Accent and identity (with Erik Singer)

if you know me and my work then you know that i talk a lot about identity and especially how your accent is a big part of your identity your accent tells the story of your life but if you do want to change your accent or improve your pronunciation how do you do it recently i had the pleasure of talking to someone with expert answers to that question eric singer a dialect coach who helps film and television actors to speak with an accent that is not their native accent and because of this he knows exactly what it takes mentally and physically to change the way you speak in this interview we talk about how to change your accent the best ways to practice but more importantly if and why you should try to speak like a native if you would like to listen to this interview as a podcast you will find a link down in the description box where you will also find a link to eric's website which has lots of amazing content about different aspects of accent and pronunciation i hope you enjoy it eric singer thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today my pleasure glad to be here for people who don't know you and your work could you just introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what you do sure uh so i'm a dialect coach um so i work with uh predominantly with actors um in film and tv uh who need to speak with an accent that is not uh their native accent or in some cases also uh working with actors to sound like they are speakers of a language that they don't speak uh and usually that i don't speak um so that's that's extra fun but uh you know is essentially uh working with the same tools and working in the same way um i will also work with uh uh non-native speaking actors uh who are working in english um to uh you know to sound uh as intelligible as possible or in some cases we really are going for trying to get close to sounding like a native speaker um and i'll do the same things uh with with actors as private clients uh and and on productions as well so that's that's basically the scope of it so i've kind of spent most of the past 10 years telling students my students who are foreign learners that they will never lose their accent which is basically your job and and i'm wondering what's your kind of gut reaction to that to my to my statement uh well first of all i wouldn't say it is basically my job um that is you know that is a uh working with non-native speakers to sound more like native speakers is is a thing that comes up and it's part of it but i mean i i would say more often i'm working with native speakers of english to sound like native speakers of a different variety of english uh or as i said working on a different language um but it is part of it for sure um you know i think that's probably a good message um and i'm sure that it's that it's underlain by you know an even more important one which is um you know maybe that shouldn't be the goal um which is that uh in fact uh you know effortless intelligibility obviously is something you want in a second language um but that the it's it is on the one hand such a feat it is achievable i i do think so you know i wouldn't agree with the underlying message in terms of sort of actual like is it absolutely impossible for anyone who doesn't speak a language natively who's you know who's acquiring a second language over the age of you know 12 or 13 or something to ever sound like a native speaker i do actually think that in some cases uh it is possible but it is a feat it's really a feat and it takes a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of motivation um and i think you know it's absolutely right uh both given the amount you know that it requires and and what a feat it is to question it but also um just to question it on a more basic level of well you know why why why should that be the goal why should we really want that um i do understand that a lot of native speakers desire that i a lot of them come to me as private clients um you know and i will work to support them while being you know sort of uh as as honest and straight and realistic about uh about the difficulty of the task um but also you know introducing sort of questions like this about well you know should that necessarily be the best goal you know your if we just stick with you know first language english speakers for a moment accent is incredibly incredibly complex and fascinating but is also incredibly uh tied to the essence of of who we are who we identify ourselves as being um you know it's it's kind of a record of group identity and belonging um you know this is what sociolinguistics is is is all about and you know we're learning more all the time um and human beings are complex right we're not just sort of one thing we belong to multiple different groups in intersecting ways and we shift our accents um just as we shift other things about our ourselves and our presentation depending on who we're with and what context we're in um but it is our accent is tied to all of those things and is an you know an essential reflection of all of those things i i sometimes just shortcut it by saying accent is identity which i think is not far from the truth so it does get more complex when you're talking about a second language because you don't have in the new language you don't have all those countervailing aspects of identity going back and forth determining your pronunciation um and i think that has two you know i think there's two two big sort of implications there um you know the first of them is that um there is identity uh you know tied up in your native language in the sound system of your native language um and that to be an effective communicator um you know does require a uh a potent and vivid self um and a potent and vivid self presentation and i think for most um you know adult speakers in a second language their first language origin is a huge part of what can can become can be can become that effective presentation um you know i think it's not hard for probably anybody to think of um you know a a second language speaker uh in english or in you know whatever language you're most familiar with who is in fact incredibly effective an incredibly effective communicator and presenter whether it was you know um the the russian uh history professor you had in college you know or uh or a boss or a colleague or something like that or a friend who's um you know who is able to be a vivid storyteller and communicator and version of themselves in a second language with an identifiable uh you know sound system coming from their native language um but the other implication that i think it has is also you know if you are going to strive towards getting closer to a native speaker like sound which one um because it's so again determined by all these things about identity uh and as i know you know and as i'm sure a lot of your listeners know um you know there's there's standard language ideology and they're you know there are versions of of each you know the pronunciation of each language that are more or less standard and kind of you know encoded in textbooks and held up as somehow neutral or right or correct and these are basically arbitrarily determined and and in fact largely fictional as well um so you know so it does then produce sort of that that problem so which version exactly for a native speaker it's determined by all of these you know countervailing complex identity aspects and if you don't have context for any of that as a non-native speaker constructing that constructing that accent is an interesting challenge i think i would say that um a majority of learners just have it in their mind without question that their goal is to sound like a native speaker and i mean you know what what do you think would be a more realistic and perhaps more um helpful objective for somebody who is who who wants you know an intelligible i think that's it i mean i i think i think the number one goal is intelligibility i think i think that's the you know to sum it up in a word i think that's the concept i think that's the most appropriate target um for a speaker of a second language to to achieve and it i think it kind of sounds to a lot of language learners like a low bar um like well of course i want to be intelligible that's just basic right um but it's not um it's you know even for uh for native speakers i mean you know before i was doing primarily uh production uh dialect coaching i was i was teaching in uh you know in actor training programs for a number of years so so you know actors native speaking actors undergo you know two or three years of speech training uh so that they're working on the skills of being able to do accents yes but but being able to be effortlessly intelligible across different contexts with you know difficult texts and things like that um so you know there's some real skill there involved even if it's your native language um i think it starts getting very interesting when we look at okay well what is that what are the determiners of intelligibility um and we can talk we can go into that a little bit if you want i think um but you know that would be the number one goal and then you know effective dynamic communication um and i think those are very closely related i think one is just maybe sort of you know widening out the scope a little bit um and you know and then we're getting into things like the the sort of you know effective use of of prosidy of intonation um in a particular variety things like that um you know they are to some extent um stops along the way towards you know spy-like sounding like a native speaker um you know so if i i often find practically speaking and working with uh individual people whether it's actors or civilians civilians we call them talking about spies i'm very confused um that uh you know even when that's the goal and it really is the goal for a lot of people even after i have you know these conversations with them um uh that you know we're still working along it's it's we're still working along the same road we're still basically working on the same things you know in terms of what i feed back to them it might be a little bit different you know because if somebody is making very effective contrasts between two or three different roughly similar vowel sounds but none of them sound exactly like a native speaker version well you know if if our goal is intelligibility and dynamic effective communication great that's fine we're happy um if the person really is like no i want to get as close as i can to a native speaker like sound then we'll talk in some more detail about okay great you're making these contrasts between these three vowel sounds absolutely beautifully totally effective but let's look at adjustments that we can make if you actually want to try to get closer to that native speaker like sound so there are places where they diverge but like for the most part um we're you know we're working along the same road yeah um it's interesting that you brought up the analogy of of kind of a spy right this idea of well the idea of a spy is hiding their true identity and i wonder if you think that for example a non-native speaker trying to take on let's say a new york accent or a or a london accent if that's actually in a way a form of deception oh wow that's a really fraud question um you know let's let's think about it you know i mean i guess are actors lying or actors telling the truth um you know what what i think we find uh compelling in a great performance by an actor is its truthfulness it's truthfulness under imaginary circumstances um so you know keeping in mind that my particular perspective here i'm coming from working with actors and we're telling stories we're telling stories that are made up but that you know have to have the feel of truth for them to be engaging and interesting to an audience and we all know this we all respond to this right positively when it works and negatively when it doesn't um so i i don't think those of us who you know do what i do are are you know terribly comfortable thinking of it as deception um but you're not talking about actors you're talking about you know okay somebody who's you know who's a a first language spanish speaker um passing as a native i don't know i think it's individual honestly i think it's individual it does though go to you know there's there is an act of imagination involved in uh fully taking on another sound system um you know there's an acting task it's incredibly technical speech is physically right because every speech action is is a is the result of a physical election the sound is just a byproduct of the thing that's happening physically it is the most complex thing that we do physically it's immensely complex so it's hugely technical and you know all of my training and experience and everything i sort of bring to bear um and you know ideally we have i talk a lot about how uh how difficult this process is even again if we're just talking about within english native speaker of english learning another accent in english it takes time a time that we don't always have in production uh time that we you know that i'm constantly sort of saying please understand this we need more producers you know catch up to what audiences expect here give us proper prep time which is six to 12 weeks before we start shooting you know um because it is so complex but ultimately when it comes down to it to fully integrate it and put it all back together is an act of the imagination as well spite of all the technical stuff that we adjust and work on try to get right you can't fully do it unless you can imagine yourself as somebody who speaks that way and so i think for that very difficult feat um of a non-native speaker sounding like a native speaker passing right being able to fool people um it it does require um a kind of construction of an alternate self i don't think that always has to mean uh the erasure or the abandonment of your prior self or your true self it's just another one you know um so i think that's that's a little bit of a different frame now i do you know some of the people that i that i know that have run across in my life who have accomplished this very difficult feat surprisingly often they are people who have done something kind of drastic identity wise and it's not something i would ever recommend to anybody but i can't help but observe that in fact you know i know uh people who you know moved from germany to the uk in their early 20s not really speaking any english and five years later they sound completely like a native nobody can tell the difference but they never go home uh kind of don't really have ties with friends and family at home want to be and think of themselves as being english or the similar thing you know with with american or australian so that's a very drastic thing to do and you know people will will do those kinds of things in their lives for you know whatever sets of personal reasons it's not something i would ever ever ever recommend anybody pursue and i don't think that's everybody as i said you know i think there is a a less uh less radical less drastic uh version but it does involve being able to imagine yourself fully imagine yourself as being at least in part at least in a mode of you with a side of you um that native speaker so again it's you know it does come down to an aspect of identity yeah i mean it's it's a really interesting perspective and and i've seen you in in other interviews you know saying that taking on an accent is is an act of the imagination and to be honest when i heard i was like well sure but as you said as you said yourself you know no it's actually physical right the sound is a result of some physical placement of the anatomy but then you're right because it's not that's not enough is it it's like assuming all of the other stuff the culture and the then just it's more right it's deeper it's about creating a new person yeah i sometimes talk about accent integration um so you know we can get all the tech this is one of the reasons why it takes time right because we can get all the technical things right it still takes time and practice and that flipping of the switch that extra little active imagination or whatever it is for it to be sort of integrated into an actor so that they can act truthfully right behave truthfully through that in that mode in that way are you worried at all about the the kind of the the movement you know the the 2020 movement where um this is in your work with actors you know that actors shouldn't um kind of try to portray identities that are not their own you know that that we should have actors who you know southern actors should be the only ones doing southern accents and you know british actors should be the only ones doing british accents let me separate that out into two because i i think that um that's not an argument that i necessarily have heard a lot or take seriously if it's if it's like you can only be what you are i think what we've seen more of this year is a is a growing recognition that there are um backgrounds that actors who are not from or do not share that background should not be playing have no business playing um you know it's funny it because as actors of course and i trained as an actor and worked as an actor for many years before i was a coach um so i'm an actor i'm a performer as well i come from that side of things most of us do most dialect coaches and you know as actors we want to be able to do anything right that's that's that's the ambition right um it's it's often what draws people into it kind of the you know the the the burgeoning endless possibilities of being able to be anything um and it's really fun um you know when you and i did i've uh narrated probably about 50 or 60 audiobooks um you know and doing audiobooks is really fun because you get to play all the characters you know um done a couple of one and two man shows in my time as an actor where you're playing multiple characters and switching back and forth so much fun super fun um and by the way audiobooks is a place where uh this will it's it's an interesting it's a tiny little segment of what actors do right although audiobooks in general is is a big industry but um that's a place where we're going to continue to encounter that issue and have to find ways of dealing with it all the time because you have individual actors who are narrating books that have a bunch of characters including bipod characters and you know carry if it's a white actor and there are you know black characters or latino characters or things like that um but by and large as an industry um you know so that's an individual actor's perspective maybe but you know uh we live in a society as it were um you know and we have been recognizing increasingly as an industry and as a society uh the history of racist incredibly hurtful white appropriation of the voices of people that white people have historically oppressed and held down um and you know and incredible violence and that is all part of that and that you just can't separate those things out um you know that it's it's just um there's there's just you know no way in a lot of contexts um for you know a white actor uh to sort of go there and do that and be cast that way without causing hurt and causing harm so i think you know things like hank azaria stepping away from voicing up who um or um kristen bell and i think jenny slate um both stepped away from voicing biracial characters and animated series that they had voiced um you know all people saying look we really have no business doing this that's all to the good um the other so this is why i wanted to separate it out though um because that doesn't i don't think it then follows that only brits can play british roles and only actors genuinely from the south can place i mean that's ridiculous it's also never going to happen because you know as an industry we want you know we audiences want to see um you know actors who who they like and respect and love and can open a movie doing this interesting acting challenge and producers are gonna cast them and that's just you know that's the way it's gonna work so um but i also think there's no there's there's no reason whatsoever um you know uh to to avoid um most of these things you know most most circumstances in which an actor might be taking on uh an accent or speaking a language that's not their own but of course i think you know being uh approaching all you know everything with sensitivity um and thinking about individual circumstances and the audiences you know everything we do is worldwide now everything that you know that we commit to film is gonna be seen by if you're playing a turkish character it's gonna be seen in turkey you know so it it really is this is another thing i beat the drum about as loudly as i can whenever i have the opportunity but getting the accents right is a matter of respect uh so i think there's there's overlap there as well um but that said uh uh you know yeah i think i think there are limits to um things we need to take absolutely off the table and i think those things are pretty clear and and for pretty good reasons i i spoke to uh david peterson a few weeks ago who is a conlanger who creates um you know artificial languages for famous that's exciting i'll have to check that out and we were talking about well the first question i asked him is why do you have a job why don't people just speak gibberish you know they can just make up stuff and he said well actually in the past they used to right they used to just they used to just invent gibberish and um and he said you know audiences these days they're smart and they expect authenticity and they know when something is fake but um like i'm wondering if let's say an accent is from like a tiny town in in ireland um maybe the only people in the whole world who know that that accent is wrong are people from that tiny town in ireland so like why does it matter like why is it important to be authentic uh it's a great question um you know i think several things first of all i think that just out of respect for those people in that town they they deserve that respect and deserve to be authentically represented just as much as anybody else anywhere else um i also think that the cases are few where it's really going to be a tiny minority of people who will know um i think if you're doing irish accents um you know most of ireland is going to have a sense um you know of of how accurate or not accurate those are um so now we're talking about an entire nation not a tiny town i think you know you could probably work really hard to come up with an example where really just about nobody would know um but for the most part i think that's pretty unusual um but also you know just the the i like your framing and i'm gonna go back to it because essentially the same answer that david peterson gave you audiences are smart um you know we may not always know you know in every particular if an accent is you know is often us in a sound here there or something like that we know if it doesn't feel right we know if it's janky and doesn't fit together we know um you know you could in the same way as you know there are very few people who are expert costume designers or fashion designers or clothing designers an enormous amount of money and time and and research um and expertise is put into getting the costumes right for a production um you know this getting the stitching to go to historical production getting the stitching to go exactly the same way and how you know these incredibly teeny teeny tiny little details and you know the average audience member is not pausing the frame and zooming in and examining the stitching on the costume but they can tell nonetheless it's it's it's that like it's that attention to detail and that's sort of loving care and attention to the detail and the complexity and getting it right that all builds together into the creation of a like a richly textured fabric of a whole which is what makes stories really come to life and really compelling what builds the whole world together and accents are a huge huge huge part of that i think and so when time and care and attention has gone into getting the details right and then making it fit seamlessly within the fabric of the whole so that it's all working together and all part of building the world we can tell um you know in in a second we're really good at that you know as small group primates um you know having evolved on the savannah and kind of being really good at recognizing um you know the minute someone opens their mouth or moves in a certain way you are a member of my group you are not a member of my group um we can't always put our finger on exactly what it is that's giving us that sense but we're really good at it um and you know and so you know just in my little bailiwick in in the sounds in in accents um you know we are we've all had the experience of watching a performance uh of somebody acting in an accent that's not their own and it being like 99 it's like it's really pretty good but then there's something and you can't quite put your finger on it i have certain theories as to you know with certain actors doing certain accents kind of you know that like uh you know i think 80 of the time that it's a british actor doing an american accent it's really good it's not quite right it's one of a handful of things i was going to ask you because i don't really know a lot about your industry but i kind of got a feeling from from some of your tweets that maybe in the in the hollywood production hierarchy you know it's like costumes are really important and camera is really important and maybe accent coaching somewhere down the bottom i mean is that fair is that it's after the animal handlers who are very important but you know um but i'll give you another really telling detail um so uh a um fellow dialect coach um who also is a manager and represents dialect coaches uh now um once went uh very recently went and went through all of the budgeting software packages that are used by productions in hollywood there's you know a handful of them she went through all of them and you know they're they're the ones that help line producers put together the budget for a film so they've got a certain number of default lines for you know all the various positions and all the various sort of items that go together to make a budget in none of them is there a default line for dialect coaching it's not part of the standard budgeting um and and this is i think it's it's really it's it's telling and representative um now every production is different um you know every producer is different um and so you know you can't can't automatically make an assumption about anyone production or film but it is the case that all too often uh dialect coaching is an afterthought um it is brought on uh too late um they haven't budgeted for it um or not at all in some cases and then you know sometimes we're fixing things after the fact right sometimes the film is shot and somebody says you know what that actor's accent isn't really working and then a coach will work with the actor hopefully to you know to do some some work and some prep and then they go in and they record you know some of their lines or all of their lines sometimes um that's very expensive by the way so it doesn't make a lot of sense it makes more sense to prep back you know to to do it ahead of time um but uh i should also say that you know things are changing things are better now in terms of you know the industry taking this seriously and appreciating what an important aspect of storytelling uh dialect code accent is and therefore dialect coaching is um it's better than it's ever been we're nowhere near where we need to be um i have been fortunate on um i mean i've seen some change in in my own career that i think is partially a result of the conversation moving on and people getting a little bit better about this partially just you know my career getting a little bit more successful along the way so different opportunities opening up but i have you know sort of in the in the last few years last sort of several projects i've done i've been really lucky to have that lead time to have that six to twelve weeks before uh starting shooting to uh you know to really work with the actors um to get something right so that it's in them when we start to shoot um but yeah it's it's uh it is one of the things that i'm out there trying to you know trying to say every opportunity that i can um which is this is hugely important it's really hard stuff um it is not actors are not you know they they don't have the expertise and some are very very good at this right some accents are brilliant doing accents because they've been doing that you know playing around with it and doing it and working on it for a really long time like all their lives you know because that's what it takes to get really good at it that's not most factors um i think this is part of what feeds into it as well is that i think i think for a lot of producers they don't necessarily really understand uh you know what actors do generally because especially very high levels because they get to work with these wonderful amazing brilliant actors and it looks like magic you know the actor shows up on set and they do these extraordinary things and you're just like wow okay so actors are magic basically so you think it's just about hiring the right actor the written you know who has the right magic without really sort of appreciating everything that goes into that um so that's another you know sort of thing that hopefully we're working on demystifying a little bit um but you know but getting actors the proper support because you wouldn't ask them i've been saying this recently you wouldn't ask them to sew their own costumes you know to design or sew their own costumes so why would you ask ask them to you know design or master their own accents without any support yeah it's it's pretty incredible especially since um obviously what comes out of people's mouths is is is a massive part of the whole performance a huge part of the experience of the audience of watching something right and this is why this is the final point i'll just sort of throw in on that is that audiences are way ahead of um the industry as a whole on this you know in terms of audience expectations you look at you know the reactions now when when a movie comes out or even the trailer for a movie comes out uh and people find something wanting in the accent um you know it's it's really really really huge so they are way ahead of where the industry is in terms of recognizing the centrality and the importance of getting the accents right so i wanted to move on to ask you about some some kind of practical questions about your your day-to-day work um so like ideally for you like 12 weeks is is a good amount of time to to prepare an actor to to do a different accent is that is that right yeah that's a really nice amount of time um you know i it depends on the actor and the accent how much they're going to have to do you know uh the degree of difficulty of that task what their facility is so i often say something like six to 12 weeks um you know and there are challenges that where you know you might want to start even earlier than that um you know portraying uh a you know doing what i call idiolect work you know an idiolect is an individual person's accent um but more than accent really we're talking then about things you know like just very characteristic local quality just the sound of someone's voice as well and you know actors often have to play real people and sometimes they have to play real people who have incredibly famous voices um i think there's more than one way to do that more than one way to approach a performance like that think about it in you know in a design sense but one way uh for sure um is to try to get as close as you possibly can uh to that voice to you know to really uh reproduce it in a way that is almost uncanny so that people are like that's exactly how the person sounds i can't believe it you've brought them back to life uh again that's like that's a fun little magic turk right um and uh i think you know actors actors sometimes very deservedly get a lot of recognition or even awards for something like that hopefully because the performance is also great and the story is also great right i don't think that's the only way to go about it but certainly if you are aiming at that if that's what you're doing when you're trying to play jfk or marilyn monroe or muhammad ali or winston churchill or something like that um that's something you want to take you know longer than 12 weeks maybe it's six months maybe it's a year um but you know that is really really really complicated and difficult and subtle stuff so that takes time and i'm curious about about something that you've kind of mentioned a little bit so far which is about individual variability right because like i can't imagine for example arnold schwarzenegger doing like a birmingham accent like i just think that to me that that kind of thing moves into the realm of the impossible but i don't know how you had arnold if you're listening i mean i didn't want to pick on any individual but i'm giving an example of i i just feel like um you know some it's like you said like some people have this kind of this i don't want to call it a talent but they have this ability i mean what what what do you have any explanation for individual variability first of all uh you know arnold's first language is austrian of course is is austrian german um so you know when you are working in a second language that is a completely different order of things that is vastly vastly vastly more difficult um you know the number of non-native speakers of english uh who are going to move from you know not sounding like a native speaker to sounding like a native speaker in six to 12 weeks of prep no matter how many hours you're putting in that's a very small number of people that's always going to be a lot harder take a lot longer um so you know but just confining the the conversation to native speakers or the subjects and native speakers um the way we get good at doing accents is by doing accents um you know i used all of my linguistic and phonetic and articulatory training to sort of break stuff down and analyze it on a linguistic level um you know analyze the prosidy analyze the vowel system and the consonant system analyze uh you know things like articulatory settings or what i call oral posture um and uh you know and and then communicate that teach that to the actor in practical ways and sort of put it all back together um so there's a lot that goes into it a lot that i do and and a lot of training and and uh and understanding that i'm really glad that i have but ultimately at its root at its base this is a human capacity you know learning the sound system of a spoken variety of a language is something we all do those of us who speak at least as human beings it's part of our inheritance and our equipment um you know people talk about the sort of magical age of 12 right 12 is kind of the magical dividing line between uh both in terms of accent and in terms of language right if you move to a new place before you're 12 you're going to end up sounding like a native even if you don't speak the language my mother actually my mother is swedish she moved to england when she was 12. um and uh uh didn't speak any english um and she you know she now sounds like a native speaker of english although exactly which kind of english it's a little confusing um but she definitely sounds like a native speaker um so you know even if it's a language but certainly fixed an accent and and so therefore you're doomed right if you're older than 12 and you're learning a new language you move to a new place you're doomed you can you will never sound like a native and i think you know just to hark back to that for a moment like yes and no um but i think what often does not get accounted for in that because there is something to that sort of magic age right this individual variation of course and they're always going to be outliers of course but it comes back to identity again um because i think you know that's a really crucial age i have a 12 year old by the way i have a 12 year old and a 15 year old so i'm studying it in close hand um you know there's you you're starting to fix your identity through those years and you know if you talk to people who moved from new orleans to connecticut or vice versa you know or melbourne to london or whatever um when they're 11 you know or when they were 12 you so often what you'll hear is i very consciously adopted the new accent as quickly as i could so i wouldn't get beat up so it wouldn't get teased right um so that's very strong incentive right there um but again identity you know you're starting to form and fix your identity and so i think one of the things that gets harder it's not just sort of brain plasticity or hearing it i think those things are factors but i think we put too much of the explanation on that and not enough on well you know if you're 13 you might actually not want to make that decision about who you are you might have this kind of hybrid identity so you might switch back and forth between two varieties two accents or you might just end up with something that kind of sounds in between right because that is your you know your complex identity as it's being formed sorry i've gone far afield because the question was um you know how to account for individual variability and you know inability um it's practice and time um you know the people who are really good at doing accents really without exception do accents so you know and we're talking about regular people not actors necessarily like you know the guy who gives you your your coffee in the morning uh who does the really great london accent um and he's not from london he's american or whatever um you know the reason he's really good at doing that london accent is because he does it every morning when he hands you your coffee you know he's constantly sort of in it and playing around with it that's how we get good at it so all of my you know techniques and knowledge and and sort of ability to analyze and break it down and name it exactly what's going on here is tremendously useful um but the you know the way i got good at it first because i was good at doing accents before i understood this stuff is kind of part of what led me into it was because i was always interested in always playing around and always doing it um so i think that's the main thing that accounts for individual variability but it's also not true that somebody simply like is good at accents or isn't good at accents it's going to be different for different accents and there then too we come back to identity and imagination um i so i uh i coach uh quite a lot of black british actors in african-american accents that is a very strange thing um you know sort of coming back to what we're talking about before i you know will always you know make sure that we talk about this uh before we start you know and and you know recognize how weird it is and how wrong it is that like that that a white guy is like teaching an accent that really doesn't belong to me and that i have no business doing it's not something i will and and i i do model accents when i'm teaching you know when when i'm working with an actor we always want to work from a primary source that's you know never never never anything different than that but i'll still model an accent so that we're you know then i'm pulling them towards me and you know we're hearing those sounds um i find that quite challenging um you know i'm only ever going to do it in privately in a room or in a one-on-one session with an actor who you know says yes i understand thank you for saying that but i trust you i want to learn this from you let's move ahead um and but even then it's very challenging for me sometimes um i've done it enough now that i you know that i kind of know what i have to get over but it there's there's a resistance there and the resistance is about you know feeling for very good reasons um you know a a a permission structure a kind of like i shouldn't be doing this sort of thing and that's just i think one example of a block that somebody could have towards doing an accent um but uh but you know i think there are there are reasons why certain accents are more accessible for certain people and less accessible and things like that yeah so so maybe um part of part of taking on the identity right part of the act of imagination isn't just understanding the culture maybe um but also kind of respecting it and maybe even admiring it learning to love the all of the cultural aspects i mean you know actors are taught um that you cannot condescend to your character um and and also and this is i think a sort of a version of that a slightly more sort of simplistic version of that but that like nobody thinks they're evil you know so when you're playing the bad guy when you're playing the villain you really have to believe that what you do that there's a good reason for what you're doing that you're justified in what you're doing right um and you know if you don't um if you're condescending to a character if you're playing character as evil it ends up being very boring um for you and for the audience um you know you're reducing the complexity of a three-dimensional human being into something that's really flat and and you know and uninteresting it's just a judgment right um that's not how human beings are that's not that's not our internal experience that's not how we live and go about things even you know even the most evil among us perhaps um you know and definitely if you're condescending to a character if you're making a character you know a figure of fun uh you know a simpleton or something like that i mean there are places certainly for performances like that broadly comic performances like that they're probably still not the most interesting work they're you know a sideline and something else that's happening um but yeah you you really can't do that that is that is death to anything interesting coming out of the you know the acting performance the portrayal of a person and so i think that very much carries over to accent so yeah that's that's that's well said let's imagine that i that i came to you and i said um you know look eric i i'm i'm going to start work as an actor next week and i need a text no not next week sorry um in six months and i need a texas accent you know like a texas cowboy accent what i mean what what does a class actually look like like what's the where would we begin what's the process well so listen well which texas accent right is what we start with um so you know i mentioned before because there's not one um that you know we always always always always always are working from a native speaker of the target accent as a model uh there are there's a small little area of of exception and that's where there aren't native speakers of whatever we're doing because we're doing a made-up accent right or it's an accent in a fantasy world where you know they speak a conlang that david peterson has created or something and we're saying but how do they sound when they speak english um in that case we're making it up and i'm the model right um or you know if i if i want you know i'll have a female colleague record you know record some material or something if i want a female voice for cast members to listen to as well but by and large 99 of the time what we're doing is we're going on a search first for a native speaker model um and i i frequently tell actors that and i do this by the way with civilians um you know who really want to work towards a native speaker like sound as well because again it's it's leveraging that basic human equipment of acquiring sounds um so they're kind of three criteria um has to be an actual native speaker so as wonderful as meryl streep's polish is in sophie's choice or daniel day-lewis as belfast is in in the name of the father we don't use them as models we want to use an actual native speaker of a target accent so we're not you know because ultimately even if it's something good we'd be making like a xerox of the xerox of a xerox of a xerox and it degrades um number two is you want it to be uh somebody who roughly matches your vocal quality um so that often means matching gender um but and and that is so that we're uh so that we're not having to listen around that listen around you know a widely different vocal quality to the actor's own um so that we can focus in on the accent because we're not trying to work up an impression after all we're trying to figure out the you know the accent itself which is the speech actions of consonants and vowels and how they fit together in connected speech uh and the prosidy and the oral posture those are kind of the three components um and the third thing though is that it needs to click uh it needs to be someone who feels right and if we're talking about an actor you know finding the model for a particular character it should be the voice where the actor hears that person speak and says that's it that's my character um usually this is a conversation between the director and the actor in me and it can take some time you know i will often produce um you know a sort of speaker sheet of six to ten or twelve different speakers with you know sort of like pictures of them and descriptions and the youtube link um where you know i've selected them all as ones that will be you know that would be appropriate um and that roughly match the actor in some way but still cover some kind of variation so that there's room for the director and the actor to kind of say yes this is this is it this is the way we want to tell the story so that's before we ever start doing anything actual work is we have to figure that out because um we it's again it's it's how we learn right from a close study of a small handful of other human beings um but also because that way we are we know we're working authentically right if you know if if i have done my work and made sure that these are really authentic representations of that you know that accent that social class that background that place and time whatever um and then we're gonna make sure that we really really really get the details right right sort of get that get all of the texture right this is i sometimes get asked how do you avoid stereotype this is a great question i love to hear from actors right because it's always a concern and one of the things i always want to make really clear is that a broad accent you know what we might describe as being a very strong very obviously regional accent doesn't automatically mean it's a stereotype right a stereotype is a reduction in complexity it's drawing with too broad a brush um so one of the ways that we avoid stereotype of course is always working from a native speaker but another is working in detail with depth and complexity and texture because if you if you if you work to calibrate all of those things and figure out how they fit together and get it right it's not a stereotype you know we're working again towards three dimensionality rather than flattening something out um but we do want to that's that third criteria we do want to sort of feel that click um so then what we'll actually do in terms of how we actually work it really it can vary so widely because different actors work in different ways different people work in different ways but uh you know we will always be working some of the time uh a lot of the time on individual articulation targets like the specific vowel sounds and consonant sounds in that accent in that sound system um we'll be working some on the oral posture because it's the it's the groundwork that you know that sort of underlies what that sound system is um phoneticians call this articulatory settings i tend to call it oral posture or vocal tract posture i think it's a little more accessible but you know where uh where the jaw and the lips and the tongue and even the soft palate and the back of the mouth and the larynx itself where those things like to hang out where they return to at rest or in between you know brief little pauses in the middle of speech sometimes you can hear aspects of that in the hesitation sounds or thinking sounds that people make when they uh uh uh you know you don't know exactly uh what sound is coming next so you go to a kind of a you know a neutral place if it's french it's uh that's something different from r which is different from m you know if you're scottish it's a m i don't know it's a you know and all of those are they're they're little keys they're little sort of clues to aspects of the oral posture but the oral posture when we can put it all together and and and put it together into this felt uh groove right it's the shape and feel of the accent it's the reason why all the individual sounds are what they are so i think even for non-native speakers um working on intelligibility um you know it's worth spending some time figuring out what are what are some oral posture adjustments i might make and i think anybody honestly anybody who speaks two languages with reasonable proficiency knows that their mouth feels a little different in one than it does in the other it's like oh yeah this is how spanish feels in my mouth this is how russian feels in my mouth this is how english feels in my mouth that's that's posture that's oral posture um but we can we can go deeper we can go directly at it and we can go deeper and we can get really refined in terms of making those adjustments and then once those are integrated and owned it helps a lot of the sound start to sort of fall in place otherwise you're doing a kind of a cut and paste job you know if we just do individual sounds and layer those on top of an existing oral posture it's not going to work so i think you know sometimes again actors who are brilliant at this or people who are brilliant at doing accents often they're working on it totally unconsciously they may never even think about it but they're instinctively still making those adjustments to their posture to make you know it's because it's the logic that underlies the sound system and then the third big thing is prosidy um so you know we got to get the music right so that's that's the movement of pitch um you know those pitch contours how the voice rises and falls um but also things like rhythm and stress i've heard you again i've heard you in other interviews talking about oral posture and and and when i first heard you talking about it it reminded me of some of probably the more ridiculous well they seem ridiculous to me stories about oral posture like um because i was born in australia and people say australians um talk with their mouth yeah they talk with their mouth closed because there's so many flies in australia you don't want to let the bugs in right so you've got to you know keep it kind of kind of wide and flat like that either that or sometimes they say it's because you're squinting up at the sun right so everything kind of goes wild like that or you don't you know you don't want to let the dust in is the other one they say so it's kind of it seems incredible to me that i know that's not the reason but um oh no it's absolutely the reason i think linguistics has studied this in some depth and the conclusion has come back that is absolutely correct it is also true that the reason why uh welsh accents have a lot of melody right a lot of up and down like that is because of the rolling hills of wales that's absolutely true none of these are true they're they're just so stories um that my profession has been very very very very guilty um even some great coaches of kind of passing along and perpetuating and i you know it's understandable i think we like to tell stories like that and they're very sort of vivid and accessible and also if you think about it from an actor's point of view it can be very useful up to a point because again it kind of gets your imagination going and gets you to start to sort of move towards some kind of cultural context thing maybe like oh that's what the landscape is like in wales i can kind of imagine that and i'm finding an analog in my speech kind of thing i you know um i actually will encourage actors um to make connections uh between the features of the accent whether it's individual specific bowel and consonant pronunciations or features of prose to your features of oral posture and the character that they're finding that they're building um and and i think that in some really transcendent accent performances um everything feels like it's of a piece everything makes sense together if you think about uh something i've talked about before but heath ledger in brokeback mountain um is doing a kind of i think wyoming uh accent you know very sort of western accent but it's very particular it's very specific and he's got a really kind of twisted up tight bound up on one side oral posture the accent is great it's more than that it's very specific and textured and it feels like it has mirrors in the character's soul and where he is um and i think that so i try to walk a line between always saying look it is not true that you know new yorkers have their jaws a little bit forward maybe a little bit of jaw protrusion because they're tough or because they're defended or because they live in an urban and you know no um language changes all the time right it changes according to a certain logic that has to do with like group affinity and separation and contact and things like that but the specific changes that happen that are happening all the time are essentially arbitrary um you know so i think it's very then easy to conclude once you look at that and understand that and know that that like you just can't draw those connections you can't say these people talk this way because they are this way or there's this particular feature in in this accent or this language or these people's speech because their culture is this way um but at the same time if we can find specific imaginative connections and we're being you know smart and and and artistic about how we're making those choices um making sure that we're not condescending to the character and that we're building something that three-dimensional and textured that can be really exciting i mean that was a beautiful um speech to be honest eric um was that not your question i kind of jumped on it didn't i no it was it was amazing um i'm i'm wondering though if if there's in your experience is talking about oral posture is is there um kind of an oral posture that is that is found throughout let's say um the general american accent that that might help foreign learners to maybe find some some of those english sounds more more easily that's a great question um i'm i'm going to uh first just very briefly take issue with the term general american but isn't that actually a technical um i mean that's that's a that's a named accent right the the g yeah linguists tend not to talk about general american um it is a term that's in use um that that linguists kind of hate um [Music] for a couple of reasons i won't go on about this at too much length because there's a practical question here that i'm sure your listeners are more interested in i tend to call it so-called general american um just you know it's almost a tick of mine um i have accent materials where it's abbreviated scga which indicates that like i haven't really thought of a better term um but i want to always call it into question i want to always side-eye it it's problematic because two big reasons one um who are these general americans i don't know any general americans um it what we're talking about when we're talking about a you know a general american accent is an accent that generally sounds white it's associated with white people um it is uh specifically probably college educated so we're kind of talking upper middle class middle class you know upper upper middle upper something um and non-regionally specific right i can't tell where you're from and that's and it's that last part that people kind of say oh that's what it means but it really codes some other things as well that i think is really problematic um it's also a problem just because it isn't one thing there isn't one general american accent it really is more negatively defined it's defined by the absence of certain features so you know if you say coffee or thought uh that's new york it's not general american um you know if you say hot uh it's great lakes it's not general american if you say tom and hyde it's southern so it's not general american um you know if you say axe that's african-american usage so that's not general american um so but within that there's a huge amount of variation to take uh just one more example because this this is practically useful for for second language speakers i think um you know there's something called the cot caught merger um which is uh pronouncing the words c-o-t like a roll-away bed and c-a-u-g-h-t the past tense of catch um so i caught something is pronouncing those exactly the same right caught caught or maybe caught caught um my native accent i grew up in connecticut and then i had you know trained as an actor in england and then became a speech teacher so you know i don't know what i have exactly all that i think it's pretty close to i made some efforts and i think it's pretty close to what i grew up speaking i have two different vowel sounds there caught caught ah they're similar um but they are distinct half of north americans have a cot caught merger and half don't so your immediate problem as a non-native speaker if what you're targeting is american english rather than say british english what are you gonna do about that it's an extra phoneme it's a whole extra sound um so that is a huge difference right it's it's it's deep deep structural difference in terms of like how many sounds do you even have in your accent um so you know as a non-native speaker learning english you can't you have a choice there there's not a right or a wrong choice there's not one that's more correct and one that's less correct it's not better to have more sounds um you know it's it's historically like that's a more conservative accent the one that has the extra phoneme um but at the same time one thing that we know from the study of linguistics is that mergers really only go one way so you know 75 years from now everybody will be caught caught merged so that's the wave of the future so maybe you want to go that way um so it's really individual there's not a right or in the wrong but again that's another problem with general american because you can find a whole bunch of general american speakers people who are like yeah that's just general american um who have that cut-cut merger and a whole bunch of people who don't have that cod caught merger and that's like one of the biggest differences that you can even imagine so it's not one accent okay that was too long sorry but um the the uh i can still offer some helpful tips um they are general um because we're generalizing across you know a huge variety even if we're just talking about so-called general american still generalizing across a huge variety of speakers and accents but and it's always relative right oral posture is a relative thing it's where are you coming from and where you're going to um but coming from most other languages and certainly most european languages um most americans move their jaws more um so we can talk about jaw height um in terms of you know sort of a resting position again pay attention to those hesitation sounds or those thinking sounds um but we can also talk about how much movement there is and americans for the most part generalizing tend to move their jaws more and open their mouths more that there's kind of you know a more open position more of the time than the vast majority of spanish speakers italian speakers german scandinavians french speakers russian speakers like that's very often a direction that we're moving a very crude tip or experiment that you can try is to speak english while chewing gum or even just imagining that you're chewing gum um i will encourage clients sometimes to try it out uh too uh it also works for australia by the way um but to uh you know to make fun um of americans be a stick because you know we can play with stereotype um and certainly you know in the privacy of your own home behind closed doors like by all means because we can learn stuff from that so another exercise i'll often have non-native speakers do is do a really broad like really offensively bad broad american accent in your native language right so so play around with develop a whole character work up a whole routine of being like the worst kind of american tourists in rome asking for directions um in st petersburg asking how you can get to the you know the the the dunkin donuts or something um you know like go really far what you'll discover first of all hopefully you'll make yourself laugh and you'll have some fun and that's always good right that's really helpful for learning but you'll probably also discover that you know some stuff about the oral posture of american english of american accents um that you like didn't know you knew um and you know or that you're not really giving yourself the permission to go towards um and you can and it's fun um and one of the things that you'll probably find is that you're moving your mouth and your jaw around a lot um so you know leaning in that direction um you know another thing that i'll say is that uh general american is so much about this very weird r sound that we have um it's a super weird complex articulation it barely exists in any other language um it is it is sometimes historically described in phonetics literature as being a retroflex r which is an r sound where your tongue tip is curling back it is not that there are some local regional american accents and you know maybe places like oklahoma where people are doing something like that but for the most part that is not the way americans make their r sounds um it's sometimes called a molar r or a bunched r um you can find mris of it uh on you know on the web which is a great thing to do um but we're you know we're bringing the sides of our tongue up bring the whole tongue back a little bit usually sometimes a lot but you don't have to um and bringing the sides of our tongue up into contact with our molars and bicuspids uh you know the upper the upper side sometimes inside sometimes just touching the sort of the chewing surfaces of them and going [Music] that is such a common sound we have so many r's in any utterance that it's one that starts to really affect and even dominate the oral posture um so that's one that is really worth the time um getting to know finding familiarity and comfort with another uh tiny little tip i'll throw in about this is just that it's a big muscular action and it is quite awkward um it's so if it feels awkward it's because it's new and unfamiliar but even when you've mastered it and it's become very familiar it will still be a little bit awkward it's a little awkward for us it's a weird thing to do with your tongue um so like don't be afraid of that you can even lean into that i'll sometimes use a you know kind of a metaphor just going back and forth between sort of rp and some kind of general american um being the difference between fighting with a small sword you know that just has a point the kind of you know like a foil that you do with fencing and fighting with a big two-handed broadsword um you know so there's something that's a little bit slower a little bit more ponderous about the movements of maybe the tongue especially um when you're talking about american english that you know flowing through all of those and even slowing down and exaggerating it a little bit there's something there there's something there that is real and that i think you can usefully kind of lean into the feel of as you practice yeah that's really interesting actually because you know whenever i'm doing my um american tourists looking for a dunkin donuts accent you know it's always about the ours well you know but i know that when i do it i'm i'm i'm overplaying the vr like i know that that my r i i think it's not only too strong but i'm doing it too much and sometimes what that is is and and you know you actually like australians are even though you're you're non-rhodic um the r that you use before vowel sounds is is usually pretty similar actually so you probably are doing work you don't have to do um but but very often for people if if they're feeling like they're doing too much or it's too strong or it's over exaggerated it is because they're going for that sort of retroflex thing which in and of itself has a similar sound but it's hugely different muscularly so it affects everything around it so going into or out of the sound it's very very different if you're using a curled back retroflex r as opposed to this back and sides of tongue bunched up towards the upper teeth are hugely different obviously when you're working with the with a client and they're producing sound what's what's the best way for them to get feedback is it is it is it let's say you're not around is it like recording themselves and listening to it i mean what what are some techniques that people can use to practice on their own a variety of strategies um i mean you know ultimately whatever works and i think one thing that we know generally about what works with the acquisition of any new skill set is to do a bunch of things um we know this from language learning too right i mean really successful language learners are usually usually using multiple strategies they're um they're doing immersion and listening they're doing mirroring and shadowing they're studying some grammar they're doing some reading they're having some conversation they're studying vocabulary and making flash cards they're not doing any one thing it's a multiplicity of connections because that you know it works on a neurological level right that we're forging more neuronal connections when we're using a variety of strategies um i think you know weight training or any kind of sort of physical training is another good example because uh you know people will doing one kind of strength training one set of exercises for a long period of time people get much much stronger very fast when they first start and then they plateau and what you have to do is you have to completely change everything up and introduce some kind of element of confusion so your muscles go oh oh okay now we have to adapt again right um i do think that uh recording yourself and listening back is a useful tool um as long as it's not the only thing you're doing um as long as it's something you should probably keep it to you know like uh you know it's something you do 20 to 30 percent of the time um reading out loud is phenomenal and fantastic you should do that a lot and only some of the time you should record yourself reading out that um something i think can be very very useful when you're you know working on your own uh being your own coach is um if there's a particular sound you're working on uh pick up a text you haven't read before and go through and actually mark all the places where that sound is you know one of the things that's difficult about english of course is its vowel system is immensely complex there are uh there are five vowel sounds in spanish and five is the exact average number of vowel sounds for all language english has depending on the variety 22 24 it has a lot and spelling is useless it's utterly useless uh so you know we were talking about intelligibility one of the reasons why that's not uh necessarily a low bar not a simple task is because first of all you've got to throw away spelling there are no sound spelling correspondences that are reliable you have to learn the sound system via you know some sort of different method recognizing what all those sounds are and you have to keep them all distinct so they don't have to sound like native speaker versions any of them but you do have to have a different e and if so that the words green and green and sheep and ship and other various dangerous pairs that most people are aware of sound consistently different um that goat and thought oh and awe and ah all sound consistently different from each other uh strut the uh sound in words like under and love and mother is notoriously tricky um because the way that most varieties of english where we have that vowel is in a very indistinct place that most languages don't have a vowel sound in but it's close to a lot of others so it's very hard to hear accurately and very easy to just substitute one from your native language um so you know whatever you're working on uh go through a text uh find all the places where that sound is um just that exercise sometimes is difficult if it's like identifying a vowel sound with all the different spellings so you're getting you know by doing that a lot you're getting used to looking for them and sensitizing yourself attuning yourself to you know the words that have that vowel sound um and then read it aloud you know and if you're recording yourself one of the good things about recording yourself i think is that you are especially for actors you're outsourcing the listening to a separate part of yourself a later part of yourself in time so you can be inside the experience of it when you're doing it which is where we want to be um and you're not always listening to yourself um and then you can listen back and you can reliably catch you know with a different ear putting on a different hat you know oh i got that one oh i missed that one you know you may notice places where you you didn't you know didn't circle or highlight the appropriate sound in the text and you'll learn by doing that as well honestly i never considered that reading out loud would be a a great activity for oh my god oh it's it's yeah i mean i don't know how you would i don't know how you would you you would really make progress uh you know in any apprentice pronunciation target without doing a hefty amount of that obviously talking is great but the thing is it's you know it's it's it's much harder um to focus on specific pronunciation tasks uh you know or working on those those particular speech skills when you were also engaged in a conversation with a human being because you're paying attention to them and you're also paying attention to forming the thoughts that you're having and communicating and you should be um so you know i often talk about there's kind of like there's three stages of mastery of an accent one is where you can do it perfectly on you know a memorized text that you've worked a lot on you know everything about it and exactly where everything needs to be that's actually unfortunately that's mostly what we're doing right that's the easiest that's the first stage of mastery the second stage is when you can do the exact same thing do it perfectly with a text you've never read before and never worked on before that's still easier than the most difficult stage of mastery um which coming back to the advice that you generally give language learners you know to give some support to to why that is i think a wise thing to you know to place to start from because it's really freaking hard to do it when you're talking when you're just talking you're thinking of what you're going to say you're paying attention to the other person as well um you know that's that's true and full mastery of an accent or even other languages when you can do it perfectly in that circumstance as well but that is the hardest thing yeah i mean it makes sense to me it makes perfect sense uh especially for second language learners who are obviously are also trying to think of the grammar or the vocabulary you know it's a memory so many more tasks yeah that's why it's it's so difficult just one final question because um unfortunately uh in in you know in the world that i work in um there are lots of people who've grown up with the idea that um that they can't communicate effectively if they have a non-native accent and they want to get rid of their accent what would you say to to those people who who you know feel bad about their accents and they and they and they wanna they wanna get rid of them yeah um that breaks my heart um you know uh again i think there is a there is a slight difference um in this issue when we're talking about native speakers and non-native speakers um you know it is purely and unambiguously true uh that there is absolutely nothing linguistically speaking that makes one native speaker variety better than more sophisticated than more right or true or correct more neutral more representative of a language than any other native speaker variety this is this is um you know again we should all be shouting it from the rooftops i look forward to a day when everybody has some basic linguistic education in secondary school maybe starting primary school um you know appreciating other other native speaker varieties um so that we can just do away with that entirely maybe one day we'll get there um you posed the question really well which is you know what what would i say to someone and i i had to say i haven't actually run across this recently i haven't had someone come to me in at least a good few years and say i am so insecure about my native accent or the way people see me at work or something that i want to fundamentally change it um but i have had in the past and you know and what i do is i have this conversation with them um ultimately it's an individual choice um people do it without seeking out accent reduction or which is another terrible term but it's it's what it's often known as um or without seeking out the help of a coach people do um they you know because the the real world that we live in uh we do have linguistic discrimination um and individual human beings have reasons for um you know wanting to advance or be taken seriously or whatever um in certain real world situations in the real world that we live in and um you know and i'm i'm here to help empower individual people right as a dialect coach with actors i'm in support of actors telling the story that they and the director want to tell um if i'm working with an individual person it's because they you know they have a need and i want to help them um i do think that code switching again if we're talking about native speakers is a um perhaps more sane and less self-violent way of going about encountering these kinds of realities so developing a way of speaking that works for what your purposes are that is a mode that you have a register that you have rather than completely fundamentally replacing um something about who you are and you know and where you came from um but you know but but starting above all with just you know saying this is wrong this shouldn't be this isn't the way it should work non-native speakers it's different because you know all non-native speakers almost all non-native speakers most non-native speakers want to sound like a native or as close as possible to you know have as good pronunciation as possible and again accent discrimination linguistic discrimination is a real world thing a lot of people encounter so again it starts with having this kind of conversation i think the paths and the solutions ultimately are individual ones they're up to an individual um you know what i try to do is give somebody as much you know context and linguistic information as i can and then we you know we sort of we go from there you know in practice again when working with non-native speakers civilians who just want to move towards sounding like a native speaker most of the work is the same you know whatever our goal is because it is such a long road most of what we're going to do in actual practice is going to be the same and someone is only going to get to that you know spy-like level um after sort of years of hard work put in if they really have this internal desire to sort of get there um so it's you know it's definitely an important thing to to talk about and then to think through and to give as much context as possible um but uh you know we're we're generally with non-native speakers we're working on a similar set of things regardless yeah um well we'll uh like you i look forward to the day when we can just accept um well i look forward to the day when um you know accent prejudice linguistic discrimination is as frowned upon as all other types of discrimination right yeah it's the last it's often said that it's the last socially acceptable form of discrimination i think there's some truth in that i agree um well mr eric singer thank you very much for your time [Music] you

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 23,340

Keywords: canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english, learning english, learn english, english teacher, english grammar, grammar, linguistics, erik singer, accent expert erik singer, dialect coach erik singer

Id: BCJQmddYK2o

Length: 82min 22sec (4942 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021