How To Do A British Accent

Hello, I'm Gareth Jameson! I'm an actor and a voice coach from www.londonvoicelessons.com Here are some tips for working on your voice. Now, you might want to do a British accent because you're in a play, or maybe you want to impress your friends or maybe you want to fit in better in the UK. Whatever the reason, playing with accents is a great way to work out your voice and speech. Now, the key to every accent is to isolate the sounds that are specific to that accent. So we're going to start with the British "r" sound. Now, when I'm saying "British" , I actually mean the sounds used in the very south part of England, the received pronunciation accent you might hear on the BBC. So let's look at this sentence: "Are there more birds?" Are there more birds? Despite there being an "r" ---letter r--- in all of those words, you don't hear the "r" sound. Are there more birds? Now change it to "Are there any birds?" Suddenly, you hear the "r" at the word, at the end of the word, "there." Are there any birds? That's because we've put an "any" , which has a vowel sound at the beginning. Are there any birds? Now listen to these: daughter, brother, shopper. Don't make the mistake of having a big, huge vowel sound at the end of those words: daughter, brother, shopper. A lot of people trying a British accent do that. You need a tiny sound. Daughter, brother, shopper"¦ Now, another feature of this British accent is that we have different vowel sounds for "hot" and "dog" than we do in "talk" and "law." That's "hot dog" and "talk, law. " Try this sentence out: "Do you talk froth or are hot dogs against the law?" My final tip for this British accent is for you to make sure you keep your vowel sounds very small when they're short vowels. So that's "pit" , "put" , "pet" , "pat" , and "putt" . Notice also there's very precise "p" s and "t" s. We don't want "pit" , "pot" ----keep it really tight. We want them "pit" , "put" , "pet" , "putt" , "pot" . That's only a few features form the British accent---of course, there are many more and what I'm saying doesn't apply to every speaker of a British accent. If you want to find out more about accents and how you can look after your voice and speech, go to "www.londonvoicelessons.com" .