SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Let’s say you’re an acting student with your eyes on a Broadway revival of “Oliver!” Maybe you’re a restaurant critic who needs a Southern drawl to match your updo when you eat incognito. Whatever your role-playing dreams, acquiring an accent can be a difficult, but rewarding, task [nytimes.com].

Nobody knows her way around a patois or a flat A quite like Sarah Jones. In “Sell/Buy/Date [nytimes.com],” her new solo show about the lives of sex workers, Ms. Jones transforms into several characters — from a feisty elderly Jewish woman to a seasoned black rapper — with the kind of dialectal veracity that would make any linguist swoon.
...
Let’s say you want to sound like a Trinidadian woman, as Ms. Jones does in her show. She recommends you watch YouTube clips of speakers at council meetings in Trinidad until you find the person you most want to sound like. If you can meet your subject in person, it will help make your goal much easier to reach.

“I ask them to speak something very slowly three times in a row and then I have them say it at normal speed the way they’d say it three times in a row,” she said. “I have them say it the way they’d say it in school as compared to how they’d say it to a friend.”

Ms. Jones said an important step in her development of a character is writing out how someone speaks. The written version of a word or phrase may often look nothing like its spoken companion. The word “girls,” when spoken by a native Arabic speaker, might look on the page like “gez.” Write it down to better understand how the word forms in your mouth.

“Phonetically break it down so you can let it go,” she said. “It helps to get out of your own speech patterns and how you understand words to appear and sound on a page — and in your head — so you can get into how it sounds coming out of that person’s mouth.”

Other ways to acquire accents: A) Learn from the political masters [youtube.com], or B) watch Russell Peters [wikipedia.org] sketches every day for a month.

Original Submission