Had a new student for American accent today for an hour and a half (hooray for cash-in-hand). Young Kiwi woman who'd done a lot of work on her accent. As usually happens though I didn't even notice until she mentioned it. Not sure if that's just a perceptual slip (I'm not always listening with my accent ears) or if it's because as soon as she mentioned her homeland and spoke about it her natural tendencies resurfaced.
The best example I've seen of this was a contestant on Big Brother a few years ago. 2006 I think. Zack the corset-maker and uber-fabulous city gayboy. I quite liked him on the show I must say and would have loved him to win over whoever that blonde Queensland girl was. She was nice too, but you know, gotta side with the team. ANYWAY! He had that (stereo)typical Sydney gayboy sound. Don't get me wrong I'm not negatively stereotyping here, accents and dialects are intimately linked to stereotypes, and when analysing them we're not being judgmental. One day - in the diary room - he started talking about his family back home - in the country. As the inevitable diary room tears started to flow his voice gradually slipped from "cultivated Sydney scene" to "rural/Broad" Australian. It was a very marked slide, and fascinating to watch. Suddenly he was dropping his final /g/ and vocalising medial /t/. Vowels got tighter and more nasaland we heard a lot more high rising tune (that thing where statements all sound like quesitons).
So back to my student. Nice girl, but very business like. Not a bad thing - I'm just used to teaching actors that have been referred to me or that I know. This woman found me on Quiet on Set - a lisitng I posted a long time ago, so hooray, it's still working for me!
She was pretty good at the American accent - had already done a bit of accent work - and had studied linguistics so I didn't have to explain any of the phonetics - so refreshing! I could even say "/l/ vocalisation" and "levels of transcription" and she didn't even bat an eyelid.
She had a scene from The Ghost Whisperer to work on - brilliant writing, and a drastic oversight by the Academy. Expected difficulties involved final dark /l/ which often trips up or gives away Kiwis, as well as the "bet-bat" vowel distinction. Interesting difficulties she had were with the difficulty with long /i:/ and /u:/ and the /ei/ diphthong (possibly related to the "bet-bat" thing through the diphthong's onset). She clearly had some Maori background and had that slightly choppy rhythm I've observed in other Islander voices. A challenge for her was to let the laid back articulation of GenAm come through and let the words breath.
I'm now wondering if I can get phonetic symbols on this blog... Would make future posts a lot easier.
Moving Day
10 years ago
