Nurse Vowel for American and British Accents

Jim Johnson takes you through the challenge of how the "NURSE" vowel + R sound happens for many Americans, and how to shift your thought when dropping the R for a non-rhotic accent, such as Standard British or Received Pronunciation (RP).

Here's a transcript of the video:

I want to talk about the /ɝ/ sound for Americans trying to do the /ɝ/ sound in many British accents.

So the /ɝ/ sound on the vowel chart here, the vowel quadrilateral, it's represented by this turned epsilon that is the ER sound minus the R. So if I add the little diacritic that means rhoticity, which is R-ness, the element of R, this is what's commonly used for a word like "heard turn girl word." Okay? So this is that symbol.

And when Americans try to do British accents oftentimes it's a challenge for them to get that. They'll say "girl world word bird heard." And in order to try to get "heard bird" what I find really helpful for an American actor trying to get to it is for them to think of changing the sound to the turned V. So that the word "girl" may almost feel like it's a "gull" as in a seagull. Gull.

Now the reason that this works for American actors and wouldn't work for British actors is, recently I did a post on the turned V this symbol, the strut sound, and how it's so incredibly different for many Brits than it is for many Americans. That for most Americans we don't do the UH sound at the back, because if a Brit tried to take that note, they wouldn't necessarily say "gull." They would tend to say "gah, gahl." And then it wouldn't sound at all like "girl" or "world" "wuhld."

For an American though, "wuh." "What." "Wuhld." It sounds very close to the same thing because we do this turned V so far forward in the mouth, and that's one diacritic that I could use to indicate that it's happening further forward, because it tends to happen so far forward in the mouth for Americans, almost becoming the schwa.

Because of that, thinking of a word like girl, world or word or first or heard thinking towards "guhl wuhld huhd fuhst." That can oftentimes be a helpful change. So that girl sounding like a seagull for an American may make sense, though it may not make sense to someone from England.

There you go. A little trick for finding your way there.

For more info on accents in general check out AccentHelp.com.