Wholehearted Phony

How I'm approaching accent work.

Hello from Los Angeles, a city in America.

I spend as much time as I can here on the basis that if I want casting directors to be impressed by my eyebrows I should narrow the geography between the two parties. Well, three. Maybe I should frown more.

While here, I’m doing the kinds of things Brits abroad do. Ordering teabags. Watching a lettuce. Figuring out how to reply to the supermarket checkout cashier who wants to know if I ‘found everything I wanted’ when I went in without a firm idea of what to get and everything on the conveyor belt happened spur of the moment.

‘No, yet I am happy.’

But in one respect, I am trying something that goes against stereotype.

In an acting class a few months ago, the teacher gave me a nudge that, to be honest, I needed. Whenever I was given a script, my instinct was to read it in my natural accent even though it was written by Americans with, presumably, American actors in mind. I’d worked off and on with coaches, books and apps for years to get a passable General American but I was shy to crack it out when I was surrounded by people for whom various shades of unGeneral American was their mother tongue.

NB. General American is a slightly manufactured accent that is the first one taught for actors who might have to tackle American roles ie all of us. It is also sometimes called Network American as it has historically been favoured by newsreaders. It is American English stripped of any geographic indicators, though sometimes people wave vaguely at the Midwest when they describe it. As actors, we learn it first so that we have an easy trampoline to jump into the ways people here actually talk rather than the tiled floor launchpads of our native accents.

The teacher wanted me to get over my reticence and do the scripts as written. I did as I was told and, after not being immediately mauled by a bald eagle, found the experience… fine.

Fine but not comfortable. I brought his up and it transpired I needed something extra.

A Week in a Farmhouse on the French side of the Belgian Border

When I was eleven, my parents packed me off to a farm to live with a French family for a week. It was all very Juste Guillaume: There was a boules championship on the kitchen telly. The dogs were fed with dinner leftovers. I caught a frog.

Though born in a British family, I grew up in Brussels and was taught in French at the local primary until a move to an international school (where I learned in English) started to chip at my bilingualism. This farmhouse immersion week was intended as a way to fight back.

Today, any of us can learn at least some fundamentals of a language at the touch of an app. Duolingo and its clones are the modern Collins phrasebooks. Like the phrasebooks, the apps can teach you up to a point but without actual immersion our brains struggle to see the point of placating an owl.

[NB I think some online places are doing very cool work in this area. If you’re interested in language learning, I recommend the YouTube videos of Steve Kaufmann and Mihalis Eleftheriou’s Language Transfer app.]

I was fascinated to watch a video once of a polyglot who learns languages by grabbing a load of picture-heavy magazines (house and garden supplements and so on), meeting up with a native speaker of his target language armed with only the words for yes and no, and going through those magazines in the language without ever allowing himself to speak English. This forces him to quickly pick up some basic vocabulary so that they can agree that a page shows, say, a bird or a tree and then he builds from there for a few months. Once he feels comfortable muddling through the language, then he might look at the actual grammar to help him slot different elements he’s picking up into place more precisely.

An accent, as far as I can tell, builds the same kind of connections in the brain as a new language. It’s like a proto-language, just distinct enough to be noticeably different without being so much that there’s no hope of understanding it if you grew up speaking in a different accent. If we treat it by the same rules, language immersion is going to be far more helpful than just grasping the fundamentals.

In accent training, we learn the accent’s placement in the mouth, the tune, the setting of the face, the consonants, and nod fearfully at that one chart of the vowel positions in the mouth. All of these are important things but as they are the theory of the accent perhaps we can call them the accent’s grammar.

American Felix Days

The something extra that I needed was a more challenging ask than I’d expected. I was charged to speak exclusively in an American accent for one month. In effect, language immersion.

So that’s what I’m doing.

…

…

…ish.

As homework goes, this assignment comes with practical complications. It requires me to send an awful lot of text messages and e-mails that start: ‘Heads up!…’, it adds a layer of complication to professional relationships, and it can be received in less than thrilled ways by personal ones (particularly with people from outside of the industry). It adds the frisson of danger that new acquaintances might catch me out.

I have, truth be told, been cheating. Since the beginning of October, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays have become what I call American Felix Days. Sometimes I have a meeting on one of those days in which I’d prefer the person I’m Zooming not to assume I need help so I move American Felix to Tuesday or Thursday. My sacrifice for not doing it for a month straight is that I’m keeping up this three-day-a-week model until I head back to London.

I am getting more comfortable with the constraint. I have been finding opportunities to push and pull at the accent in small ways. I would never have had the time to otherwise when I was so focused on getting the right placement or sweating at the imminent arrival of a mid-word R. (I still struggle with these; there is no word harder in this world than world). In consequence, my sound has changed over time. I began fairly General American (one person said I sounded like a doctor) but then I tried playing with some of the sounds of Southern California. That didn’t feel quite authentic for me; it’s bigger and slower than I’m used to. I had an accent coach once who encouraged me to find a sound born out of a similar background to mine and we stayed decidedly East Coast when looking for models so now I’m now going the other way and adding elements of New York 23 from the IDEA database. However, Hollywood is spreading that California sound farther East so I don’t want to drop it altogether. All of our accents are hybrids; my hope is that I can this way engineer a hybrid sound that feels real.

Finding this level of comfort with the accent which allows me to play with it, I find that I have time now to come back to what I’ve been referring to as ‘the grammar’. Catherine Weate’s Real Accent App is a fantastic resource for this. When I checked it the other day, I realised that I wasn’t lifting the back of my tongue high enough and, once I’d corrected that, some of the subconscious cues my brain was picking up through the immersion method made sense. I had fewer moments of being tongue-tied. I could literally speak faster. In this way, the grammar assists the communication rather than embodying it.

I’ve not completely cracked it yet. By the end of the day, I’m tired and more britishisms slip through. My vocabulary and phrasing is rooted in UK English, as is my general physicality (non-verbal communication has accents too), so I give myself away there. And as evening arrives, I find myself less willing to talk. It feels like working out. After the first day, I slept marvelously.

I notice how it also bleeds over into the next day. In the hour after getting up on British Felix days, I’m more likely to drop my Ts and Ds at the end of words like boat and road. It’s very curious to watch the effects from the outside on the brain trying to sort through these two modes of being.

So if you come across me in the next few weeks speaking funny, that’s why. Please be kind. And if you come across me after that speaking funny, that’s how I speak. Please be kind.

PS. Speaking of accent immersion, there’s been a great example of someone going the other way on the internet this month. Tyler Collins is an American actor in Glasgow who’s been showing off his skills with an accent tour of Scotland. It’s a delight.

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