938). Shakespeare is among those he quotes, although his Cockneyisms are far from East Enders. Indeed, early Cockney is primarily a matter of pronunciation, as reverse-engineered from the recorded spelling of words such as frust(thrust), farding (farthing), anoder (another), and so on. The nineteenth century saw the first wholesale attempt to record Cockney as it was spoken. The low-life episodes of Pierce Egan's Life in London (1821) take his heroes deep into the East End and its speech. London's great chronicler Charles Dickens, notably with Sam Weller and his father, is unsurprisingly keen on setting down the sound of Cockney speech, most obviously in the substitution of ‘v’ for ‘w' and vice versa. The pioneering sociologist Henry Mayhew recorded his impoverished or criminal interviewees in much the same style. Dickens at least offers an implied moral judgement on those who drop their aitches and reverse their v's and w's: irrespective of their background ‘virtuous’ characters, such as Oliver Twist and Nancy, never stray from standard English. It is left to Sykes and the Dodger to display the author's underworld knowledge. Yet ‘Dickensian’ Cockney was short-lived. By the century's end a new school of Cockney novelists— notably William Pett Ridge, Edwin Pugh, and Arthur Morrison—had emerged. It is ‘their’ Cockneyisms that are far more like what one hears today. At much the same time London's music hall was dominated by stars such as Albert Chevalier, Gus Elen, Marie Lloyd or Bessie Bellwood, all of whom promoted themselves as embodying the lives of the Cockneys who made up their audiences. Moreover they did so with songs imbued with that audience’s home-grown language. Rhyming slang If there is a stereotype of what the world sees as ‘typically Cockney' then it is undoubtedly rhyming slang. While the creation myths of that lexis differ, it was certainly popular among the early nineteenth-century Cockney costermongers. The original rhyming slang, which was a conscious attempt to mystify the uninitiated, depended on the omission of the rhyming element, for example: ‘Barnet fair / ‘hair’ (1857) to barnet (1931); ‘china plate’ / ‘mate’ (1880) to china (1925); ‘Hampstead Heath' / ‘teeth' (1887) to Hampsteads (1932); and ‘Sweeney Todd' / ‘flying squad' (1938) to Sweeney (1967). However this was by no means a rule, and there exist a number of terms in which the entire compound is pronounced — hence Adam-and-Eve / ‘believe’ (1925), cocoa / ‘say so’ (1936), or tea-leaf / ‘thief' (1903). Rhyming slang persists today, though how ‘Cockney’ such artificial constructs as ‘Posh and Becks: sex’ or ‘Germaine Greer: beer may be is at best debatable. Like Routemaster buses and black cabs, it is an essential part of London's tourist-orientated image. Cockney survives, but not without change. If one can elicit a single pattern then it is the movement beyond purely working-class speech. Mockney (1989) has been adopted by a growing spectrum of the otherwise middle-class and reasonably well- heeled young, As an accent it resembles the more formal concept of Estuary English which was first recorded in 1984 and defined by the OED as ‘a type of accent identified as spreading outwards from London, mainly into the south-east of England, and containing features of both received pronunciation and such regional accents as Cockney”. And since then, at least among the under-thirties, both working- and middle-class, there is Multi-Ethnic London English, a dialect that reflects the city's multicultural makeup, and blends terms from mainstream slang, the Caribbean and American rap, and of course London's own Cockney. Further reading on Cockney e Julian Franklyn, The Cockney: a Survey of London Life and Language (1953) e Jonathon Green, Cassell Book of Rhyming Slang (2000) William Matthews, Cockney Past and Present. A Short History of the Dialect of London (1938) Peter Wright, Cockney Dialect and Slang (1981) The opinions and other information contained in the OED blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press. London accents: Estuary, Cockney and RP Hello, I'm jane at DailyStep English and welcome to my Audio Blog! What is the difference between these 3 London accents, Estuary, Cockney and RP? In my blog this week, you can learn to understand Londoners and South Eastern English people better-no matter where they are travelling in the world! There are also some free audio previews of all the topics in this week's DailyStep audio lessons. If you are new to DailyStep English, please register for 5 free audio lessons and to be on my mailing list. London Accents (by Jane Lawson at DailyStep.com) Have you ever visited London? If so - did you understand the Londoners English? | guess you want British people to pronounce words very clearly, and preferably also slowly! Of course this does not happen in real life. The main 'local' accents that you will hear in London are quite different from each other. The easiest accent for you to understand, and the accent that many English learners try to learn when speaking English, is actually not a local accent at all. It is Received Pronunciation, or RP, also sometimes called BBC English, or Queen's English, and it is the Standard British accent. It is the accent you will find if you look up the pronunciation of a word in a dictionary. Camden, yet she referred to her adored Ken as the "real voice" of London. | wonder what she would do to his accent. Mr Livingstone has made something of a trademark of his voice. It is not cockney, neither is it the cockney refinement now called estuary. It has a slightly nasal Midlands twang, as of pre-Irish northwest London. Indeed if | were Shaw's Professor Higgins | would place Mr Livingstone as white-collar- London-and-Birmingham-Railway. Higgins, of course, was the master of snobbish phonetics. From hearing Pickering talk he could reel off his pedigree as "Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, India". He rudely demanded of Eliza, in Covent Garden, "How do you come to be up so far east? You were born in Lisson Grove." AII she had said so far was, "Keptin, n'baw ya flahr orf a pore gel ... Will ye-o0 pie me f'them?" He boasted he could name anyone's neighbourhood to within two miles, indeed within two streets. For an appropriate fee he could turn Kentish Town into Park Lane, or take Eliza from Covent Garden to her "Bucknam Pellis". But Higgins, like Ms Bainbridge, was struggling after a "London voice" that has simply ceased to exist. In the North of England, a London accent tends to mean anything posh. Sometimes London is code for "received" or "standard" or BBC English. Yet it can also be code for the opposite. In a Costa del Sol identity parade, London means yobbish. The Queen's own English is now wonderfully archaic. Dearly is still pronounced "deahleah" and people take tea on teebles and cheers. But when Eliza Doolittle's father talks of being "in me prime", as would his descendants today, it was equally London. lt is no more wrong than the pukka "sez" is wrong for "says". In the film Sliding Doors all eyes may have been on the face of the American Gwyneth Paltrow, but all ears should have been on her voice. She had studiously attuned it to that of an upwardly mobile west London career girl. Her "Notting Hill" English was a welding of a debased "Princess Diana" to the diphthongs of working-class London: "I've go'a'geh'on with my work." The voice is that of thousands of young people eager for a voice that can merge into the verbal Muzak of the city. They must pass muster at dinners and weddings, yet they will strangle their vowels and clip their consonants not to seem out of place in a pub or workplace. Tracing these chameleons across the map of London would test even a Henry Higgins. Such accents have much to do with the subtle gradations of class in a big city. In London, accent is a way in which groups and neighbourhoods define and defend themselves against newcomers. | am told that old-established residents of Whitechapel regard cockney as aristocratic alongside the near-incomprehensible Bengali-cockney of Brick Lane. But such accents and dialects are neither right nor wrong. Only grammar can be judged in those terms. We do not regard Scotsmen or Irishmen as not speaking properly because of their distinctive accents. So why an East Ender? I am all for teaching grammar. Speaking clearly is the key to writing clearly and spelling correctly, until, that is, Bernard Shaw's campaign to rationalise spelling comes to glorious fruition (or glorius frewishon). But accent is different. It is not about clarity or meaning but about family and locality. London's accents have always been the building blocks of English, drawn from the entrepòts of the docks and the markets. Like that ultimate verbal melting pot, cockney, they take on the colouring of the city's passing tribes, using, adapting and discarding at will. London English is incomparably the richer for such ethnic imports as clobber and conk, sucker and bunkum, pal, moll, bloke and boozer. It may be that nobody says cor blimey, guv any more. But effing and blinding are working up the social scale. Young Londoners now use West Indian slang as if it were their own: like ... man .... fat... cool... wicked. Some London dialect is charmingly Old English, as in "He was that stuck up" or "I give 'im what for". Some is overtly ethnic, like the Jewish "already". Some of these are anthropological gems. But as William Matthews says in his book Cockney Past and Present, today's London English is England's English tomorrow. Words and pronunciations enter the language through London. They are tested there, in street and pub, before being received as somehow official. Aristocratic England used to talk with a regional accent, as most of aristocratic Scotland still does. But like the upper-class voice a century ago, the nation's middle-class voice is now merging with middle-class London, as if to give itself national colouring. | find that a pity. It deadens local variety and standardises an aspect of English culture that has no need of standardisation. But then London English is itself becoming standardised. It, too, is killing variety and blurring the boundaries between class and ethnic origin. We are all saying "awrigh" for all right, yeah for yes, or Tony Blair's "Amean.... lessfaysit ... innit?" The fun of London English has always been its variety and its resistance to the likes of Higgins and Bainbridge. Keep it that way. By all means teach grammar: give young people the weapons to make words their servants, not their masters. But God forbid that the national curriculum should ever get its hands on the kaleidoscope that is the London voice. Wassrong? Issokay, innit? © Associated Newspapers Ltd., 04 March 1999 What does your accent say about you? By Richard Cauldwell 09 June 2014 - 09:46 'Prejudices about accents are undesirable, but powerful, and very easily learned.' Photo© Marc Wathieu, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 and adapted from the original. Are some accents better than others? English language teacher and author Richard Cauldwell examines the prejudices against various English accents and the effect they can have on one's sense of self-worth. Whatever | happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as | opened my mouth. Accents and social groups Sky News ran a report recently in which an 18-year-old woman was trying to sound less posh, because she didn't like ‘random people’ telling her that she must be rich and froma privileged background. The trouble for me is that one of the social groups | have the strongest family and emotional ties to are my cousins in the West of Ireland. And to them, my accent sounds ‘posh', that is, RP-like. Yes, some people would say that my accent is the very one that | have these prejudices about. Hey ho! Accents in the classroom Let me end by making some final pleas to teachers of English: * Don't judge yourself by your accent. * Don't judge your fellow teachers by their accents. e Recognise a reference model such as RP or General American for what it is: a useful example for teaching and learning intelligible pronunciation. * Areference model is not ‘the truth' or ‘the right way' but a reference point around which many flavourings are possible. * Donotusereference models as an attainment target or attainment model. e Control your own prejudices about accents used in reference models. Lastly, it's worth being reminded that people can be accented — even highly accented — and still be intelligible and comprehensible. Find more seminars for English language professionals live-streamed from the UK. Richard Cauldwell will be presenting on this topic at a British Council seminar, live- streamed from London on 10 June 2014. How not to do an American accent Barbara Berkery gives the BBC's Stephen Robb an American accent primer Everyone can do an American accent... at least everyone thinks they can. But how many would pass muster with a Hollywood studio? The BBC's Stephen Robb took a lesson from one of the movie industry's top accent coaches. Any actor or actress hoping to convince in a foreign accent must have three words in the back of their mind at all times. They won't be phrases like "shape of mouth", "position of tongue" or "placement of voice" - although all of these will be fundamental to learning and adopting an accent. The three words haunting the performer, driving hour after hour of dialect practice, are "Dick", "Van" and "Dyke". The American's "strike a light, ' ni : : Thanks to all readers who phoned or sent in guv'nor" Cockney caricature in Mary Poppins is widely regarded examples of their American accents. A selection as delivering the worst film will be featured on the Magazine on Tuesday accent of all time. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, it was not. And that's up against competition from Sean Connery playing a Spaniard, an Irishman and a Russian at stages of his career. British dialect coach Barbara Berkery admits that a lot of actors seeking her tutelage plead at the outset: "I don't want to sound like Dick Van Dyke." Her glittering cast of former students include Gwyneth Paltrow, whom she trained for Emma and Shakespeare in Love, and Renee Zellweger for Bridget Jones's Diary and Miss Potter. Half-hour challenge Paltrow won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love and Zellweger was nominated as Bridget Jones, but probably the greater tributes to their English accents were the nominations from an obviously impressed British Academy - they sounded the part. Berkery has also coached Brad Pitt (Seven Years in Tibet), Jim Carrey (A Christmas Carol, due out next year) and Geoffrey Rush (Pirates of the Caribbean), and is currently working with Jake Gyllenhaal on his English accent for 66 You must play a character who Prince of Persia. has an accent, but you must never In other words, or for words in another play an accent accent anyway, London-based Berkery has become the English dialect coach Barbara Berkery Hollywood turns to. "It's a nice position to be in," she says. Usually conducting her training for several weeks in the run-up to a production, and then throughout the shoot, Berkery has consistently achieved convincing results with hugely-dedicated and highly- talented actors; what she can do with me in half an hour is a different challenge altogether. Exposure to US films and television means most people probably believe they can affect a passable American accent - myself included. But Berkery explains that "mimicry is not pr the same as doing accents - if somebody [= enne is just mimicking, | think we do feel it isn't quite truthful." Her work involves building the accent authentically by teaching the real mouth shapes and tongue positions involved - for a general American accent, she tells Dick Van Dyke's accent in Mary me, that means a wide mouth and the Poppins is one of the worst ever tongue higher up in the mouth. She also tells me to smile, in order to place the voice towards my nasal resonator - one of the three voice resonators along with the facial and throat resonators. Berkery describes learning to do an accent as having "a mask on the face that fits perfectly". With my lifted tongue, wide mouth, attempted smile, and the concentration involved in maintaining these as we start voice exercises, my mask resembles something like Jack Nicholson's The Joker with a lobotomised, vacant look in the eyes. | feel certain that a cinema audience would find it distracting. Berkery takes me through some of the major vowel changes from standard English to general American - their short "ah" in bath and sample, the w" in cloth and Boston - and the sound that comes out of my mouth is unrecognisable to me. It is a long way from my own south-east England accent, but not much nearer my trusted American impression. It does Julia Roberts in Mary Reilly ran Van sound vaguely American, but like an Dyke close over-the-top, slightly camp game show host with an occasional lisp - not what | had been aiming for atall. And | find the process very unnerving. "The voice is the soul and you are moving it," says Berkery. "People do find it very frightening - it's like being off-balance." As we continue, moving from vowel exercises to working on consonant changes, Berkery frequently offers comments like "Make it less" and "Don't do as much".