AccentHelp Blog

Received Pronunciation History

Received Pronunciation - commonly called RP or Standard British - is the accent most people mean when they say that they want to learn a British ac...

Flat-A Sound

More on the concept of “flat” with regards to voice and accents. Commenting on a question about the “Flat-A” sound and why even good speakers from ...

How to Speak with Thick Vocal Folds (Chest Resonance)

Recently I shared a vlog post about how to speak with thick vocal folds (as opposed to thin vocal folds) which increases chest resonance. A follow-...

Devoicing for Emphasis

I commented to a client about a tendency to devoice when emphasizing a word, and I thought I pass the clarification on to everybody on the blog. Th...

Nasality and the Soft Palate or Velum

More on the concept of “flat” with regards to voice and accents. Commenting on a question about the “Flat-A” sound and why even good speakers from ...

What does “flat” mean?

I mention flat intonation and vowel quality in the Boston materials, and a linguist wanted more detail on what exactly I meant by that, as the term...

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 accent...

Love Me Some Pittsburghese!

Gathering dialect recordings in Pittsburgh, I got even more hospitality than I would have expected, from free meals, some t-shirts, coffee mugs, an...

Gullah Accent Grub & Gab

Jim interviewed Joseph Legree Jr, a Gullah net maker from St Helena Island, SC, who shared insights into his culture, and allowed Jim to watch his ...

Flat Accents and Round Accents

A follow-up question from a reader about the varied ways that “flat” is used to describe accents: “Are there any accents for which the key concept ...

Lifting the Soft Palate – Reducing Nasality

Accent Help coach Jim Johnson goes further into how the soft palate (velum) works, and tricks and tips on how to lift it: The soft palate is especi...

Learning Accents: Nasality or Twang?

A lot of people think that an accent or dialect is nasal when it isn’t necessarily so! Often times we interpret twang in a voice as being a nasal s...

Listening to Cockney Accents

It’s a bit of a challenge to base dialect work in a play fully on accurate, native-speakers’ accents. This is a challenge with more working-class d...

Speak with a Canadian Accent

If you’re looking to learn a Canadian accent online, it’s important to figure out which Canadian accent you need to learn. Last summer I had the op...

French Canadian Accents & Schwartz’s Deli

French Canadian Accents We drove into Quebec to pursue recordings for the Canadian French accent. Much success! Happily, I met a number of Canucks ...

Iowa Accent

I was born in a small town in northwest Iowa called Newell. And when I say small, I do mean small: There are only about 900 people there. The popul...

Talk Radio – Southern Accents

Last summer at about this time, I was on my long drive across the southeast US: Left Texas and passed through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, a...

Accents of English

I do some SEO work on the site – “Search Engine Optimization.” I never used to know what that meant, and now that I know, I feel like I still don’t...

Lessons in AAVE from a Hitchhiker

I’m on the road! Summer dialect recording season has begun! I don’t know if I’m the only one who participates in this “season” but I’m certainly wi...

Dialect Recordings

I’m on the road again, in the midst of another dialect gathering trip. This time my main focus was Detroit, though I’ve been hitting lots of dialec...

Iowa Accents by Bike

Learning Iowa Accents One Town at a Time I just spent a week riding my bike across Iowa. Yeah, that’s a little crazy, but then I was joined by ove...

Vlogs & Blogs