All About Accents Dani Morse-Kopp
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- Education
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A podcast all about accents with linguist and accent coach Dani Morse-Kopp in conversation with her partner Lucas Morse, where they explore the wonderful world of accents.
Find out how to approach learning new accents, what it means to speak with an accent, what accent coaches do, and most importantly how beautiful accents are.
Produced by Dani Morse-Kopp and Lucas Morse, theme music created by Patrick Kopp.
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Accents and constructed language in “Dune: Part Two”
In this episode, Dani and Lucas share their thoughts on the many accents, voices and languages used in Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two”, including discussing Austin Butler’s amazing performance in this film as well as the nature of conlangs (= constructed languages) and the impact of using multiple languages with subtitles.
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Dialect design in historical dramas - "Oppenheimer"
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.
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How to make speech sounds - vowels
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 -
How to make speech sounds - consonants
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 -
The crux of accent work: pronunciation
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 -
The music of accents
Dani and Lucas talk about the music of accents and how different accent speakers use their voice in a wide range of different ways. They talk about how the music, rhythm and intonation vary between major accents, and they touch on what vocal fry is (and how it’s not just a feature of Valley Girl Talk). They also discuss what makes French such a great language for rap music.
Mentioned on this episode:
- Johnny Lee Miller in Trainspotting