Links and Resources

WAAPA

WAAPA (Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts)
The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has many partner institutions and we are delighted to share this particular link gifted to us by the Voice Department at WAAPA. There are many invaluable recordings here and their site is well worth visiting!

VADA

We are also pleased to be associates of the University of Maryland. VADA – their  Visual Accent &  Dialect Archive database has a number of excellent resources including samples where you can observe the speaker’s mouth shape- a very useful tool in identifying where the ‘point of tension’ of a dialect rests.

https://visualaccentdialectarchive.com/

American Dialects

      • Interesting articles:

http://kuow.org/post/do-pacific-northwesterners-have-accent

      • The Louisiana accent:

http://www.chonday.com/Videos/lingsouth2

Dialect Books

      • How To Do Standard English Accents

http://howtodoaccents.com/htdsea.php

Useful links to a range of standard English accents by Jan Haydn Rowles and Edda Sharpe

Dialect Websites

The original web-site devoted to accents and dialects and an excellent resource that includes special collections. It also allows you to donate your own voice to the web-site.

This site contains a large collection of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. In addition to the recordings, there is a standard passage with phonetic transcriptions for most of the speakers that- if you are familiar with the IPA – will allow you to analyse the key sound shifts.

English Dialects

                  • The BBC’s Sounds of English website is an invaluable resource. In addition to video clips that demonstrate mouth shapes for Standard English Pronunciation, there are related links to English as spoken in a variety of other countries too.

Search the BBC for pronounciation videos

                  • The British Library has a huge collection of recorded voices and is especially good if you are looking for older, more ‘time-zoned’ dialects.

http://goo.gl/SN2ezx

Irish Accents & Dialects

                  • Good collection of Irish accents!

www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Cork+Ireland&FORM=R5FD5

Phonetics

            • Phonetics links

http://www.seeingspeech.arts.gla.ac.uk/uti/
This resource from the University of Glasgow contains speech samples from a number of dialects including various British Regional and New Zealand. It also allows you to see the movement of the tongue during speech using ultrasound and MRI

Scottish Dialects

A comprehensive resource that includes Scots poetry and song, the history of Scots and sound/video clips of the various dialects.

Brief introduction to the dialects of Scots and the value of using and respecting each dialect.

A fun introduction to “Weegie”

Youtube Clips (worth visiting)

                  • VIDEOJUG podcasts include short introductions to various dialects by voice coach Gareth Jameson

http://goo.gl/lVI2mj

If you were in any doubt as to why your dialect work needs to be detailed, embodied and utterly convincing then watch these two YouTube videos from the American dialect coach Erik Singer.

His comments are brilliantly observed and contain nugget upon nugget of hugely useful information about how mouth shape, energy, physicality and pitch are equally as important in finding a character’s voice and dialect as the actual sound shifts.

Idiolects:

Constructed Languages: