Jeremy talked recently to expert dialect coach Paul Meier on working with film actors, coaching musicals and the Top Tip for changing dialect. The interview includes a downloadable soundfile excerpt (mp3) of Paul demonstrating the differences between Standard British and Standard American.

Beginnings

Jeremy: First of all, you’re probably known more in this country as a dialect coach. How did you get into dialect coaching, because it’s a rather unusual field?

Paul: It started very early. I was one of those obnoxious children who mimicked everybody they heard. When we moved to London I was exposed to many different ways of speaking English. I’d had to change my own dialect a couple of times for expedience’s sake or some perceived social advantage. Then when I went to Drama school and discovered phonetics, suddenly there was an academic basis or justification for all that class clowning and mimicry that I’d done surreptitiously. The world of stage dialects was very natural to me, and I ate up phonetics with great gusto and put it to work right away in terms of transcribing dialects and analyzing them. I wasn’t long out of drama school before I was teaching it.

Jeremy: So ultimately it’s a fascination with sounds. Do you think then that dialect reflects character?

Paul: Oh, absolutely. We all have an idiolect, and I think the way we choose to speak, it’s not something that is thrust upon us – we are co-creators of our idiolect. Two brothers brought up in the same house, same social background, might very well end up speaking in quite different styles.

Jeremy: My brother and I do. And my sister as well. We all speak slightly differently.

Paul: So that reflects the way we feel about ourselves, the kind of face we want to present to the world, how secure we are within ourselves, I’m sure, how much we feel we have to adapt to our surroundings in order to not be beaten up!

Jeremy: I think I can relate to that one!

Paul: I have an uncle whose dialect was invariable. No matter who he was with, no matter where he was, no matter what the conversation, he was always in the same code. I never heard him ‘break code’. It was one monolithic version of uncle Bertie and that’s what you got all the time. I’d know from a very early age that I was completely the opposite. I would morph into something else. If I was with very working-class people I would more want to sound like them, with upper-class people I would want to sound like them. I wondered was there a real me somewhere!

Jeremy: And is there?

Paul: I don’t know, I think there is. I’ve got more and more comfortable with being what I actually am but of course dialectically I’m in no-man’s land. Americans take me for British, British take me for American. I’ve got this “Hi, I’m from nowhere” kind of a voice which has its commercial uses. In this time of global English - I think there is an emerging global English; it’s not American, it’s not English, it’s not Aussie, it may be Asian, Middle East.

Jeremy: That’s a very good point. There are so many influences because we have the internet, we have television, we have film. And then we have huge Hollywood influences but now huge Bollywood influences as well, And it’s across the board for music in that we’re now getting international musical influences, Which I think is great, fascinating.

What’s the big IDEA?

Jeremy: I want to go to your big IDEA. Tell me about IDEA.

Paul: I found myself called to Hawaii to coach a leading actor in the Flemish accent he needed in the movie, playing Father Damian, the Belgian priest. And I had no time to prepare or collect Belgian samples. I was in Hawaii at three days’ notice with no preparation other than my memory of how Flemish-speaking Belgians sounded, And I thought wouldn’t it be great if there was some kind of online archive, so no matter where you were in the world, if you had a laptop and a reasonable connection, you could listen to categorised samples. And when I got back from that gig I started IDEA with the help of a really bright and technically savvy student of mine. Started in 97-98 as a result of that idea.

Jeremy: And it’s a great idea – it’s such a great resource. I’ve used it myself. I have a question though. You’ve been doing this for some time now. Do you have an inbuilt catalogue of dialects that you can just go into your memory or muscle banks and go “Ah yes, it’s this”, or do you still need to refer to recordings of original speakers.

Paul: Oh, I use IDEA all the time as a resource. I’m called upon to coach a huge variety of accents and dialects. And with the proper resources there’s no dialect or accent in the world that I could not undertake to coach. I’m coaching dialects I’ve never worked with before quite frequently. But I’m confident with the internet, not only IDEA but other internet resources, can quickly reveal what you need. You go to YouTube for example and you want someone in East Timorese, and bam, you can pull up two or three of those people, jot down the signature sounds, catch onto the prosody of it. Having done so many dialects for so many years, I’m very quick at picking up a new one. I rely on primary sources all the time.

Jeremy: I know, because we have your dialect books with CDs sitting on the piano, and we find them so useful, one of the things that fascinates me is how clearly you’ve broken things down for the dialect learning. Was that something you did automatically or did you have to work that out?

Paul: I’ve been doing this for nearly 40 years. What you see on your piano stand is a life’s work that’s constantly being refined. Much cruder, much earlier versions of that I was using to teach at City Lit straight out of drama school. But the basic approach to finding signature sounds, or what we used to call substitutions (I no longer use that term), finding the footprint of a dialect, that’s really the heart of it all along. But refining each dialect, what information do you need, what exercises do you need to climb into another sound, Liverpool, Manchester, or Birmingham Alabama. Signature sounds – that coupled with more elusive prosodic features, the hard-to-pin-down melody, cadence, stress patterns. Those are harder to pin down but they are 50% of the job.

Jeremy: Well you do see on film certain actors and actresses who you know are doing all the “correct” pronunciation and yet not living inside the ‘race’, let’s say.

Click here to read page 2 of Paul's interview