Fake Accents

Transcription by Aileen Marshall: contact her at aileentranscribes@gmail.com.

Sadie:                         This episode contains a couple of swear words and Sean Connery doing an Irish accent which may be disturbing for some listeners. Discretion is advised.

This is Accentricity, a podcast where I examine the eccentricities of language and identity. I’ve made this episode to raise money for Social Bite, a charity who are currently getting food to those who are struggling financially during the Covid-19 pandemic. If you’re someone who isn’t struggling financially and you would like to you can make a donation at justgiving.com/fundraising/accentricity. And if you have already donated then thank you.

Dick van Dyke:           Alright, ladies and gents. Comical poems suitable for the occasion. Extemporised and thought up before your very eyes. Alright, here we go.

Sadie:                         I know I’ve said before on this podcast that there’s no such thing as a bad accent, that accents are not objectively good or bad but have values attached to them which stem from discrimination and prejudice against the speakers of that variety. And I do stand by that, I absolutely do, but then there’s Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

Dick van Dyke:           With Andrew. Hello Andrew.                  

Sadie:                         Now I love Dick van Dyke just as much as everyone else does but that is a bad accent.

Dick van Dyke:           Your daughters were shorter than you, but they grew.

Sadie:                         This episode is about acting and accents. Everyone can recognise a dodgy version of their own accent, but here we’ll be digging into the linguistics of what exactly it is that actors are getting wrong. We’ll be looking at some of the difficulties that actors face, the times when it goes right and the times when it goes a bit pear shaped. 

Female voice:             Oh Charlotte, my grandmothers necklace looks beautiful on you.

Male voice:                 [Indiscernible] Can I escort you to your [indiscernible]?

Female voice:             Excuse me?

Sadie:                          There’s something about hearing your own accent done wrong that sets your teeth on edge. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. I can be deeply, deeply, uncharitable when I hear an actor putting on a Scottish accent. I find myself picking out any vowel sound that doesn’t quite sound right and shouting things at the TV like “but what part of Scotland are you from? You just moved right from the Southwest to the Northeast you fool!”                                   

What I hadn’t realised is that when I’m not familiar with the accent being attempted, I’ll accept almost anything. Elisabeth Moss in Top of the Lake:

Elisabeth Moss:          I want to search the river flats first.

Sadie:                          Turns out that a lot of New Zealanders find that accent totally unacceptable, but she could have fooled me. In fact, when I was a little kid and I wasn’t familiar with many accents at all, I 100 per cent believed that Dick van Dyke was a cockney and I was actually really surprised the first time I saw him being American in Diagnosis Murder. To investigate accents from outside of Scotland, I’m going to need a bit of help. It’s time to fire up my laptop and contact some fellow podcasters from around the world.                                   

Megan Figueroa and Carrie Gillon make the Vocal Fries; a podcast where they investigate and dismantle linguistic discrimination in all its forms. Megan is from Arizona in the US and Carrie is from British Columbia in Canada, so I thought I’d ask them to tell me about some of the dodgiest fake American and Canadian accents in film and TV.

America, Megan’s home country, is really at the centre of the global film and TV industry. That maybe means that, in general, it fairs a bit better than some other places, in that actors are more likely to be American, or to be good at doing American accents, than they are to be, for example, Scottish or good at doing Scottish accents. But there are still times when it goes wrong. In particular, specific regional accents tend to be the ones that suffer.

Megan:                       I knew I wanted to talk about Daniel Craig in Knives Out.

Daniel Craig:             I’m here at the behest of a client.

Megan:                       And they make fun of him in the movie. Chris Evans character says, “What is this? Like CSI KFC?” and then I think he also is the one that calls him Foghorn Leghorn.

Daniel Craig:             You will find me a respectful, quiet, passive observer, of the truth.

Megan:                       It’s the Southern accent that doesn’t really exist anymore. So no one speaks like that anymore. People born around or before World War II might speak that way. The big thing is the non-rhoticities -- rhoticities? -- the non-rhoticity. 

Daniel Craig:             But let me assure you this, my presence will be ornamental. 

Sadie:                          Here how he says “aww-namental”, where I would say “or-namental”. That’s because I’m a rhotic speaker. My speech has “ruh” sounds after vowels and Daniel Craig’s accent in Knives Out is non-rhotic, so no “ruh” sounds after vowels. And Megan thinks that in doing a Southern American accent this is kind of a weird choice. 

Megan:                       So that’s not really a thing anymore for white Southerners. They do say their “r’s” but by all accounts, it seems like Daniel Craig was going for this Southern gentleman that kind of really doesn’t exist anymore. It doesn’t seem like it was supposed to be a very legitimate, how Southern men talk right -- white Southern men talk right now but it was very -- the Foghorn Leghorn comment was spot on, because Foghorn Leghorn is also very out there, Southern, gentleman rooster. 

Sadie:                          So in Knives Out, Daniel Craig does a particular type of Southern accent that doesn’t really exist anymore for younger speakers but within the slightly surreal almost timeless world of the film it sort of works. The internet doesn’t seem to be angry with Daniel Craig for his not quite authentic Southern accent but there’s another Southern accent from recent years that has got people a bit more riled up. 

Megan:                       I went to Twitter and asked for help. I was like “people help me out. What’s a bad accent?” and so many people were like Andrew Lincoln in Walking Dead. I was embarrassed because I watched that show through seven seasons and never noticed. It’s very subtle, I listened to it earlier, so tell me what you think. I think it’s the vowels.   

Andrew Lincoln:         I was hurt. He brought me in.  

Megan:                       I’m not familiar enough with the South but that really doesn’t sound like much or anything to me. I can’t be like that definitely sounds like this person’s from Alabama or North Carolina or whatever. It feels like nothing, with some vowels that are kind of a little bit Southern sometimes. So I think that’s the big thing, is he doesn’t sound like where he’s supposed to be pretending to be sounding like or from. And this is very upsetting to a lot of American viewers I’ve noticed. 

Andrew Lincoln:         Come back with me. Don’t wait this time. 

Megan:                       He’s doing -- saying “time” instead “tame” but in different places and it’s all willy-nilly.  

Andrew Lincoln:         Look I’m here now. A lot of people are here now because you helped me. 

Megan:                       It’s not a very hearty attempt at a Southern accent. I don’t know what it is. 

Andrew Lincoln:         Could be a shot from outside that door. 

Megan:                       So this is one of the big lessons for Hollywood about the South, is that there is so many variations and it doesn’t seem like everyone quite understands that.  

Sadie:                          Sound familiar Scottish people?  

Megan:                       So that’s why all -- I would say 95 per cent of the suggestions I got on Twitter were about the South.  

Sadie:                          The other member of The Vocal Fries, Carrie, is from Canada and Canada is another story again. It actually seems to be pretty rare to find a fake Canadian accent in film and TV. Usually the actor is either Canadian, in which case they might speak with a Canadian accent, or they’re not, in which case they don’t. When a fake Canadian accent does pop up it’s usually done for a laugh, to make fun of Canadians, like in this clip from the film Canadian Bacon.  

Male voice 1:              Just shut up. We want your prisoner. Now, where is she? 

Male voice 2:              I don’t know what you’re talking aboot, eh?

Male voice 1:              Aboot? It’s about! What we’re talking about! And enough of that “eh” business. You’re going to learn how to talk right, understand?

Male voice 3:              We’ve got ways of making you pronounce the letter o. 

Carrie:                        Right there! The two things that everybody makes fun of: aboot and eh. And it’s not a place that, well, maybe some, I don’t know -- The use of eh is complicated in Canadian English but for my Canadian English that is not a place that I could use that eh.  

Sadie:                          And then there’s the other thing that can happen, where the actor just does an American accent instead. This happens with Hugh Jackman, who’s from Australia, playing Wolverine, who’s supposed to be from Canada. 

Hugh Jackman:          We’ve got ourselves an X-men fan. Maybe a quarter of it happened and not like this. 

Carrie:                        Most people, I shouldn’t say most, a lot of people don’t realise that this character is from Canada. He’s from Alberta. It’s not really a huge part of his story, so a lot of people just watch this movie and think nothing of it because he seems American and that seems fine. 

Sadie:                          So why does it bother us so much when we hear a version of our accent that doesn’t sound quite right? 

Carrie:                        I think because it’s so tied to our identity that it’s -- I just feel like all you’re doing is mocking me and if the point of it is to mock it can be okay depending on the context. So Southpark making fun of Canadian accents I’m like “whatever, who cares? Go ahead” but if you’re trying to say something heartfelt and the accent’s off, you’re like “argh. This doesn’t feel real.” I think it also speaks to a bigger issue of representation in Hollywood: where some of us have been so underrepresented that you are getting people that are outside of my ethnic group to play someone in my ethnic group, and they’re getting it wrong, when you could have just had someone in my ethnic group play this.

Sadie:                          Lauren Gawne is a linguist at La Trobe University and co-host of the podcast Lingthusiasm, which covers all things linguistics. She’s also a bonified Australian so she’s extremely well placed to be able to dissect some of film and TV’s most prominent fake Australian accents.                                                                                    

Lauren:                       Let’s start with Bart vs. Australia, which is a 1995 episode of The Simpsons. 

Bruno Drundridge:    900 dollarydoos! Tobias! Did you accept a six-hour collect call from the States? 

Lauren:                       He says the word hour, but he says the word “aah-r”. I can’t even do that that’s very -- he uses a monophthong, he uses a single vowel, whereas in Australian English we tend to really stretch that out: you get “ow-er”.  

Bruno Drundridge:    Who do they think I am? Some stupid Aussie drongo? Bleedin’ yanks. 

Lauren:                       It is a weird fever dream of vocabulary. Where you have words like -- you get yank in there, which is an Australian slang term for American. You get drongo, also a great Aussie word. But then dollarydoos is definitely not Australian and if we do anything when it comes to slang, we like to shorten things, shorten a word wherever possible. Wherever possible, we love it. We’re all currently in “iso” here in Australia. People are complaining about the “rona”. Just anything we can do to shorten a word, we are there.  So dollarydoos -- immediately you’re just like this man is not calling from Australia.  

Bruno Drundridge:    My name is Bruno Drundridge, right. You owe me 900 dollars mate. 

Bart Simpson:             No! You owe me 900 dollars. 

Bruno Drundridge:    I -- you -- oh! You’re -- you’re just some punk kid, aren’t ya?  

Lauren:                       He’s trying so hard to make sure that he doesn’t have any “r” sounds at the end of his words but then when he says “aren’t ya” and he just can’t not put that “r” in there. He’s got it at the ends of words. He knows he has to drop it but he literally -- you can just almost feel his tongue. He’s just like, “I can’t not put the “r” in there”. That’s probably when it gets to its messiest.   

Bruno Drundridge:    I’m going to report this to me member of parliament. Hey, Gus! I got something to report to you.  

Lauren:                       This episode was the first time I became linguistically self-aware. In that, it was the first time I realised that Australians really had so much more exposure to Americans than Americans had to us because I was just like “is that the best you can do? Have you ever met an Australian?  Have you been here?” As a person watching this who was quite young, it was definitely the first time I realised that my accent was not on an equal footing with others in terms of media exposure.   

Sadie:                          So The Simpsons was never famed for its authentic representations of cultures and linguistic varieties outside of America but there have been other representations of Australian accents on TV that have been a bit off in more subtle ways too.

Lauren:                       I’m a big fan of The Good Place. I have so much love for this show. Simone appears at a time where we visit Sydney, Australia according to the script but definitely not, definitely not filmed in Australia.  

Male voice:                 Professor, I can see that you’re going through something. Exams are next week, so, can you teach us anything? 

Lauren:                       This is a show that is so thoughtful and meticulous about everything. There was actually a theory in Australia for a while that maybe the whole Sydney thing was a double bluff because all of the actors were so bad that everyone was like “this is intentional. It’s has to be intentional. We’re going to discover that it was all a dream and that they’re definitely not there or something.” That’s how bad Australians found many of the accents. Which is kind of absurd cause this is a show shot in America and there are so many Australians who go to America to act. There must have been some people who could have just stepped up and didn’t require putting on a terrible fake accent.  

Sadie:                          So in The Good Place’s “visit” to Sydney, the most prominent Australian character we meet is Simone. Outside of Australia Simone’s accent didn’t really raise too many eyebrows but inside Australia it did. Lauren talked me through some of the linguistic details of this accent that are just a little bit off. 

Lauren:                       Simone as a character was doing my head in and I actually independently just went and researched Kirby Howell-Baptiste, who’s the actress who plays Simone, because I was like, she has nailed the rhotics. She’s nailed when to use those “r’s” at the end of words and sometimes when to include them or not in other places. 

Kirby Howell-Baptiste: Hey babe. What you want to talk about? 

Lauren:                       She had that down pat but then what you notice with her vowels if you’re an Australian English speaker is that they just overshoot a bit and that means that she sounds like a New Zealander at times. 

Kirby Howell-Baptiste: I’ve been collecting data and now I’m positive something is truly forked up. 

Lauren:                       The Australian and New Zealand accents are quite similar. Sometimes their vowels will be slightly higher than Australian English. 

Male voice:                 Janet?

Kirby Howell-Baptiste: Who’s Janet? And why are you screaming her name into the sky? 

Lauren:                       So, for example, Janet. Simone slightly overshoots and you get something more like “Jenet”. Not quite, it’s not as strong as that, but you can hear how her vowels are just a little bit higher up in her mouth. That’s why I ended up researching her and it turns out Kirby Howell-Baptiste is a British English speaker and then when I found that out I was like this explains so much.  

Kirby Howell-Baptiste: Here’s what I know: Eleanor and Michael are up to something and it’s focused on us. 

Sadie:                          Okay, I have to say, I watched this season, and I didn’t necessarily know she wasn’t Australian. So while she wasn’t good enough to fool an Australian, she was good enough to fool me, just about. Like I didn’t think about it too deeply, but it didn’t make me kind of do a double take or make me go, eh?

Kirby Howell-Baptiste: My best guess - it’s some kind of experiment we’re being observed in a close environment.  

Lauren:                       I’m sure nobody in any audition at any point batted an eyelid because it is quite subtle, and it was much easier in The Simpsons clip to point to exact examples of things going very bad. Whereas with this it’s much more subtle and it shifts slightly throughout. Occasionally she’d say something and I’m like I’m just being pedantic, or I’ve just decided, I don’t know why, to just not go with this.  

Sadie:                          So to sum up: lots and lots of points to Kirby Howell-Baptiste from The Good Place for being able to pass for a real Australian to my ears but minus 50 points to The Simpsons for Bart vs. Australia. And also another minus 50 points to them for Groundskeeper Willie. And minus 8000 points for Apu.  

There is one accent that does appear to be particularly badly treated in film and TV and that’s the Irish accent. There are so many bad Irish accents in films. Why is that? I spoke to Irish podcaster Conor Reid, who makes Words to that Effect, a podcast about fiction and popular culture. 

Conor:                        Nah, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s probably more convincing for an Irish person to attempt a half decent American accent than the other way round, simply because we just consume so much American media and we’re constantly listening to American people talk. I suppose, for your average American, you’ve got not that much exposure at all to real Irish accents, mixed with a long history of Irish people in America, so there’s loads of historical stories, there’s loads of Irish Americans. There’s a huge really strong connections between Ireland and America, so if you’re making films, historical stuff or contemporary stuff, it’s likely that they’re going to be more Irish accents maybe then, I don’t know maybe a New Zealand accent or something like that. So there’s maybe a long history of -- or there’s a lot of possibilities for Irish characters maybe? And then there’s very little exposure to contemporary Irish accents. 

Sadie:                          I also spoke to Stephen Lucek, a linguist who works on contemporary Irish accents and their representations in the media. I got Conor and Stephen to take me through some of the highlights or lowlights of the history of Irish accents in cinema and do you know what? Although there are lots of famously bad Irish accents by American actors, actually a lot of the worst offenders come from Ireland’s close neighbour Scotland. Here’s Sean Connery in Darby O’Gill and the Little People back in 1960. 

Sean Connery:            You know, somebody beat me over the head that night and I thought it was the little people, but when I spoke to King Brian about it, he said that you should take the consequences. 

Stephen:                      You may be shocked to hear this but there isn’t a dialect coach on this movie. It’s 1959 so this wasn’t really an industry to speak of. He would have just had to ask other Irish people on the set, of which there were many, how they would say these things, say these lines, and unfortunately it doesn’t look like he asked anyone. Sean Connery engages in the unfortunate stereotype of the stage Irish man which was popular on the stage from the late 17th century onward. The stage Irish man is a buffoon, slurs his words, is often drunk, often fighting, and we see this time and time again where Irish people are depicted in very, very negative contexts. It’s not at all unique to Irish people but it is something that we have quite a bit of back and fore.  

Sadie:                          Perhaps one of the most iconically bad fake Irish accents is Tom Cruise in Far and Away in 1992. Quite a few of the other actors in the film are probably up there too.  

Tom Cruise:               Hello Grace.

Female voice:             Hello Joseph. Will I be seeing you in church tomorrow morn?

Tom Cruise:               Sounds divine and holy Grace. We can share a pew, me and you.

Female voice:             Too-da-loo. 

Stephen:                      I’m not convinced that Tom Cruise has ever met an Irish person, certainly not before filming this movie.

Conor:                        Americans I think hear Irish accents as a lot more sing songy than they maybe are in reality so the “high the voice goes up and down and then the ha-de-da”. It’s kind of -- it’s sort of heard that way, so most Americans who try to do an Irish accent make it a lot more sort of -- the intonation goes up and down much, much more than maybe it does in reality. So that kind of makes is sound very odd. 

Sadie:                          A few years later we have cancelled man Kevin Spacey playing real life Irish crime boss Martin Cahill, who was in real life from Dublin. 

Male voice 1:              Round one up ahead now Peter.

Male voice 2:              Supposed to be the highest village in Ireland.

Male voice 1:              Wouldn’t mind living round here, I can tell ya. 

Male voice 2:              A lovely quiet spot. 

Conor:                        So I don’t know what he’s trying to do. There are points he sounds like he’s kind of maybe from Belfast. There are bits where he’s kind of got something from Dublin going on and then mostly it’s that kind of generic way that Americans think Irish people sound. Like that we --Ireland: that kind of Irish accent. Which is sort of stems from the early Darby O’Gill and the Little People days of “aw this is an Irish accent” and then that kind of gets toned down. I don’t know, I think it’s -- I guess, and again I’m not an actor, I appreciate these things are very difficult, but it’s more the sort of random variations. It’s not like he’s doing one accent badly. He’s kind of doing lots of accents so he’s just -- he kind of just wonders between the west of Ireland, the east of Ireland, the north of Ireland and America in like every couple of words or something like that.  

Sadie:                          Aidan Gillen gets a special mention too for the rogue appearance of his own Irish accent in Game of Thrones.  Aidan Gillen is Irish but most of the time in this role he does the slightly strange southern English accent. When that accent wobbles, we see some presumably unintentional glimpses of his Irish accent around the edges.  

Aidan Gillen:              Always keep your foes confused. If they don’t know who you are or what you want, they can’t know what you plan to do next.  

Conor:                        Maybe he’s just gone “right, I’m not going to try and do an accent, a country specific accent. I’m just going to go mad and see what comes out.” 

Aidan Gillen:              Brothels make a much better investment than ships, I’ve found. Whores rarely sink. 

Conor:                        There’s definitely not an excuse that it’s a fantasy show. It doesn’t matter that they’re not in -- really in Ireland or really in England or anything else because you’d pick an accent and you’re like, “right people from this place speak this, with this accent.” Even if you’ve got the wrong one that’s one thing but if you keep changing in mid-sentence -- this is just really distracting. So I don’t know how distracting that is for an American viewer, probably not much, but it’s really strange for, I think for either a British or Irish viewer, just seems weird. A weird accent can be as disconcerting as him wearing Nike runners in the middle of the set or something. Even if it’s only a glimpse it’s like “ahh no, you’ve kind of broken the world. It seems weird.”  

Sadie:                          And, honestly, we’ve hardly scratched the surface. We haven’t even covered Northern Irish accents yet, which possibly get the worst treatment of all.  

Alister:                        Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away. 

Tommy Lee Jones:      I’ve come here to create a new country for you called Chaos and a new government called Anarchy.  

Alister:                        He played a Northern Irish character who, I think was a terrorist, I think I’ve got it right. 

Sadie:                          Alister McCartey is an accent coach who teaches actors how to do Northern Irish accents. I asked him what it is exactly that tends to catch people out.  

Alister:                        So long “a’s” becoming short “a’s”. Rather than saying “faaather” “father”. Rather than saying “caaalm” “calm”. An English person would say “cahhr” that drives you to the shops, whereas a Northern Irish would say “carrr”. A really strong “r” at the end. They of course miss the two diphthongs, like the cow and the train. They’re the “ow” and the “a” diphthong. They’re the most difficult.  

Sadie:                          I’ve spoken before on the podcast about how linguistically speaking there’s no reason for any accent to be harder to understand than any other. You might well struggle to understand a particular accent but that’s likely just because you’re not that familiar with it. It’s nothing to do with the accent itself. Well, equally, there’s no reason why one accent would be more difficult to copy than another and yet….

So you do sometimes hear people talk about actors doing Irish and Scottish accents. So this is something that I feel we might both be familiar with --

Alister:                        -- Very much so.

Sadie:                          -- Irish and Scottish accents are notoriously done badly, and maybe particularly Northern Irish accents, right?  

Alister:                        Yes. 

Sadie:                          Why would it be the case -- so do you think that some accents pose more of a challenge to actors than others? And why do you think that might be? 

Alister:                        Yes, is the short answer. A few reasons: number one is the number of people who natively speak that language. So you’re less subjected to a Northern Irish cause there’s only 1.8-1.9 million of us and within Northern Ireland, as with in Scotland, which is about 6 million -- is it about 6? -- there are huge variations. I think that’s the first reason, that there’s not -- there’s not as many people who speak it, so you’re not as likely to hear it or to come into contact with it, so it’s less familiar. And then the second one is in terms of people who would guide you into speaking it -- accent coaches, speech therapists -- again coming from a smaller population there are less of them.

If somebody wants to do a generic North American accent, hey, you’ve got 300 and something million Americans. I know there’s variations there, but the generic American accent is a much bigger audience, a much bigger pool to try and satisfy. Whereas my wee country, 1.9 million. 

Sadie:                          Nicola Redman is also a voice and accent coach who teaches a whole range of accents. She also happens to be from Northern Ireland.  

Nicola:                        So the first thing I tend to do with people to get an idea for who they are is have a bit of an old chat, obviously, and then I get them to, if they’re comfortable, do whatever version of the accent they have on a little diagnostic passage like Arthur the Rat or Comma gets a Cure -- one of those that has all the sounds in it.  

Sadie:                          Diagnostic passages are basically wee stories which are designed so that they contain as many different sounds and sound combinations as possible. For actors learning an accent, they basically place you in every linguistic situation that you could possibly find yourself in while doing that accent.  

Nicola:                        So I’ll get them to do that and sometimes I’ll do a little bit of call and response if they’re uncomfortable, but most people are coming going “I sort of have a version of American, but I just don’t know what it is and sometimes it goes a bit south or sometimes I end up in New York” and already you can start to get a feel for why that might happen because of our features. So if it’s New York then it’s probably something to do with rhoticity. Same with the South. Sometimes with the South it’s about the treatment of the vowels or the pacing or something. So I get them to do their version of it and I’ll make a few notes and I’ll just start tweaking from there. That’s if they have a version. If they don’t, then I tend to start with aural posture, so the shape through which the sound is going to travel. Thinking about whether that accent has a loose jaw, a responsive jaw, a tight jaw, a high soft pallet, low soft pallet, high tongue, low tongue, responsive tongue tip, is it wide in the lips, is there pouting, is there rounding, and exploring the physicality of the sound because one of the things that actors find, and a lot of people find with accents is, “oh I can do it for a few lines and then I end up drifting in to Welsh or something.” So for me it’s about giving them those physical anchors, in terms of, the actual physical changes, can really help them find consistency.  

Sadie:                          I think about language a lot but sometimes I find myself forgetting that speech is always a physical thing that happens in the body. Not just sign languages and not just in terms of body language or gesture but also in terms of how we produce sounds with our mouths and lungs and tongues and larynx’s. Actors and accent coaches never forget this. 

Nicola:                        If you think about my accent, when you’re watching me doing my accent, what you can see is probably quite similar to yours. Our settings are quite similar like wide -- we get pouting but not too much rounding. So if we contrast it to something like standard English for example, all of a sudden there’s more rounding, the tongue lowers so there’s more space vertically in the mouth rather than horizontally. And already it’s very physical. You can see it from the outside let alone feel it. If you can get an actor to understand that the sound changes are happening because of x,y,z physical thing, then it can really help them hang on to it and understand it better.  

Sadie:                          I hope, dear listeners, you will be proud of me when I tell you that I’ve resisted the very strong urge to get Nic or Alister to teach me to do an accent. I figure that within the confines of an episode we wouldn’t be able to do justice to a process that usually takes months and even with their help, I know that my attempts would probably have been a lot worse than any of the clips you heard in the first part of the episode.

Speaking to them about how they teach accents is totally fascinating for me as a linguist, but I also wanted to hear from an actor about the process of learning an accent.

This is Roanna Davidson: 

Roanna:                      In drama school I did a play and the -- it was a -- we all had to do Whitby accents. My Northern accent was really, really bad and our director said to everybody, that for the whole six weeks that we were doing this play, he wanted us all to talk in the accent all the time. All the time day and night and so we did. We just all did. Now it’s a really comfortable accent for me to just flip into and to be able to talk in and pick up and put down whenever we want to, but it means that I’ve got that scope so that you can turn off your brain. You’re not concentrating on it anymore so you can make sure that you’re doing the “acting bit”. You can make sure that you’re concentrating on that and do get the authenticity of that. Accents are always going to get a lot of flak because people have so much ownership over where they’re from and so something sounds a little bit wrong then they’re like hunting out to pick out other things that you’ve done incorrectly as well.  

Sadie:                          The first time I say Roanna acting was in the musical Glasgow Girls. If you haven’t seen Glasgow Girls, firstly, you should if you get a chance it’s amazing and secondly, it’s also probably not what you’re imagining it is. It’s the true story of a group of seven teenage girls, four of who were asylum seekers, who took on the UK immigration system and won. Campaigning to stop the UK border agency carrying out dawn raids and detaining children.  

Roanna played 15-year-old Glasgow girl Agnesa Murselaj, a Roma girl from Kosovo, who quite recently moved to Glasgow. There had already been a documentary made about their story meaning that as well as spending time with adult Agnesa, Roanna had access to loads of footage of Agnesa at 15. In theory, this meant that instead of just learning to do a generic Kosovan accent, she could actually copy Agnesa’s real life accent directly.  

Roanna:                      Got all of this source recording of her being 15 years old. She sounded a little bit Kosovan, a little bit Glaswegian, these sort of lilts, but then really MTV generation, really like everything was a question and everything was kind of going up. I made a choice with the director -- so I was saying I’ve made a study of her accent based on what I’ve learnt from my accent coaches about how to take an accent apart, but if I present this on stage I’m going to look like a terrible actress because people are going to be picking up on “where is she from? This doesn’t make any sense.” So rather in it being true to her, we made the decision to push her further into Kosovo and I chatted that through with Agnesa as well to make sure that she was okay at the time of me taking that kind of artistic liberty with her voice. I think that was the most interesting kind of case study that I’ve had for -- because it’s a real person as well as you’re trying to be true to them but then not -- then keep the audience with you and let the audience understand where you are in the world.  

Sadie:                          So, this is interesting. We all carry about an idea of what an Australian or American or Canadian or Irish or Scottish accent sounds like and we can pretty easily spot when what an actor is doing doesn’t match up with this idea. We think that what we’re asking actors to do is to produce an accent that sounds realistic and authentic but Roanna’s story about playing Agnesa, really exposes another layer to the challenge. Because what we’re really asking of actors is that they produce something that matches up with our idea of a typical accent from that time and place. Something that makes us, the audience, feel comfortable and that doesn’t get in the way of the story or invite any questions. But I guess we’re not really asking actors to produce accents that are exact copies of real accents because real accents can be sort of all over the place. 

Here’s accent coach Nicola Redman again: 

Nicola:                        My friends used to laugh at uni, when I was first at uni, because they knew me as Irish. I was in uni at Manchester and my mum’d ring and I’d be like “aye well should we just go to the pub or whatever and blah blah blah” and I’d be like “ah yeah, you alright. Yeah, yeah, we’re just off to the pub” and they’d be like “what? What just happened to your accent there? What was that?” and I was like, “aww it was my mum.” 

Sadie:                          This is what real accents do. They change from moment to moment. They mix together so that a person can sound a bit Kosovan and a bit Glaswegian and a bit American all at the same time. Even people who’ve never moved from the place where they grew up have accents full of what me might call inconsistencies if we heard them from an actor. Looking at real world speech close up shows that linguistic features appear and disappear and change constantly in the course of a normal interaction. And even though Nic really does talk very differently to her friends and to her mum, if she did this while acting the role of a person from Northern Ireland, we as the audience would probably demand an explanation.

I’ve recently been watching a Netflix show called Spotless. It’s alright, I wouldn’t massively recommend it. There’s a character in it called Nelson Clay, played by the actor Brendan Coyle, who fairly early on in the series has to explain his accent to another character. He was born in Corby, a town in England, where people tend to sound a bit Scottish because of lots of migration there in the 50s and he has an Irish dad and a Scottish mum. I looked it up and this is the real-life story of the actor’s accent. So I don’t know what went on behind the scenes but possibly this is an actor who’s decided to play a role without putting on a fake accent and they’ve had to write this into the script so that audiences will accept his real voice.  

Nicola:                        You have to conform to what people expect of that accent because I feel like sure, everybody changes around and code switches depending on what’s going on, to fit your tribe and all that kind of stuff, but if you as an actor are trying to represent and embody a sound it has to be a consistent version, so the listener feels comfortable. 

Roanna:                      We start to associate it with things that we know and draw it back to ourselves and you don’t want to confuse an audience, it’s not what you’re there to do at all. You want people to stay with you the entire time so if something is really triggering and is pulling you away from the story all the time, and it might be somebody’s dodgy accent or it -- you know we’ve all watched, I would assume that a lot of people have been to the theatre and seen something go wrong, like a bit of costume be hanging off of someone and you can’t pull your attention away from it the whole time. So if you’re constantly hearing something that just doesn’t sound right or true then it’s going to pull you away from the story. 

Nicola:                        So the good/bad line isn’t as simple for me when it comes to accents unless you’re talking about Dick van Dyke or something because that was just horrific. Mary Poppins. For me it comes down to whether whatever they’re attempting takes me out of what they’re trying to do with the character. If I’m stuck thinking about the accent and not focusing on their acting decisions or I’m not focusing on the story then, yeah, they’ve done a bad job. But I know that, for example, Elizabeth Moss got a really, really bad time from some people for her accent in Top of the Lake. Whereas because I just think as an actor she is completely flawless, it didn’t bother me at all. Didn’t take me out of the character, didn’t distract me in any way. I loved it. 

Sadie:                          On top of this, each audience member is going to come with their own set of expectations based on their own experience. Spotless also features a guy speaking English with what I thought was a really dodgy French accent, until I looked it up and the guy is French. That’s his real accent. How unfair am I?  

Nicola:                        Ultimately, everybody’s opinion on an accent is formed from various biases. It doesn’t have to be negative; it can be positive. Or it’s just experience and influence, isn’t it? And what your ear’s used to. That’s a huge weight to carry when you’re having -- asking for an opinion on somebody’s accent or you’re giving an opinion. It’s like yes, you think Liverpool sounds that way because that’s what you’ve heard a Liverpool accent sounds like. It might not actually be what this person thinks a Liverpool accent sounds like. I can’t remember where I heard this phrase: accent opinion is in the ear of the listener. There’s only so much the speaker can do and what should the speaker do? I’m always troubled with like; do I get my actor to go and find three samples and find consistencies and -- tendencies was a word that came up recently when I was doing some training. Some tendencies in the accent. Or do they pick one person who represents exactly what they want to acquire and just hone in on that? 

Sadie:                          So look, I would never slag off the way Dick van Dyke or any other actor speaks in their normal life but, yes, I’ve always felt that when someone is getting paid a lot of money to put on a Scottish accent then it’s fair game for me to be outraged when the accent sounds wrong.  

James Doohan:          Well Captain. Klingons call you a tin-plated, overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of Godhood. 

Sadie:                          Nothing will persuade me to accept James Doohan’s Scottish accent in the original Star Trek, but I do have a newfound appreciation of what a strange task actors have when they’re putting on an accent. If you’re being asked to do a Scottish accent, you’re sort of being asked to sound like a Scottish person but you’re also being asked to sound like an imaginary, archetypal Scottish person. Someone with a kind of constructed, normal accent which doesn’t really exist. You’re being asked to sound authentic but not too authentic. To be accepted by an audience member as fussy as me, you have to take real world speech and then smooth out the bumps. But then that’s fiction I suppose.

When I was a kid my mum read us Lord of the Rings as a bedtime story and I once asked her why Frodo and Sam never went to the toilet. She had to explain to me that it might be a bit boring if Tolkien told us every single thing that happened, so he had to leave bits out. When we watch a film, we want to be able to focus on the story and characters and relationships, not the mechanics of the accent. Most of us aren’t there for the linguistic features. Most of us. 

Nicola:                        Yeah, I feel like accents -- opinions on accents are always going to happen and there’ll always be somebody who’s got an opinion in the sense that they think you’ve done it wrong or it’s not the way their Aunty said it or whatever. And I just think, hang on a second, everybody has a bloody opinion on everything, did you enjoy the film? 

Sadie:                          This episode has been made during the Covid-19 pandemic and it’s been a difficult time for everyone. So I’m extra grateful to the people that took the time out to speak to me from their homes in various time zones: Carrie Gillon and Megan Figueroa of The Vocal Fries, Lauren Gawne of Lingthusiasm, Conor Reid of Words to that Effect, Stephen Lucek, Alister McCarty, Nicola Redman and Roanna Davidson.  

You can find The Vocal Fries, Lingthusiasm, and Words to that Effect on all of the podcast apps and they’re all fantastic so I definitely recommend going and having a listen. Nicola Redman also co-hosts a podcast called The Voiceover Social, which is very useful if you’re a voice actor but also really, really interesting if you’re just interested in accents. There are some links to specific episodes of all of these podcasts that I think you might enjoy in the episode description, as well as a bit more information about the guests featured in this episode.  

John, who edits Accentricity, recently released another podcast series that he’s made called Retold: A Bible Story. It’s about a bible that he found at the dump and his mission to return it to its original owner. You should definitely go listen to it if you get the chance. It’s really excellent. Find it on all of the podcasting apps or at telt.media/podcasts. And if you’re on the lookout for other new podcasts at the moment, maybe you’ve got some extra time on your hands, Accentricity has recently been added to a new app called Lyceum, which is a specially curated directory of educational podcasts. You can search by subject and there are lots of interactive features that allow you to get involved with discussions around the topics that come up. If you’re enjoying Accentricity and you want to find other podcasts about linguistics, look for the collection Words with Friends, where you’ll also find The Vocal Fries and Lingthusiasm. Again, have a look in the episode description for a link.  

Thanks to John for the editing and Seb Philp for the music. And thanks also to the newest member of the team, my little sister Martha, who is starting out as my social media and finance manager because she’s much, much better at that stuff than I am.  

Thanks to the newest Patreon subscribers: Emily Dibdin and Sinead Sheridan. And thanks to Scott Hames and Alex Kenzel for helping me out with advice during the early stages of me putting together this episode. Thanks to everyone who’s already donated to the fundraiser for Social Bite and if you haven’t yet it’s justgiving.com/fundraising/accentricity. 

If you’d like to get in touch, it’s @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook or accentricity.podcast@gmail.com.