This unique book offers a complete course in how to do any accent and also gives you the tools to navigate your way through a specific accent. Using solid technical know-how, clear practical steps, real-life examples, and the occasional dose of humour, the Haydn/Sharpe System brings to the surface the underlying structure of accents. The authors share the processes that they, as specialist dialect coaches, have developed, to give you the insight, tools and confidence to work with accents. This second edition includes examples and exercises for six new accents. Includes a free online code to access detailed exercises and sample sentences – giving you the sounds you need to get your accent skills going! Also includes ready-to-use resource recordings of the following accents: Norfolk (NEW), Yorkshire (NEW), Standard Canadian (NEW), Standard Australian (NEW), Standard American, Northern Irish (Belfast), Southern Irish (Cork), Scottish (Glasgow), Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, South Wales (Swansea), West Midlands (Walsall), Cockney, Neutral Standard English, Contemporary 'Street' London (NEW), Cornish.

Do You Like the Way Your English Accent Sounds? How you sound in English matters. Research shows this very clearly. Native speakers judge people with clear, easy to understand accents as proficient in English (even if in reality they're only beginners). On the other hand, they judge people whose accents are hard to understand as being low-level (Even if they're

What impact do accents have on our lives as we interact with one another? Are accents more than simple sets of phonetic features that allow us to differentiate from one dialect, variety or style, to the other? What power relationships are at work when we speak with what those around us perceive as an 'accent'? In the 12 chapters of this volume, an international group of sociolinguists, applied linguists, anthropologists, and scholars in media studies, develop an innovative approach that we describe as the ‘pragmatics of accents’. In this volume, we present a variety of languages and go beyond the traditional structural description of accents. From ideologies in national contexts, to L2 education, to accent discrimination in the media and the workplace, this volume embraces a new perspective that focuses on the use of accents as symbolic resources, and emphasizes the importance of context in the human experience of accents.

Some people say scohn, while others say schown. He says bath, while she says bahth. You say potayto. I say potahto And- -wait a second, no one says potahto. No one's ever said potahto. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of Received Pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father David travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English. Everyone has an accent, though many of us think we don't. We all have our likes and dislikes about the way other people speak, and everyone has something to say about 'correct' pronunciation. But how did all these accents come about, and why do people feel so strongly about them? Are regional accents dying out as English becomes a global language? And most importantly of all: what went wrong in Birmingham? Witty, authoritative and jam-packed full of fascinating facts, You Say Potato is a celebration of the myriad ways in which the English language is spoken - and how our accents, in so many ways, speak louder than words.

This is a comprehensive workbook for actors, covering the key characteristics and profiles of a wide range of African accents of English. Its unique approach not only addresses the methods and processes by which to go about learning an accent, but also looks in detail at each example. This lets the reader plot their own route through the learning process and tailor not only their working methods but also their own personal idiolect. Full breakdowns of each accent cover: an introduction giving a brief history of the accent, its ethnic background, and its language of origin preparatory warm-up exercises specific to each accent a directory of research materials including documentaries, plays, films and online resources key characteristics such as melody, stress, pace and pitch descriptions of physical articulation in the tongue, lips, jaw, palate and pharynx practice sentences, phoneme tables and worksheets for solo study. African Accents is accompanied by a website at www.routledge.com/cw/mcguire with an extensive online database of audio samples for each accent. The book and audio resources guide actors to develop their own authentic accents, rather than simply to mimic native speakers. This process allows the actor to personalize an accent, and to integrate it into the creation of character rather than to play the accent on top of character.