3 RP Intonation Tricks for All of Your Acting

RP - Received Pronunciation - is also known as Standard British, Standard English, the Queen's English, and sometimes BBC English. It has changed a bit over time, just as all accents do, so there are both more classic and more modern versions of RP, but they do share a lot in common.

Some of these elements for actors learning Standard British are actually incredibly helpful for most actors to carry over into all of their acting, no matter the accent!

Learning Standard British

I grew up in Iowa, and with that mix of a Midwest accent and my theatre training, I speak in the range of what I call a Generican accent - roughly General American. It's basically the "no accent" version of an American accent.

This is also the accent that most American actors speak, to some degree, aiming for the nebulous "I don't know where you're from, but you're American" in the sound of it.

When American actors are learning RP, there are intonation elements that they need to learn, or it'll always sound like an American trying on a British accent without truly owning it.

RP Intonation Shifts

There are three big elements of RP intonation that are incredibly helpful for an American actors making the shift to Received Pronunciation that would actually serve them to bring back to their acting in their own accent.

The video above dives into these three major principles:

1) Take whatever their pitches are that you're operating on, and take the higher pitches much higher, and take the lower pitches a bit lower.

This is because Americans don't tend to use much of their pitch range, and this can make your acting rather flat... There's not a lot of variety. Often stretching your pitch range will also affect your acting itself, prompting you to make bolder choices moment to moment, and being more engaging for the audience. Always a good thing!

2) Be more selective with operative/stressed words, and make the stressed words more distinctly different from unstressed phrases.

It's very common for Americans, in addition to a limited pitch range, to limit the differentiation between what they stress and what they don't stress. This makes you a lot harder to understand, so creating a bigger distinction - and perhaps stressing fewer words - will likely make your ideas much clearer for the audience. (It often also makes the actor get clearer on their meaning and intention, as they have to be more selective.)

There are three primary ways to stress words: pitch, volume, and length. It's very common for actors to use higher pitches and louder volume to stress, but they often neglect elongating words to stress them - even though they do it in their own lives! And this kind of elongation is actually the most helpful way to allow the audience to follow the character's thoughts, so American actors typically neglect the most helpful stress characteristic.

3) Americans tend to drop off at the end of every phrase. I call this the American Clunk. It's as though you put a strong period at the end of each phrase, and it kills the forward energy!

I like to think of this as almost an airplane crash... You need to get in the habit of landing the plane instead of crashing it!

It's as though you're putting a period in the middle of thoughts, and those periods just drop off all the time. That would not be appropriate for RP.

It doesn't mean that everything has to end upwards. It actually means that you can actually go down, but when you go down, it shouldn't be a crash. It should be more of a landing.

Though it could also be more about treating the text as if you're going to go on, as though everything is a comma or semicolon with the intention of continuing - without defaulting to full-on uptalk.

That kind of American Clunk kills off the energy. And the audience often loses the ends of your thoughts, in addition to hearing you say "I'm done" over and over again.

Accent Toolkit

Learning an accent is often about more than just learning that one accent. You can learn skills from an accent that you can often apply to other accents. If nothing else, there are a lot of shared intonation elements from one accent to another, so you can be learning a lot about Caribbean accent intonation by working on the intonation for an Austrian accent.

You're actually also often expanding your sense of what you can play and how to play it, and that can even expand your sense of yourself and what you're capable of in your acting. Sometimes an accent demands something that you didn't know you had or simply haven't made much use of, and it can creep into the rest of your work - hopefully in a good way!

Accents Are a Door

Sometimes it can feel like an accent is a wall between an actor and a role. It may feel like it's keeping you from being cast, or even from auditioning in the first place. But accents can actually be a doorway into insights that can help you to find much more about your character, or even a gate that can open to give you access to new skills to bring to the craft.

If you're an actor who wants to learn an accent, check out the over 50 different sets of accent tutorials for actors on Accent Help. Each one comes with audio and written instruction, leading you through learning the accent, and lots of native speaker recordings to serve as examples for you to listen to as you develop your skills.