Thick Vocal Folds vs. Thin Vocal Folds

Accent Help coach Jim Johnson talks through the basics of how the vocal folds work, what impact this has on honesty, and how it affects some accents – or at least the process of learning an accent, such as a Northern Irish accent.

Vocal Fold Thickness & Vocal Tone

I actually wanted to talk about a couple of things with regards to the voice that does have impact on dialects and accents and also on speaking in general. The concept that I want to talk about is actually what's going on with your vocal folds, which are in your larynx, in your throat. One of the elements that can shift with regards to your vocal folds is that you can be talking with thin vocal folds or thick vocal folds, and they can also be in transition in between.

Now in general when people go to higher pitches, when they're talking, they tend to go to thin vocal folds. And when they're speaking on lower pitches, they tend to be on thicker folds.

You can actually speak with thicker folds up high, and you can speak on thinner folds down low. A lot of us will do the thin folds down low when we do our telephone voice. "Hey, how are you? I'm good, I'm good. Well let me, let me, I wanted to touch base with you about something." Where what we do is we go into the nice person voice, those thin vocal folds.

What it tends to do is actually it sort of robs you of authority in the moment. It also tends to make whatever you say less impactful, so it's not as strong of a statement to somebody else.

When you go up in pitch with thick folds, it'll actually tend to sound more like anger. So if you do thick folds and you take them up into this range, it's still fine, but if you start to go up into the danger sort of communication range, this is kind of the way that people tend to be when they're angry, right?

So the biggest thing that people often times have to work on for their speaking, in general, is actually allowing the thick folds as they speak. This is so true for actors. If somebody speaks on thick folds, we're going to hear more of that chest res, the low end of the voice, and I will bet you big bucks that you will be more believable if you speak on thick folds. And that's part of why this holds true for other kinds of speakers, whether we're talking about politicians or lawyers or teachers.

For you to actually speak on thick folds is going to make you much more believable and whatever you have to say is going to sound more like you're fully committed to it.

As opposed to what a lot of people give into which is just lightening up their voice going towards thinner folds, which just doesn't have the impact.

Vocal Fold Thickness & Accents

Now one of the ways that this impacts dialects is that there are some dialects that seem to rely a little bit more on thick folds. And certainly it's good to go to these thick folds when you're first working on the accent. For example, Northern Irish. The Northern Irish sound is a very different sound from much of the rest of Ireland.

It's actually very similar to Dublin as well, but it's kind of the extreme version. Dublin is almost like Northern Light to some degree. So this this Northern Irish accent tends to lean a little bit more towards the low end of the mouth, the low end of the pitch range, I should say, the low end of the resonance, remaining there, even as you go up on something. There seems to be thicker folds, in general for people when they're doing that accent, at least in the beginning, to get anchored into it.

So that's the difference between thick folds and thin folds, and the benefits that those can have for you.