We were laughing as we wrote this section, because we remembered a game that we play when we’re on the tube. We watch people in the next carriage and try to guess their accents simply by watching their faces as they speak. Even though we can’t hear them, we are able to see some of the muscular settings of the face and mouth that contribute to the sound. Jan’s mum, who is not famed for her ability to do accents or impressions, gets one bit spot on: when recreating a speaker she will always pull a slightly bizarre face! What she recognises is that the speaker is using a different muscular setting from her own. Fortunately (perhaps) she doesn’t have to walk on stage and recreate an accent, so her work can stop there; but if she did, this would be a very useful starting point.
In each accent the muscles of the face and mouth are shaped and held in a particular position. After all, if your mouth has to make the same set of moves over and over again it is bound to take up a position that makes those moves possible. In Arabic, for example, the root of the tongue is tense, ready to make those guttural sounds; in Indian the tongue tip is curled up and back for the retroflexed consonants; in Canadian the body of the tongue is bunched up, ready for those Rs; and so on…
When we worked with an Australian actress (who did have to walk on stage), she said that in order to get into the English accent she had to relax her cheek muscles, get a ‘scooped-out’ feeling in the cheeks, and make a gap between her top and bottom back teeth. These three small adjustments made a huge difference to her setting, and through this setting she was more able to find and keep the zone and tone.
Feel your muscles being held in different settings from the ones they’re used to while you count to ten, or speak the days of the week. Focus on maintaining the setting, letting that inform the sound. We’ve gone through the articulators one at a time so that you can really focus on the effect changes in each of them can have.
Listen to the way the quality of the sound changes with each setting.
Look at the changes in the mirror.
Cheeks:
| ● | Let the cheeks hang loose. |
| ● | Scoop the cheeks inwards. |
| ● | Widen the cheeks in a half smile. |
Lips:
| ● | Tighten the inner muscle of the lips (‘cat’s bottom’!). |
| ● | Stretch the lips out into a thin, wide line. |
| ● | Pout with fat lips. |
Jaw:
| ● | Clench the teeth. |
| ● | Bounce the jaw open for the vowels. |
| ● | Drop and hold the jaw loosely open. |
Tongue:
| ● | Squeeze the tongue up and forward in a strong ‘EE’ position. |
| ● | Relax the tongue and let it feel fat in the mouth. |
| ● | Hold the back of the tongue high up in the mouth, as if about to do a ‘G’. |
Soft Palate:
| ● | Hold a yawn at the back of your mouth. |
| ● | Let the soft palate become heavy, squashing the space at the back of the mouth, like almost saying ‘NG’. |
Now listen to us as we describe the settings of three accents as we speak in them:
| ● | Yorkshire |
| Cheeks: Loose | |
| Lips: Slack | |
| Jaw: Dropped | |
| Tongue: Heavy and flat | |
| Soft Palate: High | |
| ● | Scottish |
| Cheeks: Soft | |
| Lips: Pouted and held small | |
| Jaw: Mid-open | |
| Tongue: Rolled forward and gripped | |
| Soft Palate: Low | |
| ● | Cockney |
| Cheeks: Held | |
| Lips: Flat (corners pinched) | |
| Jaw: Closed | |
| Soft Palate: Low |
So how do you identify what the setting of a particular accent is? Well, it really is a circular process: get the tone and zone and you have the setting; get the setting and you have the tone and zone. If you can see a speaker then you will get some visual clues, and when you listen to a speaker your own muscles may well find the setting for you through a sort of sympathetic response; but if you’re still not sure, the biggest clue is to be found in one of the smallest sounds the speaker makes…
The Hesitation sound
The hesitation sound ‘um’ or ‘uh’, that you hear when speakers are thinking of what to say next, is the sound that is made when the mouth relaxes into its own neutral setting.
By listening for and recreating this sound you can often identify the setting of an accent, especially if it is very different from your own!
Listen to all these hesitation sounds… You can hear how different they can be from one accent to another!
Copy the hesitation sounds and feel the shapes you have to make to get each sound right.
Freeze mid-sound and notice the position your muscles are in. This can give you the neutral setting for that accent.
Do the above exercise, and this time look in the mirror