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Yearly Archives: 2011
A Quick Update
I’ve received a lot of great feedback in the comments about yesterday’s post, Mastering the Trap-Bath Split. With that in mind, I’ve made some minor revisions to the post to eliminate points of confusion. I’ve sensed there is an unwritten … Continue reading
Mastering the Trap-Bath Split
[Update: I made a few slight revisions to this post based on feedback.] (NOTE: This post uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For information about the IPA, please visit my page of IPA Resources.) What is the #1 thing American actors screw … Continue reading
Posted in British English Tagged accents for actors, Boston accents, Cockney, Received Pronunciation (RP) 40 Comments
Techspeak for Evil
The information age has produced something of a dialect. Techspeak (if you want to call it that) has a vast trove of unique vocabulary, its own grammatical and syntactical rules, and represents a very real culture. And I am fascinated … Continue reading
The Cot-Caught Merger
One of the major distinctions in American English is something called the Cot-Caught Merger. This is exactly what it sounds like: some dialects merge the sounds in words like cot, lot and Tom with the vowel in caught, paw, and … Continue reading
Dialect Savants on YouTube
I have been with the family for a few days and haven’t got a chance to post anything substantial. So I figured I would quickly comment on the recent rash of “dialect savant” videos on YouTube. The most trafficked of … Continue reading
Pahk Yuh Cah: Non-Rhotic in New England
A few years back, I was sitting in a restaurant in my hometown of Willimantic, Connecticut*. A few booths over, a late-middle-aged man was talking to a young woman paying at the counter. Here is my paraphrasing of the conversation: … Continue reading
Cheryl Cole’s Accent: You Decide
I don’t want this to turn into a pop culture site, but it is hard to ignore the recent hubbub surrounding Cheryl Cole. As I mentioned a few days back, Ms. Cole is a pretty pop singer from the UK … Continue reading
Rhyming Slang
It was inevitable: if you write a blog about English dialects, eventually you will write a post about Cockney rhyming slang. For you confused Americans out there, here is the basic jist of rhyming slang: 1.) Take any word in … Continue reading
Dialects at the Oscars
As has been noted more than a few times, last night’s Oscars telecast was a veritable cornucopia of accents. Best picture nominees features Boston English, Ozarks English, California English, Texas English, Received Pronunciation and, if you want to broaden the … Continue reading
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Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects Tagged accents for actors, dialects in film Comments Off on Dialects at the Oscars
Australians do the Best Accents
I often use Google News to write this blog. Crude source of inspiration it may be, but searching for permutations of “dialect,” “accent,” or “language” gives me a wealth of material to ponder. There is one exception to this, however, … Continue reading