How to Fake a British Accent

Source:nytimes.com

To sound like a Brit, you’ll need a “flexible tongue tip,” and for that you must exercise, says Barbara
Berkery, a dialect and voice coach currently tutoring Geoffrey Rush on the Queensland set of the fifth
“Pirates of the Caribbean” film.

Americans have particularly lazy tongue tips. When Berkery is training an actor in a British accent, she
starts with a tongue boot camp of silent flicks and twists. There is a physicality to speech we prattling
adults often overlook.
“Babies learn to speak by watching us making shapes at them from their crib,” says Berkery, who advises
her clients to similarly study mouths while watching videos of politicians, like David Cameron, who have
perfected the British accent that linguists call “Received Pronunciation.”

BBC programs are also good primers. Americans speak with wide, almost grin like mouths. British speech
requires a dropped jaw and vertically open lips. (Imagine you are blowing kisses and then say the word
“swan.”) Clearly enunciate consonants. Don’t, for example, say T’s as D’s (it is “butter,” not “budder”).
“That’s a very American thing,” Berkery says. You should hear the full T at the end of “cat.”

Practice British consonants and vowels with repetitive ditties, like “Ten tiny typists tripped through the
tunnel”; after that, graduate to reading whole chapters of British novels aloud. Don’t run words together
as Americans do. Instead, each word needs what Berkery calls an “infinitesimal space” around it, which
will make you speak more slowly.

At a certain point, go undercover. Berkery trained Renée Zellweger to sound British for her role in the
movie “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” Before filming started, Zellweger used an alias to get a temp job at a
London publishing house where everyone assumed she was British. Order at a restaurant or ask to try on
clothes in a department store in your new patois. “Use the accent with strangers, otherwise you’ll never
get it,” Berkery says. Practice until nothing can jar you out of it, not even a sex scene or a close call with
an oncoming taxi.

Get good enough, and eventually you will be able to slip effortlessly into the accent. “It should be second
nature to you,” Berkery says.

boot camp a place for training soldiers

flick to move something with a short sudden movement
twist to turn something, especially repeatedly,
prattle silly talk about unimportant things
crib a small bed for a baby with tall sides
primer a basic text or visual method for teaching something
grin a big smile that shows your teeth
ditty a short simple song
trip to move with quick, gentle steps
temp a temporary office worker
patois language spoken by people in a particular area that is different from
the standard language of the country
jar to shock someone
close call a situation in which something bad, unpleasant, or dangerous almost happens,
but you manage to avoid it
slip to become free, or to no longer be held by something