Category Archives: Dialect Myths

Myth du Jour: Actors Need General American Accents

Posted on September 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

Myth: To work regularly, you need to be able to speak in a General American Accent.

Reality: The reality of this situation is that for each and every actor the rules are different. (Doesn’t seem fair, I know. Sorry ’bout that.)

It comes down to this– the way you speak is one essential component of your unique, complex acting product and if you take the time to harmonize your speech skills to the rest of your acting product, you can maximize your casting opportunities. The General American accent itself contains no magic. It’s just a tool. If the General American accent ‘tool’ fits well with your acting career, great. Use it. If there are other tools (other accents) that fit better, stop fretting over the General American accent and make sure you master those accents so that you can find yourself booking jobs more frequently.

If you are dubious about my claim, I encourage you to take a few minutes and make a list of all the high-profile actors you can think of that don’t use a General American accent very often (or ever) in their careers. There are plenty of them.  There are also plenty for whom a General American accent is indispensable. Your challenge as an actor is to figure out into which category your own acting product logically falls and take action as needed.

Here are some places to start if the idea of thinking about your acting product/image/essence/brand (whatever you’d like to call it) is new to you.

1) You may find value in this blog post I wrote earlier this year.

2) You may benefit from attending personal brand workshops such as those taught by Sam Christensen in Los Angeles and NYC. (If you live outside these cities, you can see clips of Sam’s work on YouTube.)

3) You may wish to invest in a dialect fitting with a qualified dialect consultant who specializes in such matters.

I hope you’ll enjoy this part of your journey. If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact me here in the comments section or at dialect411 (at) gmail (dot) com.

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Myth Du Jour: Your Dialect Coach is Judging You…

Posted on June 24, 2010 | Leave a comment

MYTH: Dialect coaches are constantly judging others on the way they speak.

TRUTH: Probably not. Here’s why: The amount of energy and focus involved in listening to every single sound that an actor utters and analyzing those sounds in light of some particular dialect goal is enormous. Trust me, it’s intense work! If a coach were to try to judge every sound every person in their vicinity spoke every day, they’d burn out quickly. (I just read this blog aloud–including this sentence- and it clocked in at 44 seconds, during which time over 400 individual sounds were uttered. That’s around ten sounds per second…Intense, yes?)

So relax! If you see your coach somewhere and they aren’t ‘on the clock’ they are probably listening to what you are saying rather than how you are saying it.

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Dialect Myth Du Jour: I’ll Add The Dialect Later

Posted on May 20, 2010 | 1 comment

Myth: It’s better to get the lines and blocking down first, and then add the dialect once you’re comfortable with everything else…

Truth: In film and TV this isn’t even an option. Rehearsals are limited and every minute on set costs the studio money, so it’s essential that you are 100% performance-ready with any dialect (or other skills you might need) the moment you first arrive on set. Actually, if you aren’t performance-ready with your dialect well before you even audition, you probably will be passed up for the role entirely.

As for theatre productions, it’s important to keep in mind that the very sounds you utter onstage are a significant part of your character’s life moment to moment. If your dialect is ‘in-progress’ during rehearsals, you will never be free to really connect with other actors and rehearse.  Half of your mind will be always be elsewhere thinking ‘Whoops! That was a dialect mistake!’ or ‘Yes! Got that one right!’

Truthfully, if your dialect is not ready for integration at the first read-through, the entire rehearsal process is going to feel awkward and uncomfortable. Of course, it is this discomfort that makes it tempting to want to put off the dialect work in the first place, but actors who choose that route find themselves in the 11th hour suddenly forgetting blocking, dropping lines and never really being able to just let go and act.

In a production where the dialect work has not been incorporated on time,  the result is most often that an inconsistent and distracting attempt at the dialect diminishes what would otherwise be a solid show. Even if the production manages to escape earning a scathing review, you won’t find audiences rushing to see it.


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Dialect Myth Du Jour: The Most Difficult Accent To Learn

Posted on May 6, 2010 | 3 comments

Myth: Some accents are harder to learn than others.

Truth: The perception that an accent  is ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ to learn is entirely relative.  What is hard for you may be a piece of cake for the guy sitting next to you.

Accents that seem easy to learn typically have many sounds in common with your own personal dialect.  Or, within your personal life experience, you may have had significant contact with some other dialect that has sounds and features in common with the one you are endeavoring to learn.  For instance, if you grew up in Nebraska and so did both of your parents, but from the time you were two years old until you were nine, you had a live-in guest from Paris, France who spoke English with a French accent, you may find it easy to learn most of the phonemes that happen to be part of that French accent simply because you were exposed to them for so long and at such a young age.  You might then in turn find it ‘easy’ to learn some type of Belgian accent, which happens to contain certain phonemes that are also common to Parisian dialects.

It’s not that the dialect itself is easier. It’s that you had a head start.

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Dialect Myth du Jour – Dialect Coaches Speak Many Languages

Posted on April 27, 2010 | Leave a comment

MYTH: A dialect coach speaks many languages fluently.

Probably not.

It certainly isn’t a requirement for superb work.

In simplest terms, a dialect coach’s job is to ‘help one person sound like another.’ This entails being able to analyze a particular ‘sample’ of spoken language and then guide another person (most typically an actor) in hearing, duplicating, and ultimately integrating the components of that ‘sample’ seamlessly into their work. The job demands a keen understanding of how a particular set of words (the script) needs to be spoken (for authenticity and accuracy) rather than an ability to converse fluently in a foreign language.

There are of course times when a coach will need to have a firm grasp on basic elements of a particular language in order to deliver a good product, but rarely will this require fluency.

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Posted in Dialect Myths, FOR AGENTS, MANAGERS & CASTING ENTITIES, FOR THEATRE & PRODUCTION COMPANIES, Learning A Dialect

Accent Reduction

Posted on April 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

If you live in Los Angeles (or nearly any major metropolitan area) you’ve seen the handmade signs stapled to telephone poles that say ‘Lose Your Accent!’ or ‘Accent Reduction!’ followed by a phone number where you can purchase lessons.

But guess what?

There is no such thing as ‘Accent Reduction.’

Learning to speak in an accent other than the one you arrived at naturally is an acquired skill. It is something that is added to your list of abilities, not something that erases an ability you already possess.

Think of it this way—when you were a little kid, and you learned how to skip or to jump, did you give up walking? Did the skipping or jumping ‘erase’ your ability to walk? Of course not. You walked when it made sense to walk, and skipped or jumped for enjoyment or to get over an obstacle. To this day you still know how to walk, skip, and jump and you use each of them as they seem most appropriate.

Even if it were magically possible that learning a new accent could ‘erase’ the one you naturally have, as an actor why on Earth would you want to do that? It would only make you eligible for fewer roles.

For the record, the appropriate term for learning a new accent is ‘Accent Acquisition.’

That said, please forgive your agent, manager, or acting coach if they toss around the term ‘Accent Reduction.’ They’ve probably just read a whole lot of telephone poles…

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Dialect Myth du Jour- A Light Dialect Is Easier to Learn

Posted on April 20, 2010 | 1 comment

MYTH: It’s easier to learn just the ‘flavor’ or ‘hint’ of a dialect than it is to learn the ‘real’ dialect.

I hear this from inexperienced directors all the time: “I am not too worried about the dialects for this production. I’m really just looking for the actors to capture the ‘flavor’ of the dialect…So if you could give the cast one or two pointers, maybe suggest some films they could watch…that’s all we really need.”

When I hear this, as a dialect consultant my heart hurts because I know from experience that every actor involved in that production is going to be negatively affected by this director’s misconception. It’s nearly guaranteed that the acting work will suffer as the actors struggle to ‘find’ this ‘flavor’ the director has imagined and ultimately the actors (not the naïve director) will take the blame in the reviews for having ‘distracting’ or ‘poor’ dialects.

The plain truth is, a dialect is a dialect. (An accent is an accent.) It doesn’t matter how ‘heavy’ or ‘light’ you or anyone else perceive it to be. If you wish to be convincing, no matter how ‘light’ or ‘heavy’ the accent, you will still have to make conscious, consistent changes to your speech pattern, be 100% intelligible, and feel absolutely natural while doing it.

To accomplish this, the same amount of work is required no matter what.

…If someone tries to tell you otherwise, keep in mind that they’re probably not the ones whose performance will be captured forever on film…

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