All About Accents

In this episode, Dani and Lucas discuss Christopher Nolan’s latest work “Oppenheimer” by taking a closer look at the dialect and accent choices available when creating shows set in the past. They consider the trade-offs of historically accurate accents compared to modern-day accents, and apply this analysis to the accent work in "Oppenheimer", among other examples.

This episode is about how we produce vowels sounds with our speech muscles. Dani and Lucas make some more silly sounds trying to understand what our speech muscles are doing to produce vowel sounds for speech. We encourage everyone who’s listening to join us in this exercise and think about how YOU pronounce certain sounds. This exercise can be quite difficult, especially if (like most people) you’ve never thought about what your facial muscles are actually doing when you speak, so don’t worry if you’re finding it hard!

Mentioned on this episode and useful resources:

Simplified drawing⁠ of a person's face showing all important articulators

In this episode we focus on how we produce consonant sounds with our speech articulators. Lucas and Dani make lots of silly sounds trying to understand what our speech muscles are doing to produce consonant sounds for speech. We encourage everyone who’s listening to join us in this exercise and think about how YOU pronounce certain sounds. This exercise can be quite difficult, especially if (like most people) you’ve never thought about what your facial muscles are actually doing when you speak, so don’t worry if you’re finding it hard!

Mentioned on this episode and useful resources:

• Simplified drawing of a person's face showing all important articulators

In this episode, Dani and Lucas discuss how to approach new pronunciations of words when learning a new accent. They take a look at the sound inventories of different accents and highlight what tools you can use to change how you pronounce specific vowels and consonants, including the famous IPA (not the beer, sorry) and the super useful KIT list.

Mentioned on this episode (plus other useful resources):

• The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
• Lexical Sets - original source: Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• The IPA chart with sounds

SPOOOOOOKY SEASON – In this episode, Lucas and Dani chat about where the stereotypical “vampire” accent might come from by taking a closer look at some of the most famous depictions of Count Dracula on film.

Mentioned on this episode:

• Dracula (1931) & Bela Lugosi
• Dracula (1958)
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
• Mina’s Reckoning
• Interview With the Vampire (2022-)
• Hotel Transylvania (2012)
• Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897)