Podcasts about Received Pronunciation

Get episodes without adverts + bonus episodes at ⁠⁠⁠EasyStoriesInEnglish.com/Support⁠⁠⁠. Your support is appreciated! British people are obsessed with class, but what does it mean to be middle class? From accents to animatronic tigers, come with me for a whirlwind tour of class markers in British society. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠EasyStoriesInEnglish.com/MiddleClass for the full transcript. Vocabulary: Social bubble, Parvenu, Nouveau riche, Processed food, Received Pronunciation, Posh, Chav Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is one accent that is often rated as the most prestigious - Received Pronunciation. But what is RP and how did it come about? Lynda Mugglestone is a Professor of the History of English at the University of Oxford and author of '‘Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol'. She says the idea of one national accent for all first started to emerge in the late 1700s with the creation of orthoepy and the invention of pronouncing dictionaries.

Is it classist to stop Geordies using the term of endearment 'pet'? After the University of Newcastle sent out guidance to researchers advising they avoid using the word 'pet' as it might feel patronising or sexist to women, people took to social media to claim this was a classist move. It sparked a wider discussion about accents and class. Others claimed accents shouldn't be used as a marker of identity and that speaking with Received Pronunciation could be an equalising tool that could prevent prejudice. So what are the origins of RP and what does the data show about our perceptions of accents?GUESTS: Jasmine Andersson, writer and journalist Jonathan Meades, writer and critic Lynda Mugglestone, Professor of the history of English at the University of Oxford Dr Christian Ilbury, lecturer in Socio-linguistics at the University of Edinburgh

Angela “A.G.” Slatter is the author of the gothic fantasy novels All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, and The Briar Book of the Dead (Titan Books); the supernatural crime novels Vigil, Corpselight and Restoration (Jo Fletcher Books); twelve short story collections, including The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings; the novellas Of Sorrow and Such, Ripper and The Bone Lantern; and a Hellboy Universe collaboration with Mike Mignola, Castle Full of Blackbirds. She's won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Shirley Jackson Award, three Australian Shadows Awards and eight Aurealis Awards, and been shortlisted for the QLA Courier Mail Book of the Year Award. Her work has been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Turkish, French and Romanian. angelaslatter.comThis story originally appeared in Dark Discoveries #35, 2016.Narrated by: Monica Pierce and Rikki LaCoste.Monica Pierce is a nerd. A nerd with a background in both sci-fi and musical theatre; she is also a wicked Dungeon Master and the newest member of The Seanachai Group—a motley gang of storytellers from Toronto Canada, founded by Rikki LaCoste, who is both a veteran narrator for StarShipSofa and an unrepentant nerd himself. And as far as we can tell, Rikki may not, in fact, be made of tin.(The narrators would like to apologise to all English speakers of the UK for our use of the Toronto British dialect - a Canadian/Harry Potter hybrid. However, we are all quite convinced that this would be the Received Pronunciation spoken in the south of England by the 2200s CE.)With many winks,Rikki LaCostemSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/starshipsofa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of BTL we will go beyond the basics. We will talk about the UK, but not only about London, not only about Received Pronunciation, but also about some of these amazing cities in East Sussex and Kent. Are you ready?

Put on your best Maine accent (or your best Received Pronunciation) and return with us to Cabot Cove! We pay homage to a titan of stage and screen, Angela Lansbury, with another Murder, She Wrote classic. MSW always had amazing guest stars, and this episode is no different! Which one of these tidbits is a lie: One guest star has more than 280 IMDB credits; One guest star has more than 320 IMDB credits; One guest star was in three of the most popular sales films ever — alongside Tommy Lasorda?  We bring in another guest star: Tracy Friedman, the writer of this episode of Murder, She Wrote! She tells us the logline and shares how she spent her time waiting for the producer to tell her if they accepted her script or not.  We watched Murder, She Wrote, season 8, episode 12: “The Witch's Curse” on Peacock.  Hey! Check out www.cluedunnitpodcast.com and let us know what you guessed, your logic cop catches, and anything else!  While you're online, sign up for your very own official Cluedunnit Private Investigator license! (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/cluedunnit2/commissions)  Or just follow us on the socials and let us know what you think!  Twitter: @cluedunnit   Facebook: @cluedunnitpodcast   Instagram: @cluedunnitpodcast 

Blwyddyn Newydd Dda! The first episode in 2023 took your host to the Land of Song on the British isles - Wales. Steffan, more often in his Welsh tongue, is a Radio host, TV presenter and household name in his native Wales. Steffan also performs throughout the UK in English, a language he only became fluent in his teens.The Swansea native's love for his culture and his langue is evident throughout this interview.Steffan shared how he thinks in Welsh, how his skills at translating between the English and the Welsh languages help him deal with occasional glitches on stage and why he is fed up with lazy jokes about the Welsh language. So fed up is he that he wrote a whole show mocking the English language - those lazy "jokes" are not about Welsh but simply about a language you don't know.---------------------------------Follow Steffan on twitter, Instagram or join his Facebook groupSteffan's Rats in Boilersuits: The Torchwood PodcastFollow your host Kuan-wen on Instagram and Twitter----------------------------------Kuan-wen mentioned a set from the Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert and the Welsh singer Browen Lewis.If you like the episode, please share it and leave a review.For any comments or suggestions, please contact us on Instagram or email comedywithanaccent@gmail.com----------------------------------Episode timeline00:50 Intro02:09 Rhod Gilbert's comedy portrayal of Cardiff02:51 Growing up copying the Received Pronunciation accent; English fluency only in his teens07:48 Thinking in Welsh; mastery over English as second language11:09 Occasional glitches12:55 Autism and accents15:04 When the comic forgets a specific English word16:33 Translating skills (The Welsh Language Act 1993)18:59 An example of a glitch20:57 Just admit you forget the word22:53 Tougher gigs to perform to Welsh audience30:28 Less stereotypes and more nuances for home crowds?32:28 Audience shouted Sheepshagger34:04 Accessibility to home culture and mother tongue39:23 First show at Edinburgh Fringe Festival was secretly about languages45:00 Battles to save the Welsh language46:16 What is a microwave in Welsh?46:53 Steffan's social media and podcast---------------------------------Podcast intro music by @Taigenkawabe

English Speaking Practice - A Wonderful British Accent Compared To Received Pronunciation Do you remember watching Downton Abbey or Sherlock? How about the Harry Potter films? Most of the actors in these great TV programs and films speak English using Received Pronunciation (RP). That's not to say RP is better than other British accents. It's just RP is an accent that the world has listened to and understands, easily. Which is something all new English language learners should want. So listen to this podcast and find out what makes RP different. Just in case you didn't know, we sell an English pronunciation audio course that is specifically designed to help people sound more RP by correcting issues with English consonant pronunciation. It's an excellent course which you can find out more about on our website here. This podcast reveals some interesting background about me, so keep listening if you want to know why and how I came to speak the way I do. If you want to speak with a British accent, you probably want to use one that people listening to you will understand easily. If that sounds interesting to you, then today's English speaking practice lesson is going to be great for you to understand what makes RP different from other English accents. ✔Lesson transcript: https://adeptenglish.com/lessons/english-speaking-practice-received-pronunciation/ And what is the difference between RP and other British accents? Why is it so special? Well Received Pronunciation (RP) is a name given to the accent of Standard English native speakers as spoken in the south-eastern counties of England, mainly in and around London. I think of it as the accent you can't really go wrong with. It's the best place to start if you want the most easily understood English accent. If you find what we do helps you to learn English, please donate what you think we are worth https://adeptengli.sh/donate thank you.

This summer marks the tenth anniversary of a landmark production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their 2012 Julius Caesar was Britain's first ever high-profile production of a Shakespeare play with an all-Black cast—a milestone that came 76 years after it was first done in the US and 15 years after it was first done in Canada. The production featured Paterson Joseph as Brutus, and he was so impressed by the experience that he wrote Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare's African Play. The book takes an unflinching look at Joseph's time at the RSC, both while working on Caesar and in the 1990s, when the son of St. Lucian parents found himself one of only four Black people in the building. He also writes about his early work, performing sharp and boldly reimagined Shakespeare with the Cheek by Jowl company; his thoughts about race in the British theater; the proper way to play Brutus; Received Pronunciation, and much more. In 2018, Joseph was at the National Black Theater in Harlem, performing his one-man show, Sancho: An Act of Remembrance, about the first Black man in England to cast a vote. We invited him into the studio to talk about the book, Brutus, and more, and we bring that conversation to you again now. Paterson Joseph is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Paterson Joseph is an acclaimed British actor who has performed major roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, including the title role in Othello; and the leads in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and The Emperor Jones. He has also worked extensively in film, and in television, including recently The Leftovers and Timeless. In 2015, he wrote and performed his one-man play Sancho: An Act of Remembrance on tour. Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare's African Play was published in the US by Methuen Drama, a division of Bloomsbury Books, in 2018. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Originally published May 29, 2018, and rebroadcast August 16, 2022. ©Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Bear It, As Our Roman Actors Do,” was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott, and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions, LLC, which created it for the Folger. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquardt at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Robert Auld and Deb Stathopulos at the Radio Foundation in New York. Special thanks to ‘Illuminations' for allowing us to use excerpts from their DVD of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2012 production of Julius Caesar.

How'd it go for the first BBC announcer with an accent?  How much work can you get if you "make it" in voiceover?  How much did the woman behind Siri make?  And what's a pencil got to do with any of this?  All this and more in part 2! Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. 00:25 RP and Wilfred Pickles (voiced by Simon Jackson) 04:26 The cast of Futurama work a lot! 08:17 Voiceover is easy! (right?) 11:30 #moxiemillion 12:30 Trying to find a job 13:55 Props and accessories 15:55 AI (even worse than the movie) 18:24 Bev Standing vs TikTok 20:50 sponsors: Sly Fox Trivia, Sambucol 23:06 Susan Bennett, the voice of Siri 27:53 It's in the game Music: Kevin MacLeod, Track Tribe . Links to all the research resources are on the website.   Back when the BBC was first launched in 1922, the first General Manager of the corporation, Sir John Reith, insisted the BBC be as formal and quintessentially British as possible, and he created a number of rules towards this end.  One thing he stressed in particular was that the newscasters spoke the “King's English.“  He felt it was “a style or quality of English that would not be laughed at in any part of the country”.  He also assumed RP would be easier for people across the empire to understand versus a regional accent, of which the tiny land mass of the UK has dozens.  Reish wanted things to be ‘just so,' even ordering that any newscaster reading the news after 8PM had to wear a dinner jacket while on air, on the radio, where no one could see them.    The BBC didn't create Received Pronunciation, though.  We can trace the origins of RP back to the secondary schools and universities of nineteenth-century Britain, making it the accent of a certain social class, the one with money.  Their speech patterns - based loosely on the local accent of the south-east Midlands, roughly London, Oxford and Cambridge, soon came to be associated with ‘The Establishment.'   although one of Reith's goals in using RP was to appeal to the widest audience possible, many listeners still felt alienated by the broadcasts being beamed into their homes because of this “upper class” accent being used. Despite this, newscasters were required to use Received Pronunciation right up until World War 2.   Why change it during the war?  Didn't they have bigger things to worry about?  Well, the Ministry of Information was worried about the Nazis hijacking the radio waves.  During World War 2, Nazi Germany invested a lot of time and money to train spies and propagandists to speak using perfect Received Pronunciation so that they could pass as British.  If they pulled it off, the Nazis could potentially issue orders over the radio in a thoroughly convincing and official-sounding newscaster voice.  Therefor, the BBC hired several newscasters possessed of broad regional accents that would be more difficult for Nazis to perfectly copy, and as a bonus might also appeal to the “common man”.   The first person to read the news on the BBC with a regional accent was one Wilfred Pickles in 1941.  [sfx clip]  The public trusted that he was in fact British, but they didn't trust, or couldn't ignore his accent to pay attention to, a word he said.  Far from being popular, his mild Yorkshire accent offended many listeners so much that they wrote letters to the BBC, blasting them for having the audacity to sully the news that way.  Nonetheless, after the end of World War 2, the BBC continued to loosen its guidelines and began to hire more people who spoke with the respective accent of the region they were being broadcast.  That said, the BBC does continue to select newscasters with the most mild accents for international broadcasts.   You can't please everyone, but if you can get in good in the voicework industry, you can do a staggering number of roles.  How many?  Here are some examples, pulling only from the cast of one of my favorite shows, Futurama.  You might say my husband and I are fans; we had a Hypnotoad wedding cake.  Billy West, the voice of Fry, Prof. Farnsworth, and Zoidberg, as well as both Ren and Stimpy, has 266 acting credits on his IMDB page.  Maurice LaMarche, who did Calculon, Morbo and Kiff and is the go-to guy for Orson Welles impressions like Brain from Animaniacs, has 390 roles listed.  Tress MacNeille, who did basically every female who wasn't Amy or Leela, as well as Dot on Animaniacs and Agnes Skinner on The Simpsons has 398 roles to her name.  Bender's voice actor, John DiMaggio, without whom the Gears of War video games wouldn't be the same, has worked on some 424 projects.  The man who made Hermes Conrad Jamaican, and gave us Samurai Jack, Phil LaMarr, is the most prolific voice actor on that cast, with a whopping 495 credits to his name.  Still, he falls short of the resume of Rob Paulsen, who did the voices of Yakko and Pinky on Animaniacs, and other examples too numerous to list here, because his IMDB pages lists 541 voice acting credits.  And did I mention they're bringing Animaniacs back? [cheer]  Paulsen is trailing behind Tara Strong, though.  The actress who voiced Bubbles on Powerpuff Girls, Raven on Teen Titans, and Timmy on Fairly Oddparents has 609 roles in her 35 year career, or an average of 17 a year.  That may not sound impressive, but have you've ever tried getting *one acting job?  Strong can't hold a candle to a man whose voice I can identify from two rooms away, a man who will always be Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop no matter who he's playing, Steve Blum, who has racked up 798 voice roles.  And those are just a sampling of voice actors I can name off the top of my head.  So when career day rolls around, maybe skip doctor and firefighter and suggest your kid become a voice actor.  Not everyone who does voice work has a face for radio, so I put pictures of all the actors up on the Vodacast app so you can se what Fry, Yakko, and Raven really look like ..   “Sure,” you say, “that sounds like a sweet gig.  Walk in, say a few things, and cash the check.”  Oh my sweet summer child.  If it was that easy, everyone would do it.  For starters, there is no “got it in one take” in voice acting.  Be prepared to do your lines over and over again, with different emphasis, different inflection, different pacing, or sometimes simply saying it over and over again until, even though each take sounds the same to you, the director gets the subtle difference they're looking for.  Bonus fact: the feeling you get when you say a word or phrase so many times that it stops sounding like a word and becomes a meaningless noise is called semantic satiation.   You may be standing in a little booth all day, but that doesn't mean it won't be physically taxing.  Actors dubbing anime in particular are required to do a lot of screaming.  Chris Sabat, who voices Vegeta in the Dragonball series, says that even with his background in opera and the vocal control that taught him, “I will literally be sick the next day. I will have flu-like symptoms. Because you have to use so much energy, and use up so much of your voice to put power into those scenes, that it will make you sick. That's not an exaggeration; I will be bedridden sometimes after screaming for too long.”   That is, if you can get a gig.  Remember how I rattled off actors who've had hundreds of roles each?  That's because, in rough figures, 5% of the actors get 95% of the work. So unless you're a Tara Strong or Phil LaMarr, noteworthy roles will be hard to come by.  One plus side is you get paid by the word, as well as by the tag.  A tag is part of a recording that can be swapped out, like recording a commercial, and recording the phrases “coming soon,” “opening this Monday,” and “open now.”  The clients gets three distinct commercials from one recording sessions, so you get more money.  Assuming the client actually orders the session.  You may find yourself on stand-by or “avail,” as it's called in the industry.  You may be asked to set aside a few hours or even consecutive days for a recording session.  The problem is, the client isn't actually obligated to use you during that time and no one else can book you during that time until they release you from it.    But it's a job you can do in your pj's, and I often do, and that's always a plus.  Even though no one can see the actors, voice work still uses props and accessories.  While computers can be used to speed up or slow down dialogue (which is more of a concern in dubbing Japanese animation, where the visuals are already done), certain vocal changes can easily be achieved using random items in the studio. “If the character is in a hollowed-out tree, I might stick my head in a wastebasket,” veteran voice actor Corey Burton told Mental Floss. “If it doesn't sound quite right, I can throw some wadded-up Kleenex in there for better acoustics.”  Burton, like Mel Blanc, prefers to eat real food when the moment calls for it. “They want you to sometimes just go, ‘Nom, nom, nom.' No! I want a carrot, a cookie. I don't want to make a dry slurping noise when I could be sipping a drink.”   Pencils also play an important role, not for making notes on the script or creating any sort of convincing sound effect.  The plague of these performers is plosives.  You've probably heard them on podcasts; they've definitely been on mine.  A plosive is the noise you get when a consonant that is produced by stopping the airflow using the lips, teeth, or palate, followed by a sudden release of air.  It's also called popping your p's, since that's the worst culprit.  A round mesh screen in front of the mic helps, but the old-school trick to stop plosives actually uses a pencil.  If they're getting p-pops on the recording, voice actors will hold a pencil or similar linear object upright against the lips.  This disrupts the air enough to avoid the giant, sharp spike in the soundwave.  Now if only there were some cheap and easy trick to get rid of mouth noises and lip smacks.  You may hear a few on this podcast, but for everyone you hear, I cut twenty out.   The most sure-fire way to avoid mouth noises and breathing when ordering a recording is to use a computer-generated or AI voice.  Now this is a sticky wicket in the VO community, a real burr under a lot of saddles.  Whenever it comes up in message groups, a third of people turn into South Park characters [sfx they took our jobs].  I won't get too Insider Baseball here, but here's the scoop.  AI voices are cheap, fast, and they're getting really good.  Have you ever gotten a robodialer call where it took you a moment to realize it was not a live person?  There are companies offering entire audiobooks in AI voices.  There is even an AI voice that can cry!  So why am I not bothered?  The way I see it, the people who will buy the cheapest possible option, in this case an AI voice, weren't going to pay even my Fiverr rate, and invariably, the cheaper a client is, the more working with them makes you regret ever starting this business in the first place.  It's an irony a lot of freelancers and business owners are familiar with -- the $5k client pays you the day you submit the invoice; the $50 client makes you hound them for six weeks and then they say they want you to do it over or come down on the price.  So I'm fine with letting those gigs go.  The other reason is that while AI applications and devices such as smart speakers and digital assistants like Siri are powered by computer-generated voices, those voices actually originate from real actors!  In fact, I just wrapped an AI-generation job this week.    In most cases, even computerized voices need a human voice as a foundation for the development of the vocal database. Nevertheless, AI is creating new work for a wide range of voice actors. Are these actors putting themselves out of a job in future?  Maybe. Maybe not.  It's definitely something I had to wrestle with before accepting the job.  But I figured, AI is coming whether we like it or not, so it's best to be involved to help steer the ship rather than be capsized by its wake.   When I took the AI-generation job, there were two questions I had for the client: what control do I have over how my voice is used, and what happens if you sell the company?  I asked these two questions for two good reasons, Bev Standing and Susan Bennett.  Bev Standing, a VO and coach from Canada, was surprised to hear her own voice being used on peoples' videos when friends and colleagues told her to log onto Tiktok.  For one, people could use her voice to say whatever they liked, no matter how vile, and she'd never worked with, been paid by, or given permission for use of her voice to TikTok.   According to Standing, who I've taken classes with and is a really nice lady, the audio in question was recorded as a job for the Chinese Institute of Acoustics four years ago, ostensibly for translations.  “The only people I've worked with are the people I was hired by, which was for translations... My agreement is not what it's being used for, and it's not with the company that's using my voice,” Standing said in an interview.   Standing files a lawsuit against TikTok's parent company ByteDance on the grounds of intellectual property theft.  She hasn't consented to her performance being used by TikTok, and had very real concerns that the content created using her audio would hurt her ability to get work in the future.  Imagine if Jan 6 insurrectionists and other such hateful wackaloons used your voice on their videos.  Good luck getting hired after that.  TikTok and ByteDance stayed pretty mum, both publicly and to Standing and her lawyer, also a VO, but they did change the AI voice, which certainly looks like they done wrong.  The lawsuit was settled a few months ago, but it's all sealed up in NDAs, so I can't tell you the details, but I'm calling it a win.   The other name I dropped was Susan Bennett, but that's not the name you'd recognize her as.  Though she was training to be a teacher, it soon became clear to Susan Bennet that her voice was destined for more than saying “eyes on your own paper.”  She acted in the theater, was a member of a jazz band, an a cappella group, and she was a backup singer for Burt Bacharac and Roy Orbison.  That background helped her land gigs doing VO and singing jingles for the likes of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Macy's, Goodyear, Papa John's, IBM, and more.  In 1974, she became the voice of First National Bank of Atlanta's Tillie the All-Time Teller, one of the first bank ATMs.  Her voice made the new technology more user-friendly for a computer-unfamiliar public.     Bonus fact: one of the earliest ATMs in NYC printed the security picture of the user on their receipts.  According to the man who sold them to the bank, “The only people using the machines were prostitutes and gamblers who didn't want to deal with tellers face to face.”  Or it could be the hours they keep.  I can neither confirm nor deny this, but I like to think that sex workers are the underappreciated early-adopters that helped the rest of us to be able to hit the cash machine on the way out of town (or the Mac machine, as my mom called it well into the 90's).  Bennet also became the voice of Delta Airlines announcements, GPS's, and phone systems.   But even with all that, that's not where you know her voice from.  “Hey, Siri, how big is the Serengeti?” [sfx if Google was]  Susan Bennet was the original voice of Siri on the iphone, but she never actually worked for Apple.  In 2005, she recorded a wealth of words and wordy-sounding non-words for a company called ScanSoft or Nuance, I've been seeing either listed.   For four hours a day, every day, in July 2005, Bennett holed up in her home recording booth, saying thousands of phrases and sentences of mostly-to-completely nonsense, which the “ubergeeks” as she called them, could use for generating AI speech.  According to Bennet, “I was reading sentences like 'cow hoist in the tub hut today.' 'Militia oy hallucinate buckra okra ooze.' Then I would read these really tedious things that were the same word, but changing out the vowel. 'Say the shrayding again, say the shreeding again, say the shriding again, say the shredding again, say the shrudding again.' “  These snippets were then synthesized in a process called concatenation that builds words, sentences, paragraphs. And that is how voices like hers find their way into GPS and telephone systems.   The job was done, the check cleared, and life went on, then 2011 rolled around and Siri was unveiled as an integrated feature of the Apple iPhone 4S.  The actors who'd worked for Nuance had no idea until well after it happened.  Bennett found out that her voice is actually Siri after a friend emailed: ”Hey, we've been playing around with this new Apple phone. Isn't this you?'  Apple had bought SoftScan/Nuance and all of its assets.  “Apple bought our voices from Nuance without our knowing it.”  As a voiceactor, this turn of events was problematic for a few reasons.  Typecasting and stereotyping, for one.  The downside of being successful in a role can be that that's all people want you for after that, like Sean Bean and a character who dies.  So Bennett kept her identity close to her vest until 2013, when Apple switched voices.  “My voice was just the original voice on the 4s and the 5. But now it no longer sounds like Apple because [Siri] sounds like everyone else. The original Siri voice had a lot of character; she had a lot of attitude.   Bennet has never said how much she made from Nuance, but we know how much she's made from Apple.  In round figures, give or take for inflation, [sfx calculator] she made $0.  Her voice was on something like 17 million phones.  Even a penny per phone would have been a handsome payday, but no, no penny for you.  “We were paid for the amount of time we spent recording but not at all for usage. The only way I've been able to get any payment for it, really, is through my speaking events, but I'm very grateful to have been the voice of Siri. She's very iconic; it's led to a whole new career for me.”   Another widespread voice that didn't get commensurate royalties is known for a single phrase, barely a full sentence. [sfx clip]  From FIFA and Madden to UFC and NBA, Andrew Anthony's voice has opened EA Sports video games for 30 years now and let us all have a collective shiver of mortality at that fact.  Anthony had a friend who ran a small ad sales company, who had taken on the not-yet-industry-cornerstone Electronic Arts as a client.  "My friend then called me up in Toronto and said 'Hey will you do this thing... for free?' I said 'yeah, of course, I will! I don't even know what this is but I get a free trip down to see you, so for sure'.  So Anthony went to visit his friend, read the line, which was originally “If it's in the game, it's in the game,” and assumed he would never, ever hear anything about it again.  Call that an underestimation.  EA is valued at $37B, with the Sports being a big chunk of that.  And Anthony has seen exactly none of that money, and he's pretty okay with that.  Over the years, Anthony has met plenty of other gaming fans and happily agreed to do his EA Sports voice impression on camera.    Not every screen actor's able to do voice work successfully; we've all heard flat, lackluster performances from big name stars in animated features.  Looking at you, Sarah Michelle Gellar from the recent HeMan cartoon.  Not so with the person who arguably kicked off the trends of booking big names stars for voice work, Robin Williams in his role as Genie.  Williams recorded 30 hours of dialogue, most of it improvised, for the 90 minute movie.  He took the role for *9% of the fee he normally commanded with the condition that the recordings not be used to merchandise products.  He wanted to “leave something wonderful behind for this kids.”  Thanks for spending part of your day with me.   And that's where we run out of ideas, at least for today.  So a wife overheard her boss saying he wanted a voice to notify people when they received email and volunteered her husband. “I recorded it on a cassette deck in my living room,” Edwards told the New York Post on November 7.  “Most people think I'm retired and own an island.”  Instead, he works at WKYC-TV from 3:30 a.m. to noon, and drives an Uber from noon to 6 p.m.  In 2014, Edwards told CNBC that he pranks people by standing behind their computers and booming, “You've got mail!”  Explained the voice-over actor, “I have fun with it!”  He's not bothered by not getting royalties, so I guess we shouldn't be either. 

From a rogue radio operator, to Bugs Bunny, to the lady who recorded all the time and temperature message for the phone company, we look at some history and notable names in voicework (which is what I do for a living, hire me!)  Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesliyan.   Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Links to all the research resources are on the website.   If you logged onto the internet between say ‘95-2005, you'd inevitably hear two things, the shriek of a modem, like a robot orgy in a combine harvester, and a cheery man's voice saying, “Welcome” and “You've got mail.”  Elward Edwards recorded those phrases for $200 in 1989, when his wife worked for Quantum Computer Services, the company that later became AOL. At its peak, AOL had 23 million users, all hearing Edwards' voice.  He briefly returned to public attention when a video of him saying the iconic line was posted on social media, by one of his Uber passengers.  My name's …   Every topic I cover on YBOF is interesting to me, anywhere from a little ‘huh' to an all-consuming passion that dictates everything from my daily schedule to my podcast listening.  This is one of those, because I do voiceovers for a living.  Hire me today, no job too small.  With a chronic idiopathic pulmonary condition, covid provided a real kick in the pants to finally get out of retail.  What I discovered, apart from how it's not as easy as you think, or at least as easy as I thought with two years of podcasting already under my belt, is that VO is everywhere!  It's not just cartoons and dubbing movies.  Phone menus, kids toys, GPS, pre-roll ads on YT, website explainer videos, e-learning/training, continuing education, audiobooks, podcasts of course, guided meditations, seriously we could be here all day.  Even computerized voices usually start with a real person, more on that later.   Kids these days may not hear a voice that was unbelievably common in the lives of many of us.  [sfx “At the tone, the time will be 7:22 and 40 seconds,” “I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service”]  That's the authoritative voice of Jane Barbe, one of the most widely-heard voices ever.  Barbe was the queen of telephone recordings, estimated to have been heard 40 million times a day in the 1980s and early 1990s, everything from automated time and weather messages to hotel wake-up calls.  She wasn't the only person who recorded automated phone messages, but she practically had the market cornered.    Barbe did most of her recordings for Atlanta-based Electronic Telecommunications Inc., which at one time produced as many as 2,000 voice messaging systems for businesses and government agencies, and for Octel Communications, which is now a part of Bell Labs/Lucent.  She was heard on 90% of “intercept messages” -- the recording played when something is wrong with a phone number -- and 60% of automated time and temperature calling programs.  You see, children, before you had the exact time and the collective knowledge of humanity to take to the toilet with you, you might go to the nearest telephone and dial a number you had committed to memory, probably the wildest part of this story, so a recording could tell you the time and temperature.   While I still haven't encountered my own voice in the wild, which was especially disappointing after I voiced a local political ad, Jane Barbe misdialed her calls as much as the rest of us, an experience she described as “really weird.”  One time she overheard her mother dialing a number and getting her on a recorded message.  ‘Oh, shut up, Jane!' her mom groused before slamming down the receiver in exasperation.   The story of how our go-go tech-driven lives became infused with voiceovers well predates YT and phone menus.  We have to go back over a century, to the night of Christmas eve 1906.  Up to that moment, the ship wireless operators for the United Fruit Company, along with the US Navy, had only heard Morse codes coming through their headphones.  But suddenly, they heard a human voice singing “O Holy Night” with violin accompaniment and afterwards a reading from the Bible.  This was heard by ships along the Atlantic northeast coast and from shore stations as far south as Norfolk, Virginia.  A repeat broadcast was heard on New Year's Eve as far south as the West Indies.  The voice was that of Canadian inventor and mathematician Reginald Fessenden, who was responsible for establishing the first transatlantic wireless telegraphic communication and what is considered to be the first voice work.  Fessneden was excited by Alexander Graham Bell's new device, the telephone, and set out to create a way to remotely communicate without wires.  In 1900, working for the United States Weather Bureau, Fessenden recorded the very first voice over: a test he made reporting the weather.  The following year, Guglielmo Marconi, who is often credited as the father and inventor of the radio became the first person to transmit signals across the Atlantic Ocean.   Though wireless communication was invaluable in WWI, broadcasts to the public were largely regional, amateur affairs.  The first radio news program was broadcast August 31, 1920 by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan, which survives today as all-news CBS station.  The first college radio station began broadcasting two months later from Union College, Schenectady, New York.  Around the same time, station 2ADD (call letters were weird in the beginning), aired what is believed to be the first public entertainment broadcast in the United States, a series of Thursday night concerts that could initially only be heard within a 100-mile (160 km) radius and later for a 1,000-mile (1,600 km) radius. It wasn't much, but it was the start of broadcast voice work.   The average person knows off-hand that the first movie with diegetic, or native, sound was The Jazz Singer in 1927, but the biggest event in voice work came the following year -- the first talkie cartoon.  It was Steamboat Willie, with the prototype for Mickey Mouse voiced by none other than creator Walt Disney.  Hot on its heels came next year's Looney Tunes the following year.  And that's t-u-n-e-s like music, not t-o-o-n-s like cartoon.   In the early days of animation, Disney produced short animated films called “Silly Symphonies,” to promote and sell music, in the form of records and sheet music.  As Silly Symphonies gained popularity, Warner Brothers created its own equivalents, “Merrie Melodies”“Looney Tunes.” As for the “looney” part of the title, Warner Brothers wanted to indicate that “[their] cartoons were a little wackier than the sweeter characters of Disney.”  Cartoons quickly solidified their place as entertainment for children and adults alike.   One man in particular made Looney Tunes a powerhouse, “the man of a thousand voices” - Mel Blanc.  He is considered to be the first outstanding voice actor in the industry and voiced Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, the Tasmanian Devil, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, and many others.  Raised in Portland, Oregon, he worked at KGW as an announcer and as one of the Hoot Owls in the mid-1930s, where he specialized in comic voices. It took him a year and a half to land an audition with Leon Schlesinger's company, where he began in 1937. He also worked for Walter Lantz, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia, and even Walt Disney until Schlesinger signed him to an exclusive contract.   One of Mel Blanc's most important contributions to the voice over industry is the recognition that voice artists now get to enjoy. Originally, voice artists were not given screen credit on animated cartoons. After he was turned down for a raise by tight-fisted producer Leon Schlesinger, Blanc suggested they add his name as Vocal Characterizationist to the credits as a compromise. Not only did it give a greater recognition to voice artists but also from then on, it helped to bring Blanc to the public eye and quickly brought him more work in radio.   We almost didn't have as much Mel Blanc voice-work as we did.  On January 24th, 1961, Blanc was in a near-fatal car accident on Sunset Boulevard.  He suffered multiple fracture to both legs and his pelvis, as well as triple skull bone displacements.  He lay in a coma, unresponsive, for two weeks.  After many doctors' attempts to bring him out of the deep unconsciousness, one of his neurologists tried a different approach and asked Blanc, “How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?”  After a moment, in a low voice, he replied, “Eh… just fine, Doc. What's up?”  The doctor then asked if Tweety was in there too, to which Blanc replied: “I tot I taw a puddy tat.”  Mel Blanc recovered shortly after and continued to do what he did best, until his death at age 81.  His tombstone in Hollywood Forever Cemetery reads “That's all, folks.”   Bonus fact: Bugs Bunny's habit of eating carrots while delivering one-liners was based on a scene in the film It Happened One Night, in which Clark Gable's character leans against a fence, eating carrots rapidly and talking with his mouth full to Claudette Colbert's character.  The trouble was, Mel Blanc didn't like carrots.  He would bite and chew the carrots to get the sound needed and immediately spit it out.   MIDROLL   Hopping back to Disney, the house of mouse also pioneered the full-length animated feature, to much soon-to-be-disproven skepticism and derision, with Snow White in 1937.  Adriana Caselotti was the daughter of Italian immigrants living in Connecticut.  Both her mother and older sister sang opera and her father gave voice lessons, so making best use of one's voice was sort of their thing.  After a brief stint as a chorus girl, when she was only 18, Caselotti was hired to provide the voice of Snow White.  She was paid $970, equivalent to $17K today, typical for the non-union times.  In most Hollywood stories, this would be step one of a meteoric rise.  The movie was certainly a success, even briefly hold the title of highest grossing sound film, so why isn't Adriana Caselotti a household name?  All my research indicates that Disney did it on purpose.  Caselotti was under contract with Disney, so she couldn't work for other studios, but Disney never provided her with any other roles.  Even radio and TV legend Jack Benny was turned away, with the explanation, “That voice can't be used anywhere.  I don't want to spoil the illusion of Snow White.”  It's the same reason Disney didn't credit voice actors for the first six years of feature films; he didn't want anything to remind the buying public that the characters are just make-believe.  Caselotti's only other cinematic contribution, for which she was paid $100, was to sing the falsetto line "Wherefore Art Thou, Romeo", in the Tin Man's song in The Wizard of Oz.  She was a lovely girl; you can see pictures of her if you're listening to the show on the Vodacast app.   I've actually got a few bullet points on the dark secrets behind the happiest place on earth.  There's enough to fill a movie.  I can see the trailer now.  “In a world…”  I can't do the voice.  Only one man could, the epic movie trailer guy, Don LaFontaine.  Donald LaFontaine was called, “The King,” "Thunder Throat" and "The Voice of God."  His CV includes 5,000 movie trailers and over 350,000 television commercials, network promotions, and video game trailers.  His signature phrase, "in a world...", is so well known and parodied, LaFontaine parodied it himself in a Geico ad. [sfx]   LaFontaine was born in 1940 in Duluth, Minnesota. to Alfred and Ruby LaFontaine.  At age 13, his voice changed, all at once, mid-sentence, and never went back.  He began his career as a recording engineer at the National Recording Studios producing commercial spots for Dr. Strangelove: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.  LaFontaine worked behind the mic until 1964, when he had to fill in for a missing voice actor to finish a promo spot for 1964's Gunfighters of Casa Grande for a client's presentation.  The client bought the spots, and LaFontaine's career as a voice actor began.  LaFontaine developed his signature style of a strong narrative approach, and heavy melodramatic coloration of his voice work.  In 1976 LaFontaine started his own company producing movie trailers.  He moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and was contacted by an agent, launching a career that spanned three decades.  LaFontaine's signature voice came with a busy schedule.  He could have voiced about 60 promotions a week, sometimes more than 3 in a single day.  Most studios were willing to pay a premium for his service.  It has been said that his voice-over added prestige and excitement, a certain gravitas, to what might otherwise have been a box office failure.    In a 2007 interview, LaFontaine explained the strategy behind his signature catch phrase, "in a world where...": "We have to very rapidly establish the world we are transporting them to. That's very easily done by saying, `In a world where ... violence rules.' `In a world where ... men are slaves and women are the conquerors.' You very rapidly set the scene."  Wait, what movie wa that second one?  LaFontaine became so successful that he arrived at his voice-over jobs in a personalized limo with a full time driver, until he began recording from his palatial estate in the Hollywood Hills, thanks to the internet and ISDN.  It's hardly worth talking about ISDN as a voiceover today, as it's rapidly on its way out, but as a podcaster, I'm happy to.  ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) is a system of digital telephone connections, which enables recording studios anywhere in the United States, Canada and abroad to connect digitally with voice over talent working remotely in their home recording studio.  It's as clear as being in the same room.  It makes a Zoom call look like two Solo cups and an old shoelace.  But nobody's having a dedicated ISDN line installed these days.  It costs at least $1500 for the unit, plus anywhere from $75 to a few hundred dollars per month for the service, so [sfx raspberry] onto the rubbish heap of rapidly-outdated technology it goes!   LaFontaine died suddenly in 2008 and  now all we're left with is the Inception noise. [sfx]  I mean, it was cool at first, but now … meh.  You can also hear shades of LaFontaine in the work of a Barbadian-British VO known professionally as Redd Pepper.  His legal name is on wikipedia, but I don't like when mine comes up, so I won't use his.  (Also, if you find out someone goes by a name other than the one on their passport, just leave it, will you?  Be they trans, an actor, an exotic dancer, or a check-out girl, don't matter.  You don't need to know what my “real name” is unless you're writing me a check.)  Anyway, Pepper has voiced over 100 trailers, including blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Men in Black and Space Jam, so you've probably heard him, even if you thought he was the old “in a world” guy.  Here's LaFontaine [sfx] and here's Pepper [sfx].   Speaking of signature sounds, if you've ever heard old movies or newsreels from the thirties or forties, then you've probably heard that weird old-timey voice.  It sounds a little like a blend between American English and a form of British English.  Did everyone talk that way between the world wars?  Not everyone, no, only the people being recorded and they did it on purpose.   This type of pronunciation is called the Transatlantic, or Mid-Atlantic, accent.  Not mid-Atlantic like Virginia and Maryland, but like in the middle of the Atlantic.  Unlike most accents, instead of naturally evolving, the Transatlantic accent was acquired.  People in the United States were taught to speak in this voice.  Historically, Transatlantic speech was the hallmark of American aristocracy and by extension the theatre.  In upper-class boarding schools across New England, students learned the Transatlantic accent as an international norm for communication, similar to the way posh British society used Received Pronunciation, which we'll get to in a minute.  Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region….   Transatlantic has several quasi-British elements, such a lack of rhoticity.  This means that Mid-Atlantic speakers dropped their “r's” at the end of words like “winner” or “clear”.  They'll also use softer, British vowels – dahnce, fahst.  While those sounds were reduce, emphasis was put on t's.  In American English we often pronounce the “t” in words like “writer” and “water” as d's. Transatlantic speakers pounce on their T's, writer, water.     This speech pattern isn't completely British, nor completely American.  Instead, it's a form of English that's hard to place and that's part of why Hollywood loved it.  With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures.  It was then that the majority of audiences first heard Hollywood actors speaking predominantly in Mid-Atlantic English.  But why do so many speakers have such a high, nasal quality?  There's a theory that technological constraints, combined with the schooled accent, created this iconic speech.  According to Duke university professor Jay O'Berski, this sound is an artifact from the early days of radio.  Radio receivers had very little bass technology at the time, and it was very difficult, if not impossible, to hear bass tones on your home device.  Speakers with pleasing full baritones were no good on early radio.    The Transatlantic accent made Americans sound vaguely British, but how can you make British people sound more British, like, the maximum amount of Britishness, like a cup of earl grey tea served with a dry scone smeared with marmalade and imperialism.  You teach them Received Pronunciation.  Received Pronunciation, or RP, is the instantly recognisable super-British accent often described as The Queen's English', ‘Oxford English' or ‘BBC English.'  RP is described as “the standard form of British English pronunciation,” though only 2% or so of Brits speak it.   So where did Transatlantic pronunciation go?  Linguist William Labov noted that Mid-Atlantic speech fell out of favor after World War II, as fewer teachers taught it to their students and radio and movie sound technology evolved to handle bass.  It's not gone entirely, though.  British expats like Anthony Hopkins still use it and it pops up in place of actors' natural British accents in movies.  The example that leaps to my mind is Warwick Davis.  You also know him as The Leprechaun, Professor Fliwick in Harry Potter, among 80 other roles.  For his first major film role as the titular Willow in 1988, he was taught the Transatlantic accent because the studio heads thought that Americans wouldn't be able to understand his British accent.  *sigh*  I could probably do a whole episode on executives thinking the average person was sub-moronic.  Did you ever once have a problem with Warwick Davis' accent, or anything less clear than Brad Pitt in Snatch?  Pop on to our social media…

Pernah denger wawancaranya Emily Blunt atau Idris Elba? Elegan banget ya aksennya. Cuma kamu keliru kalo menganggap semua orang Inggris berlogat sama. Mari berkenalan dengan Received Pronunciation dan beragam aksen lainnya yang ada di Britania Raya! 

This week I am joined by Singing Teacher, Dance Facilitator and Researcher Elizabeth Drwal who is based in gorgeous Ireland.  It was a joy to hear how it all started around Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! I used to watch those old movies with my lovely Mum when I was a little girl too! All the links shared here are in essence educational and could benefit you or someone else you know who uses their voice (or is aiming to become a voice professional), or who has any health issues with their voice.  Please help by sharing anything you find useful x Show notes and links (timings are approx) 0:00 Intro and welcome Elizabeth's Website (about) 1:30 How would you describe the journey with your voice? 2:30 Packed off to Music School in Coventry 3:00 Vocal Suppression led me to run away to the theatre! 4.00 Classical arias didn't really help me find my soul 5:00 The difference between strict traditional approach and more playful expression 5:36 Finding the love of singing English Art Song 6:40 What's in your ear helps. 7:00 Next steps in the journey, voice coaching for actors. 8:10 The Golden Age of Musical Theatre! 9:15 The use of imagery and using visualisation and imagination 13:00 "I wanted to walk down the avenue with my cane and top hat!" 13:55 "I remember President Kennedy's assassination and how it upset the TV Schedule!" 14:45 What singers you love and who could you never tire of listening to? 15:07 The Story of Marni Nixon (short). Plus Shall we Dance from the King and I 16:40 Feeling robbed at The Greatest Showman 17:10 Les Mis movie, do we feel robbed there? 18:10 What do you know now you wish you had learned sooner? 18:55 "Your breath and your body are so connected" 19:16 A little Reset & Manifest course feedback 20:50 "The importance of really taking time to really let go" 21:35 Working our teaching magic! 22:39 Teachers can be so empathetic 23:20 Becoming a more reflexive teacher 23:50 "Lesson plans can be debilitating to some degree!" 24:30 What do you find most valuable in caring for your voice? 25:00 Related: Dr Vox Products for Vocal Rehabilitation and Health and Dr Vox Product Video Shorts  26:15 Shocking statement about an old teacher!  27:20 "A lot to be said for mindful, caring empathetic teaching" 28:15 "What I didn't know back in the day..." 29:45 "We all development at different stages and we have to let go of comparing" 30:15 What does your voice mean to you? 30:30 "I wanted to speak with Received Pronunciation"  31:50 I'm beginning to enjoy singing for myself! 32:00 Petula Clark singing Downtown (in an interesting jacket? is that PVC?) 33:00 The songs from Heartbeat, from my childhood, "more innocent times" (in the charts) 34:45 "I am much more open to listening to contemporary music now" 35:45 "Synchronicity of movement and sound is so beautiful" 37:00 "Actors are so open I found it so liberating working with them!" 38:00 Passing on our excitement to our students! 38:42 What is Vocal Freedom to you? 39:45 Just Singing and not being bothered!   40:35 Workshop story and what cropped up the next morning 41:10 The Mental Post-It note tit-bit 41:50 It works! I shut that voice straight up!  42:30 Farewells and do come back soon!  To learn more and join our growing community of voice and wellbeing practitioners and supporters of the podcast visit our home page or facebook page for  episode updates and useful shares. To communicate with me regarding the podcast or any of the vocal freedom coaching services please email me directly at lmt@vocalfreedomcoach.info Leigh xx

Today Jon and Gideon discuss the RP accent. That's the standard British accent and probably the one you're learning if you're studying British English. What does it mean? Who speaks it? And what's the difference between this and Oxford English or The Queens' English or BBC English. All will be revealed.

Bu bölümde çok yönlü bir konuğum var, o yüzden başlığa neyi taşısam kararsız kaldım! Lise eğitimi için 10 sene önce Kanada'ya taşınan Can, Toronto'da lise eğitimi sonrası Toronto Üniversitesi'nde Uluslararası İlişkiler ile İtalyan Dili ve Edebiyatı çift anadal bölümlerini bitirip önce Birleşmiş Milletler'de staj yapıyor, şimdi de Kanada-Avrupa Birliği ticaret anlaşması ile ilgili bir projede çalışıyor. Bir yandan da inanılmaz yetenekli ve kendi kendini geliştirerek aksan koçluğu yapmaya başlamış. İngiliz (Received Pronunciation, Posh ve Cockney) ve Amerikan (Standard ve Southern) olmak üzere beş farklı İngilizce aksanın koçluğunu yapıyor ve bir yandan da en büyük hayali olan müzikal oyunculuğunu gerçeğe dönüştürmek için adımlar atıyor. Can ile hem Toronto ve Kanada'da hayatı hem de lise dönemi oraya taşınmayı, aksan koçluğunu ve müzikal oyunculuğu hayallerini konuştuk.

Arik takes a second look at “ye”, Allen investigates a Sonic-related coverup, and we review an accent that doesn't exist. After the Fact: hypocrisy and synergy. Ye olde Old English Latin alphabet Anglo-Saxon runes Ultima Underground Thorn Old English writing Up Up Down Down Two Spies Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Sonic 3's Carnival Night Zone music Analogue Poorly drawn Sanic Is There a Place in America Where People Speak Without Accents? Pacific Northwest English General American English Canadian raising General American vs. Received Pronunciation

Arik takes a second look at “ye”, Allen investigates a Sonic-related coverup, and we review an accent that doesn’t exist. After the Fact: hypocrisy and synergy. Ye olde Old English Latin alphabet Anglo-Saxon runes Ultima Underground Thorn Old English writing Up Up Down Down Two Spies Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Sonic 3’s Carnival Night Zone music Analogue Poorly drawn Sanic Is There a Place in America Where People Speak Without Accents? Pacific Northwest English General American English Canadian raising General American vs. Received Pronunciation

Today I’m bringing you the eighth and final episode in this summer’s “Summer School” series where all summer long we have been having conversations with language teachers. In today’s episode I’m speaking with Melissa, an English teacher and the founder of Quintessentially English. I wanted to do something different with this episode and if you’ve been listening for a long time now you’ll notice that this is the first conversation that I’ve had about the English language. What makes this interesting to me is that though we are both talking about English, we are both talking about different varieties of English - UK English and US english. In this conversation Melissa and I talk about what makes UK English stand out in different regions. We discuss accents and common phrases that one would hear throughout England and Scotland. We take a few moments to try and understand where Received Pronunciation came from and how it affected the US variation of English. We note the ways in which French language and culture has been an influence in both of our countries and we take on the popular topic of Cockney Rhyming Slang. If you’ve ever considered improving your English conversation and don’t know where to start, this would be a great episode to listen to. For starters, you can hear both of our accents and how we say the same words differently. You can decide if you think that learning UK English or US English would be best for you! And when you’re ready to choose learning UK English, you can get in touch with Melissa by following the links in the show notes! To Find Melissa: Website: https://www.quintessentiallyenglish.org/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quintessentiallyenglishteacher/ Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/mybritishcoach Speaking Tongues Podcast: www.speakingtonguespodcast.com Follow on IG: @speakingtonguespod Follow onTwitter: @stpodcasthost Like our Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/thespeakingtonguespodcast --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/speaking-tongues/message

Welcome to Britalian, a podcast that was born from the very unsettling experience of applying for settled status, also known as a badly planned way to manage the legal situation of the European citizens in Great Britain after Brexit. That’s quite a mouthful! I’ve been living in Britain for 6 years but at first my application was rejected. It was an experience that made me sit down and consider if this is really the country I want to spend the rest of my life in. I thought about it. Short answer, yes. So now what? I am an Italian repotted in British ground. British. Italian. Such far away identities. Should I keep them separate and feel constantly pulled between the two, or embrace the new one? Should I have a split personality? But how do I reconcile my national identity with a new one? Do I need to feel British to fully integrate myself, or can I maintain my original identity? And will Britishness take over my identity, will they sit comfortably side by side, or will they blend together? Can I pick and mix what I like? And first and above all, what is Britishness? Is it talking about the weather all the time? Drinking tea? Received Pronunciation? Stiff upper lip? Getting pissed on a Friday night? This is starting to sound like a bunch of stereotypes So here it is, a sort of diary to track my attempts at becoming more British and coming to term with my new home. An exploration into Britain beyond stereotypes, and a recount of the differences that make me stop and laugh. Welcome to Britalian. Cover art: Ramona Bruno @ramaflowers Intro music: Karakurenai by Andy Akiho, additional music: The Toy Robot’s Mechanical Heart, by Christopher Adler, both played by Passepartout Duo @passepartoutduo Transcript on britalianpodcast.com

With Anna Burtt we discuss Trump impeachment, Waffle Willies, The Crown, CagaTío (a weird Catalan version of Santa), Nitegeist, The Brighton Book Club, Childhood Books, Received Pronunciation, YA Fiction, Other People's Christmases, whist having a blind wine tasting of Sauvignon Blanc -one form the old world, one from the new...and Laura and Anna introduce Kristy to Panto! Support the show

Paul's guest for November 2019 is eminent linguist David Crystal. Paul and David discuss the history of Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as the Queen’s English, BBC English, and Standard British English. They also discuss the newer dialect often referred to as Estuary. For more information about David, visit DavidCrystal.com, OriginalPronunciation.com, and ShakespearesWords.com.

In this episode of the Spotlight Podcast we talk to Nina Zendejas, an international voice coach specialising in accent and dialect, and native to the United States. Currently working as the Head of Voice at Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts (MT) in London, she is also a voice-over artist (represented by Wisebuddah), and freelance production coach. Nina talks to us all about experimenting and creating characters with your voice, dealing with accent changes (especially for an audition!), improving your Received Pronunciation and General American accents, and how to get the most out of your voice long term.   It's a super fun and practical episode with a lot of great information and some exercises you can try yourself at home. Take a listen! Find more great info on voice, and for all other advice to do with mastering your acting craft and navigating the industry, take a look at our News & Advice. 

We ask David Crystal about standard English: why does standard English exist? How is it changing? Should students be exposed to different accents from around the world? And what role should culture play in English language teaching?Ross Thorburn: Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This episode, we have Professor David Crystal ‑‑ linguist, writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. In this episode, I asked David Crystal about standard English. Why does standard English exist? How is it changing? What type of English or Englishes should teachers teach?We talked about pronunciation and also the role that culture plays in language teaching. I hope you enjoy the interview.David Crystal, welcome to the podcast. Can you start off by telling us, when did the idea of standard English first start? Is it something that also came into play in the 18th century along with things like prescriptive grammar and Samuel Johnson and the first dictionary, etc., or was it something that started earlier than that?David Crystal: One has to ask the question, what is a standard for? A standard is to guarantee intelligibility amongst lots of people, because if you carry on writing in your regional dialect, eventually you won't understand each other.The first signs of standard English come in the Middle Ages when England becomes a nation rather than a set of independent kingdoms and there is a national civil service evolving, and a national parliament and all these things and English is becoming the language of the nation.Then it became essential to get rid of some of these variations, and all sorts of influences caused the evolution of standard English ‑‑ civil service scribes, for instance, individual authors like Chaucer, the influence of the Bible ‑‑ many, many different variations, but the point is that between 1400 and 1800, standard English as we know it today evolves.By 1800, virtually everybody was writing, and this is the point. Writing standard English is essentially a written form of English, not a spoken form. Even today, only a tiny proportion of the world's English‑language users speak standard English naturally at home as a first language. Most people learn standard English in school, and I'm talking not just about foreign language learners. I'm talking about native speakers as well.Only about four or five percent ‑‑ maybe even that's an exaggeration ‑‑ of people in England speak standard English as a natural home language. Most people speak regional variations. Most people say, "I ain't got this. We ain't got no nothing" and things of that sort. Double negatives, all non‑standard features ‑‑ that's how they normally speak.Then they go to school and they learn that, "That's not correct, dear boy. You have to say it this way," and you learn standard English. That's very useful, as long as you don't then your local accent and dialect demeaned in the process, which of course used to be the case.Anyway, around about 1800, standard English in this sense of a universal, pretty unified form of writing had emerged, thanks to Dr. Johnson, with his dictionary. People like Lindley Murray and Bishop Lowth with their grammars, people like John Walker with their pronunciation dictionary and so on and so forth.There's still a certain amount of variation, but on the whole, it's pretty standard. Then along comes Noah Webster in America and messes everything up, saying, "We don't want that standard anymore. We want a different sort of standard for a new nation," so he develops different standards for American English.Again, only about five percent of American English is different from British English in terms of spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammar, and so on, but it's a pretty significant five percent, nonetheless. Suddenly there are two standards in the world, British and American.Then that opened the floodgates, doesn't it, because any other country now who comes along and wants to use English. As soon as they adopt English they immediately feel they need to adapt it to express the identity of their own milieu.This is where non‑standard comes into play, because what non‑standard does is it expresses identity rather than intelligibility. You and I are speaking now non‑standard English to each other. We're not going to understand each other, but I'm proud of my non‑standard English and you're proud of yours.Of course, the result could be chaos but in many parts of the world, what happens is that the two varieties are so distinct that they don't mix each other up. I use standard English on some occasions. I use non‑standard English on other occasions.Ross: Presumably, now, then, most people recognize that one version of English isn't necessarily superior to the other. It's just that they get used at different times and in different situations, I suppose.David: Yeah. In other words, it's a notion of appropriateness rather than a notion of correctness. The 18th‑century notion was that only standard English was correct. Everything else was incorrect and rubbish and should never be used. You'll be punished if you use it.These days it's a notion of appropriateness ‑‑ that standard English is appropriate for some kinds of functions, non‑standard appropriate for other kinds of functions. This is where it gets relevant to all countries. We're not just talking about British and American and Australian and Indian or the old colonial territories. We're talking about Chinese English and Japanese English and so on.What is Chinese English for me? Chinese English is not somebody learning English from China and getting it wrong.No, it's somebody learning English from China who is now developing a good command of English but using it to express Chinese concepts and Chinese culture in a way that I would not necessarily understand, because I don't understand Chinese culture, coming from outside it.All over the world now, we see these "new Englishes," as they're called, being very different from traditional standard British English and traditional standard American English.What they're doing is they're allowing the expression of their local identity to become institutionalized in dictionaries and in novels, you see, and plays and poetry and grammars and things like this, so that we now have to respect the identity of whatever it might be ‑‑ Indian English, Nigerian English, Chinese English, by which I mean, English written by Chinese authors expressing a Chinese milieu but with a competent command of English, so that one can't just say, "Hey, that's a mistake."That is a genuine, shared expression of some section that's coming from China.Ross: Given all that, then, it really complicates the job of English‑language teachers, doesn't it? What's acceptable to teach and what is it acceptable to leave out? It's a lot more difficult, I guess, than it used to be, isn't it?David: Oh, gosh, it does, doesn't it? It is a fact that English‑language teaching has become more difficult because of the evolution of English in this way. It isn't a simple, "Oh, there's British and American English. As long as you know those two, you're home and dry."It's not the case anymore. Everything I've said, mind you, is really only relevant for language comprehension, not so much for language production. After all, if you're used to teaching standard British English in Received Pronunciation, as many teachers are and in any case as many exam boards expect and as a lot of materials expect anyway, then fine. Carry on.Standard British English is a good thing. RP is a good accent, etc., etc. But when it comes to listening comprehension and reading comprehension, if one restricts one's ability only to British English and RP, then you miss out Heaven knows how many percent ‑‑ probably most of the English language around the world.How many people speak traditionally British English in an RP accent? We're talking about, what, a couple of percent of the world's population. It's a very useful accent still. No question about that.Standard British is still a very useful dialect, but nonetheless, from a comprehension point of view, how often are you going to encounter it in the street, in literature, and so on? Only a minority of the time.It's an increasing gap, it seems to me, between production and comprehension when it comes to teaching. That's me finished now, Ross, because now it's your problem to decide how to implement this in terms of syllabus design and at what point in the teaching process do you introduce these variations? I have the easy job here.[laughter]Ross: That's a pity, because that was actually my next question.David: [laughs]Ross: What do you think? Should teachers and course books and writers be trying to work in examples of non‑standard English and non‑standard accents from all around the world into their lessons and in their course books?It seems that even, for example, native speakers might even need help with their listening skills in developing an ear from accents from parts of the world that they're maybe traveling to that they haven't been before. Presumably the same is true for non‑native speakers as well.David: Absolutely. These days there is no difference, essentially, between a native and a non‑native speaker of English in this respect. I go to another part of the world just like a second‑language learner goes to the same part of the world and we're both equally foxed by the local identity of the language.I have this all the time. I go to places. I don't know what the heck is going on, because I just don't understand the local words, the local expressions, the local nicknames of the politicians. All these cultural identity things are everywhere now. It's a problem for me as much as for the other.As far as materials are concerned, yes I think one should build in right from the very beginning an awareness of variation. Some programs do this. Global, for example, does this to a certain extent. I think it's more general than that. All the materials, of course, have always had a certain cultural input.You teach the present tense by for example saying, "Let us go for a walk down Oxford Street. Let's buy some things," and we'll use the present tense for that. It's drama driving the content.You can also at the same time let culture help to drive the content. Not only do you have a vocabulary list at the end of the chapter which says what's going on or explains what's going on, but you have a culture list as well.For example, we've done Oxford Street. When somebody says, "Let's look at your watch," and you say, "Oh, it's a nice watch," and the person says, "Yes, but it's not actually Bond Street. It's Portobello Road."That's the kind of comment that anybody might make ‑‑ completely unintelligible to most foreigners until they know that Bond Street is the posh street and Portobello Road is the street market.You could easily imagine how going into a shop to buy a watch to drill the present tense or whatever might also be supplemented by a little cultural panel somewhere or other which says, "Here ‑‑ this is a posh place to buy. This is not a posh place to buy." You gradually build up a sense of the cultural identity of the place.I'll put it another way. If I go to Beijing, how do you translate Bond Street and Portobello Road into Beijing or wherever? How would you do it? If a Chinese person said that sentence to me in English ‑‑ "Go to this part of..." ‑‑ I would not know what it meant until it was explained, which, you know what I mean by saying it's a very general issue.Ross: I also wanted to ask you a bit about how new meanings come about, because obviously that's something that happens, I think, both in standard and non‑standard English. I think you mention in "A Little Book of Language" about encouraging people to look up word meanings in dictionaries.Is it also the case that words often only really take on new meanings when people misuse them? Can you tell us a bit about how new meanings come about, or maybe how first they might be non‑standard or maybe even just considered to be wrong?David: To begin with, some people would say that any new meaning was a wrong use. There are always pedants around who will say that any change is an error to begin with. Then gradually usage grows and people forget that was ever a problem. They focus on new things that are taking place. This has routinely happened.It's only happened since the 18th century. Before that, change just took place...People did object to it. Some people tried to stop it, people like Dryden and Swift and, to begin with, Johnson, said, "We must stop language change. Look, the French have done this with their Academy. They've stopped..." Of course they hadn't. But they tried and thought they were doing so.Johnson himself recognizes this eventually and says, "Even the French haven't managed to stop language change. That's why we don't want an academy over here."Change takes place. It will always get reactions. It's a very natural process, very subtle process. Most of the semantic changes that affect vocabulary take place without anybody noticing them happening at all until they become established, they get a new the dictionary, a new sense comes along, and people say, "Oh yeah. Of course. We've been saying that for years. We just haven't noticed it happening."Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Professor David Crystal. If you'd like to know more about David's work, please visit his website at www.davidcrystal.com. I hope you enjoyed today's interview and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

In the early days of the ABC, people listened to the BBC and what was called Received Pronunciation; anything less was regarded as debased or undesirable. But, says Professor Roly Sussex, nowadays the norms of Australian English are multiple and often variable.

In the early days of the ABC, people listened to the BBC and what was called Received Pronunciation; anything less was regarded as debased or undesirable. But, says Professor Roly Sussex, nowadays the norms of Australian English are multiple and often variable.

In the early days of the ABC, people listened to the BBC and what was called Received Pronunciation; anything less was regarded as debased or undesirable. But, says Professor Roly Sussex, nowadays the norms of Australian English are multiple and often variable.

Got an audition to prepare for? Does it require you to learn a new accent? This is the podcast to answer your accent qualms, featuring Josh Mathieson, a voice and accent coach and director who is the Head of Voice and Co-Vice Principal at theMTA, a voice teacher at the Independent Centre for Actor Training (ICAT) and a Voice and Acting Tutor at The Centre PAC.  Josh talks to us about what accents are most tricky to master, how to approach breaking down a new accent, audition etiquette, how younger performers can prepare for accent work and auditions, and the number one accent concern we hear from our actors: mastering Received Pronunciation!  Find out more great advice on voice work on our website, including our latest video on YouTube. For more industry info, tips and advice, check out www.spotlight.com/news-and-advice. Any other questions? Ask us on Twitter!  

Renowned American choreographer Mark Morris on adapting the Middle Eastern love story Layla and Majnun with the Silkroad Ensemble, Yorta Yorta soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham's new work inspired by the Eumeralla Wars, we discuss Shakespeare's tragic prince with theatre historian and author of Performing Hamlet Jonathan Croall, author of Performing Hamlet, and Re-Member Me performer Dickie Beau, voice and dialect coach Leith McPherson leads us through another accent lesson, and as NoFit State Circus rolls into the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, we tag along to find out just how that big top gets built.

British comedian Bill Bailey returns to Australia with his new show Earl of Whimsy, we speak with three leading experts on arts policy to interrogate the state of arts funding in Australia and we take a look at the history of professional wrestling in Australia and its place within the performing arts.

Carry is back in the studio with some more insights on phonetics. Today she and Roger focus on pronunciation problems typical for learners from a certain area and what teachers can do about those. Be aware, while the episode takes reference to Germany and the Saarland foremost, many of the problems mentioned are relevant for speakers of other native languages, too. Our Russian listeners for example might also be affected by what is referenced with the German term "Auslautverhärtung", that is the de-voicing of word final consonants (think: мороз vs. морозный). Listen in and try it out! And don't forget to hold your larynx while doing so. English vowel chart Illustrating the vowels for the British standard "Received Pronunciation". German vowel chart Compare it to the German vowels system as shown here. Notice some of the vowels mentioned here are not natively German and occur in loanwords etc.

Hi everyone! I'm Georgiana, founder of SpeakEnglishPodcast.com. My mission is to help YOU to speak English fluently.  In this episode:  • I'll talk about why is the American accent is so different from the British accent. • After that, I'll use the Question and Answer technique for helping you develop your speaking skills.  Let's get started!  In the eighteenth century, American and British pronunciations were pretty similar. Remember that the British Empire colonized America. Many immigrants traveled to America to start a new life.  So why is American and British pronunciation so different nowadays?  Well, there are many theories, but here's a reasonable one:  I know that may come as a surprize to you It's actually the standard British accent that has radically changed in the past two centuries. However, the American accent has remained almost identical.  So, what happened? A little bit of history can help us. At the time the British accent started to change, the industrial revolution began. That means that many families became wealthy in a short period. The upper-class society did not welcome those families, although they had a lot of money.  Therefore, newly wealthy families tried to distinguish themselves from the other lower classes. One way to achieve that was to change the way they spoke. They tried to sound more sophisticated, more elegant.  So, new tutors and experts on pronunciation offered their services to the newly affluent people. New guidelines and pronunciation dictionaries were written. This new way of speaking became standardized – it's called "Received Pronunciation" - and it spread all over the country.  More and more people wanted to sound more elegant and not like the lower class. It was a fashion that became very popular.  The funny thing about this is how accents are represented in historical films. For example, the American Revolutionary War shows British soldiers talking with the Received Pronunciation (RP) accent, as if they were on the BBC, and American soldiers with the Standard American Accent, you know that's not very accurate. Read the text here: speakenglishpodcast.com

For a long time, the English variety of choice in Swedish schools was what is often called “British English”, or, to be more specific, Received Pronunciation. Not only was this the variety used by the teachers themselves, but it was also the variety students were encouraged - indeed forced - to use, to the exclusion of all others. Recently, American English has made headway, both among teacher candidates and in Swedish society as a whole, probably due to the American dominance in popular culture. Today, most teacher candidates choose to use either Received Pronunciation or General American English, and teaching materials in Swedish schools and at university also focus on these two varieties.   But how representative is this limited choice for the status of English globally today, when most speakers of English have it as their second, third or fourth language? Should we continue to encourage our students to choose either English or American English? And how do we approach students who are fluent speakers of another variety, such as Australian, Nigerian or Indian English?   Participants: Philip Shaw, Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics, Stockholm University Katarina Kearney, secondary school teacher in English and PE at Nacka Gymnasium   Moderator: Sara Lilja Visén

Great Scott! Hosts Phil & Eric think awfully hard on the sounds of the lexical sets lot, cloth, thought. A set up for the trifecta (tetrafecta?) of our next few shows, in this episode we talk through the sounds typically associated with these lexical sets, particularly in “standard” accents like Received Pronunciation, so-called General American, Canadian, and the tendency for cloth to merge with either lot or thought.Typical Sounds encountered in these lexical sets range from a type aɑ script aɒ turned script aɔ open oDiacritics discussed:o̞ loweredo̝ raised o̘ Advanced Tongue Root (forward)o̙ Retracted Tongue Root (back)o̟ Advancedo̠ retractedo̽ mid-centralizedö centralizedo̹ roundedo̜ unrounded

Hey listeners! Sorry for the 1 week delay, I'm all well again and we recorded FOWL 7 last night. Here are the show notes:Dialects and diglossia.Debate in Switzerland as trigger / PISA. PISA Polizei Podcast (German).New word(s?) of the week: Nerd Valhalla.The Queen's English, a.k.a. Received Pronounciation (thanks Joel!).Next week's topic is slang and two friends of mine might come on the show (Bhavna and Clive).Songs:Das Isch Mi Tag by G Punkt from their album Genau Das.In a Long Time by 46bliss.The file: FOWL Radio 7Size: 46.8mbLength: 50:58minsBitrate: 128kbps