As an actor, the ultimate dream is to have a varied career in which you play a range of different roles. One surefire way to broaden your casting potential is to have more than one accent in your toolbox.
“If you can only speak with your native accent, you are limiting yourself to a certain type of role,” according to Actors Studio. But if you can learn how to do accents other than your own, you can “suddenly audition for a much wider range of parts and show versatility to casting directors.”
Knowing how to learn accents can also enable an actor to lean into a particular character, and therefore make their performance more authentic.
If you can master other accents, the sky’s the limit! You may join the likes of Meryl Streep, Forest Whitaker, and Gwyneth Paltrow – all of whom have won Oscars for performances in accents that were not their own.
JUMP TO
There isn’t just one way to learn accents; it’s about finding what works best for you. It’s often useful to work with an accent coach, but that isn't always possible financially.
Here are eight general tips for how to learn accents.
1. Become aware of how you naturally speak.
Accent modification and dialect coach Christopher Lakewood recommends, first and foremost, building self-awareness of the way you speak.
“The more awareness you have of your own speech tendencies, the easier it is to shift toward something else,” says Lakewood, who has worked with actors on screen productions including The Wheel of Time and The Thomas Crown Affair.
2. Listen carefully.
Study and listen to the accent you want to learn, using as many sources as possible. The International Dialects of English Archive is an excellent resource, containing around 1,800 samples from 135 countries and territories.
“Prioritise careful listening. Find a podcast featuring a native speaker whose voice feels right for your character,” Lakewood says. “Listen to it on quarter-speed so you can speak along in real time, noticing precisely where their mouth movements and sounds diverge from yours.” You may also find it useful to watch TV series or YouTube videos featuring people speaking in your desired accent.
3. Learn little and often.
Learning an accent isn’t something you can cram overnight. It’s much better to have multiple practice sessions spread out over days or weeks to allow the learning to sink in. “To sound fluent and have the accent feel invisible and embodied, it’s vital to build muscle memory through short, consistent daily practice,” Lakewood says.
How long it takes to learn a new accent depends on several factors. “The more accent work you’ve done, the easier it is to pick up new ones. If it’s a few lines, you can usually get that accurate in an hour or so with a coach. If it’s a long script, contains high emotional stakes, or requires improvisation, that takes longer. You have to consciously understand and replicate the key differences before allowing them to settle into your unconscious,” Lakewood says.
4. Be wary of English spelling.
English spelling is “notoriously misleading,” Lakewood says. “Words like strut, love, glove, tough, and blood all share the exact same vowel sound in native English accents, despite being spelled with a U, O, OU, or OO.”
Instead of grouping words by spelling, Lakewood advises, work out which words belong in the same “sound bucket.” By that, he means it’s best to group words by the way they sound phonetically.
“Identify shared sound buckets. In my roughly modern RP accent, I say ‘lot’ words (shop, cot, fob, don) and ‘thought’ words (caught, dawn, water, Sean) with different sounds,” Lakewood says. “In most American and Scottish accents, those buckets each use the same sound, so ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ or ‘Don’ and ‘Dawn’ sound identical. Working out which buckets align and which differ is vital, as is working out what you already do yourself.”
5. Focus on the physical feel of the accent.
All languages and accents have a “series of physical tendencies in the vocal tract (our mouth, nose, and throat),” says Lakewood, who advises that finding how your own habits differ from your target accent is “often the magic glue that holds the work together and makes it feel integrated.”
Lakewood asks his clients whether someone speaking in their target accent opens their jaw more or less than their native one, how much their lips are rounded, whether their tongue feels wide in their mouth or like a “nimble blade,” and whether they hear a noticeable nasal resonance or a drier, less nasal sound.
6. Find the musicality.
All accents have a “prosody,” or musicality, which refers to rhythm, pitch patterns, stress, and intonation, Lakewood says.
The accent coach stresses that it is vital to find it. “You can have every single vowel technically accurate, but without the underlying musicality and cadence, it won’t land as authentic,” he says.
7. Keep it in character.
Even if 100 people speak in broadly the same accent, there will be numerous little differences and idiosyncrasies among each one of them within that same larger framework. Rather than simply learning a generic accent, focus on making your speech patterns as specific as possible to your character.
“My favourite accents to work on are idiolects [an individual’s specific dialect],” Lakewood says. “Helping an actor play a real person is about capturing the narrow, idiosyncratic way that specific person speaks.”
“For instance, Boris Johnson’s base is traditional RP, but there’s a specific punchy rhythm and tongue root retraction which is particular to him,” he says.
Lakewood recalls talking to the actor Michael Sheen about this. “He spoke about avoiding pure mimicry, instead finding those specific linguistic and behavioural hooks, like a clothes hanger, and then hanging the rest of your performance on that framework.”
8. Be sensitive.
Learning accents can be an excellent tool for actors, but it is always important to do so responsibly. “Accents will become harmful and offensive if you attach a negative or derogatory stereotype to that accent or when trying to imitate an accent of a group of people that have historically received prejudice,” Daisy Mellor writes in Voice Magazine.
Rather than resorting to stereotypes, actors must “be accurate in their accents and try not to become a caricature,” Mellor writes. She points to Jodie Comer, who speaks with multiple accents as Villanelle in Killing Eve, and Daisy Edgar-Jones, who dons an Irish accent in Normal People, as positive examples of actors using accents to portray characters.
“The easiest accents are often those you’ve had heavy exposure to or those with very distinct physical markers,” Lakewood says.
For native English speakers in the UK, those may include:
- General American
- Received pronunciation (RP)
- Estuary English
- Other American accents, such as New York, Southern, or Transatlantic
According to Lakewood, hard accents to do are “accents phonetically close to your own, where your habitual patterns quietly creep back in, or those requiring a drastically different underlying vocal tract posture.”
Those may include:
- Scottish
- Certain UK regional accents, such as a Geordie accent
- Accents stemming from a foreign language, such as French or Spanish
Another popular accent, the Irish accent, may fall somewhere in between.
But even the most challenging accents are still within reach for most people. “As long as there’s no medical limitation, anyone can anatomically produce any speech sound from any accent or language,” Lakewood says. “It isn’t always easy, but it is always possible, which I think is hugely exciting.”