7 Steps to a Perfect Accent

Introduction

Are you narrating a fantasy epic with characters from every corner of the map, or has a casting director just asked, "Can you do that in a Belfast accent?"... has panic set in!? Accents are one of the most useful tools a voice actor can have. You don't need a 'good ear' you were born with. You need a method.

This is the lesson I teach my private students, and you get it for free! Yay! Seven steps that take you from "I can sort of hear it" to an accent a native speaker would accept. 

Let’s GO!!!

The 7 Steps at a Glance

1. IPA: write down how the target accent differs from your own, sound by sound.

2. Placement: find where the accent sits in the mouth.

3. Cadence: learn the melody: how the pitch rises and falls.

4. Pace: match the speed and the rhythm.

5. Immersion: live in the accent until it moves into your muscles.

6. Specifics: zoom in on a local variety to sharpen your ear.

7. Practice: practise, practise… and then practise a bit more!

Accent or Dialect?

These two words get used interchangeably, but they mean different things. An accent is how the words are pronounced: the vowels, the consonants and the tune. A dialect includes the accent and adds its own vocabulary and grammar. A British speaker puts on the washing where an American does the laundry; an English speaker asks "do you know?" where a broad Scots speaker might say "ye ken".

You can speak perfectly standard grammar in a broad regional accent, and most people do. This article is about accent: the sound. For narrators, that's good news, because the author has already chosen the words. Your job is to say them the way the character would.

What Is the IPA, and How Does It Help?

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a set of symbols for writing down sounds, with one symbol for each sound. Ordinary spelling can't do this job. The letters 'th' stand for two different sounds in thin /θɪn/ and that /ðæt/, and the letter 'a' changes sound in cat, father, about and late. The IPA removes the guesswork.

Take the word that:

• /ð/ is the voiced sound at the start, the one you can feel buzzing on your tongue tip.

• /æ/ is the vowel.

• /t/ is the final consonant.

So that is written /ðæt/. 

To learn an accent, we listen to the way its speakers talk and write down where their sounds differ from ours. For example, the word past:

Those differences come in two layers:

• Segmentals: the individual vowels and consonants. This is what most people think an accent is.

• Suprasegmentals: everything that rides on top of the sounds: stress, rhythm and intonation.

Most performers learn the segmentals and stop there, which is why so many accents sound right word by word, but still don’t sound authentic in dialogue. Step 1 covers the segmentals; Steps 2 to 4 cover what sits around and on top of them.

New to IPA symbols? Start with our article on Mastering IPA for Accents, then keep our IPA Chart open while you work. 

Step 1: IPA — Map the Differences

Listen before you speak. It sounds obvious, but it's the step most people rush. If you can't yet hear the difference between your vowel and the target vowel, you won't be able to make it reliably. Train your ear first, and your mouth will follow.

Work through the keywords. Phoneticians group English words into sets that share a vowel, each named after a keyword: KIT, DRESS, TRAP, LOT, STRUT, FOOT, BATH, CLOTH, NURSE, FLEECE, FACE, PALM, THOUGHT, GOAT, GOOSE, PRICE, CHOICE, MOUTH, NEAR, SQUARE, START, NORTH, FORCE, CURE, plus HAPPY, LETTER and COMMA for unstressed endings. Learn how the target accent says the keyword, and you know how it says every word in that set. Our accent guides and our Accent Chart are organised exactly this way. Then do the same for the consonants: R, T, L, TH and H are where most accents show themselves.

Only write down what changes. If your KIT vowel already matches the target's, leave it alone. What you end up with is your personal map of the accent. Here is the start of one for an American actor learning RP:

Drill the pairs. Say each example aloud in your accent, then in the target: /pæst/, /pɑːst/, /pæst/, /pɑːst/. Go slowly, back and forth, until you can feel the difference in your mouth as well as hear it. Then put the words into sentences. Every one of our accent guides ends its phonetics chart with a key sentence packed with the accent's main changes, and our RP article includes a full set of phonetic sentences with audio.

Step 2: Placement — Find Where the Accent Lives

Every accent has a home position: a habitual posture that the tongue, lips, jaw and soft palate return to between sounds. Phoneticians call it the articulatory setting. It's why you can often recognise an accent from a single "hello", before any of its signature vowels have arrived. It's also the thing most often missing from an accent that's correct on paper but doesn't quite convince.

Listen to a native speaker and check each of these against your own voice:

• Lips: spread, neutral or rounded?

• Jaw: open and loose, or close and still?

• Tongue body: pushed forward or pulled back? Held high or low?

• Soft palate: is more of the sound coming through the nose (nasal), or less, as if the speaker has a cold (denasal)?

• Larynx: raised, giving a brighter and thinner sound, or lowered, giving a darker and fuller one?

Two contrasting examples. Conservative RP sits forward and high in the mouth, with firm lip rounding and very little jaw movement. Liverpool English pulls the body of the tongue back and up and tightens the throat, which produces its famous 'adenoidal' quality, even when the speaker's nose is perfectly clear. Get either setting right and half the accent arrives with it.

Exercise: read a sentence in your own voice. Now hum along with a short clip of a native speaker until the buzz sits in the same place, then sigh out on an open vowel in that position, and only then read the sentence again. If only the vowels changed between your two readings, you haven't moved the setting yet.

Pitfall: placement is a tendency, not a clamp. Push it too far, and you get a caricature. The 'plum in the mouth' version of RP is the classic example: real Conservative RP is bright and forward, not swallowed.

Step 3: Cadence — Learn the Melody

Cadence is the tune of the accent: how the pitch rises and falls through a sentence. Listen for three things:

• Range: does the voice swoop through a wide range, or stay narrow and level? Conservative RP uses a wide range with dramatic falls; Contemporary RP is noticeably flatter.

• Statement endings: most English accents end an ordinary statement with a fall. But in a group of northern British and Irish cities, including Belfast, Derry, Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham and Manchester, the default tune for a statement rises, sometimes with a small dip at the very end, as in Glasgow. This isn't the same as the 'uptalk' heard from younger speakers in Australia, New Zealand and North America, which has a different shape and a different job. Swap one for the other and native ears notice straight away.

• The nucleus: which word in each phrase carries the main pitch movement. Accents don't always agree on it.

Exercise: take the words away. Hum or "la" along with a recording until you can reproduce its tune with your lips closed. Then draw it: a single line rising and falling across the page under the sentence. Only then put the words back in. You'll be surprised how much of the accent was in the tune all along.

Step 4: Pace — Match the Speed and the Rhythm

How fast does the accent move, and how does it space its syllables? Compare it with your own.

Rate. Be careful with the word 'fast'. An accent can sound quick because its syllables are lighter and more even, not because the speaker is in a hurry. Aaaaaand some accents just power through and move like lightning! Listen closely and get a feel for how speakers of the accent communicate and use their pace to express themselves. 

Rhythm. English is traditionally described as stress-timed: stressed syllables are long and strong, and the unstressed ones in between get squashed, very often down to /ə/. Many other languages give their syllables more equal weight. That's why Spanish- or Italian-accented English often keeps full vowels where a native speaker reduces them: banana is /bəˈnɑːnə/ in RP but closer to [baˈnana] with a Spanish accent. Linguists debate how neat these rhythm categories really are, but the difference you can hear is real, and for L2 accents (second language accents) it matters as much as any vowel.

Character first. Speaking rate varies hugely from person to person and situation to situation, often more than it varies between accents. Decide your character's pace as an acting choice, then check that it sits within what's natural for the accent.

Tip: Don’t Get Stuck

Many people find the placement, cadence and pace, and then speak the same way for. Each. And. Every. Line.

Real voices move. Native speakers shift their accents all the time: more careful at a job interview, broader with family, faster when they're angry. 

So learn the rules, then learn where you can cut loose and flip them. Ask yourself: how do I speak naturally, with the full range and full expression of my own voice? Your character deserves the same freedom.

Exercise: read one line in the accent with three different acting Tactics: To Calm, To Threaten, To Amuse. If the accent breaks, slow down and rebuild it. If the acting intention vanishes, you're holding the accent too tightly.

Step 5: Immersion — Live in the Accent

Once you've analysed the sounds, the placement, the tune and the pace, the analysis has done its job. Now the accent needs to move from your head into your muscles, and the only way to do that is time in it.

• Live in it. Think in the accent. Run your lines in it on the way to the shops, read the cereal box in it, talk to the dog in it. The more hours, the less you'll have to think about it in the moment.

• Listen to native speakers, not actors. Film and TV are great, but unscripted interviews, podcasts and documentaries give you the real thing. Every one of our accent guides lists native-speaker YouTube examples to start with.

• Shadow. Play a short clip, stop and repeat. Studies of language learners have found real gains in pronunciation and fluency from short shadowing sessions several times a week.

• Record and compare. Your ear lies to you while you're speaking. Record yourself, then play it back straight after the original. The differences jump out.

• Get feedback. If you can surround yourself with people who have the accent, do it, and if they're willing to give you notes, even better! Ask specific questions: "Which word gave me away?" A native speaker often can't tell you why something sounds wrong, but they can tell you where. Your IPA map tells you what to fix.

Step 6: Specifics — Zoom In

Once you feel you have the accent down, learn a local variety of it. Every accent is really a family of accents, and studying a close relative shows you the tiny differences that make each one unique.

• RP: Conservative and Contemporary RP share the same skeleton but belong to different decades. Our RP article covers both side by side.

• London: Cockney and Estuary English are neighbours that non-native speakers easily blur. See The Cockney and Estuary Accents.

• The North: "Northern" isn't one accent. Sheffield, Newcastle and Liverpool share a short BATH vowel, but almost everything else differs.

• Scotland: Edinburgh and Glasgow are less than fifty miles apart and sound distinctly different. Mark the differences and don’t get lazy!

  
  

Comparing neighbours teaches you which features are the core of the accent (the ones they share) and which are local colour. Then layer in the rest of the character: their age, their class, and how much they've moved around. Each of our accent guides ends with a 'Tips for a Slight Accent' section for characters whose accent has softened over time. The Accent Chart lets

you compare varieties row by row, and we're adding more all the time.

Step 7: Practice — and Then a Bit More

There's no shortcut here. Practise. Practise… and then practise a bit more! A few habits make that time count:

• Little and often. Short, regular sessions keep the muscles warm far better than one long weekend cram.

• Warm up with phonetic sentences. Run the key sentence from your accent guide before every session, so the main changes are switched on before you start.

• Cold-read. Pick up a book you've never seen and read a page in the accent with no preparation. That's the real test: can the accent survive words you didn't rehearse?

• Revisit your map. As your ear improves you'll hear differences you missed the first time. Add them.

• Compare yourself with yourself. Keep your first recording. In a month, record the same passage and listen to both. It's the best motivation there is!

Where to Go Next

• Mastering IPA for Accents: the symbols, how to write words and sentences, and RP vs. General American examples.

• IPA Chart: our quick-reference chart of the symbols and their sounds.

• Accent Chart: accents compared side by side, keyword by keyword.

• The RP Accent: Conservative and Contemporary RP, with phonetic sentences and audio.

• The Cockney and Estuary Accents: London speech, from the East End to the Home Counties.

Conclusion

An accent isn't a list of vowel swaps. It's a whole way of using the voice: where it sits, how it flows and when it changes. Map the sounds, find the setting, hear the tune, feel the pace, then live in it until it stops being an accent you're putting on and becomes the way your character expresses themselves. Happy /ˈpɹæktɪsɪŋ/!