Accents- A Manual For Actors

by Bonnie Engel Lee, Ph. D.
“The Speech Doc”

I just found a great book to help you learn a variety of accents. It’s called, Accents: A Manual for Actors. It’s by Robert Blumenfeld (2002), who has been a professional actor and a private and production dialect coach in New York City for more than 25 years. You can find his book by the ISBN number (978-0-87910-967-752995).

It contains some general principles and advice about accents including warm up exercises. There are four features of any accent, according to Blumenfeld:
• The physical positioning of the vocal apparatus
• Sounds changes, shifts and substitutions
• Stress (rhythm) changes
• Pitch patterns (intonation)

Blumenfeld describes a variety of North American accents and also has chapters on “how to do……” many of the world’s accents including the romance language, Germanic accents, Slavic language accents, African accents and Asian accents.

Included in the book are two CD’s the contain examples of the different accents described in the book. The book also contains a significant number of practice materials. It’s a great resource if you have a North American accent you are trying to “lose” or are trying to acquire an accent for a voiceover job you just got.

If you have any voice or speech questions for the “Speech Doc”, feel free to comment here or email your questions/comments to: speechdoc@gmail.com