大家来学习美国南部口音

Hello, I'm Gareth Jameson, I'm an actor and a voice coach from www.londonvoicelessons.com, here are some tips for working on your voice.

Now the key to any accent is to isolate the sounds that are specific to that accent. So for a Southern American accent we're going to start with the R sound. Now there are lots of variations on what is commonly called a Southern accent, there's quite an old fashioned one that doesn't have a letter R sound after vowels and there's a more modern one that does but we're going to work for the really old fashioned one that you'd hear in Tennessee Williams plays and that you might hear in something like 'Gone With The Wind'.

So for this unless an R is written before a vowel it isn't pronounced, listen to this. A green bird's brighter, a green bird's brighter. So you can hear the R in green and brighter, green and brighter, but then in birds you don't hear it, bird's, in green, a green bird's brighter.

Listen also to the sound that we get in words like bed and head and then words like bared and lair. Now in English they're very different with a British accent, e and air, but they become the same or very similar in a Southern accent, so when you say something like he bared his teeth in the bed, he bared his teeth in the bed sound exactly the same, bared and bed. Notice also as we said there is no R sound so in that word bared the R isn't pronounced - bared.

Our final sound and probably one of the most important ones for a Southern accent is I. The I in like and diner and hi, it becomes much more like an A in man, so we want hi, like, diner - hi there, everything alright? hi there, everything alright? And if you want to sound slightly less posh than some Southern Americans speakers you can take off the end T sound. So you might say hi there, everything alright? some might say hi there, everything alright? and they will have the T so that's up to you.