The Art and Science of Accents and Dialects: Bridging Linguistics and Dialect Coaching

While a diversity of accents and dialects on stage and screen have been increasingly abundant in recent years, with less obvious favouring of standardised accents, in the current world climate it remains crucial to continue to celebrate the many sounds and colours of our languages, accents and dialects.

Building on the foundational work of linguist Professor Beatrice Szczepek Reed and dialect coach Anne Whitaker, this initiative will bridge the traditional gap between academic linguistics and applied voice coaching to investigate the production, perception, and social impact of accents and dialects in contemporary performance. The roundtable will be driven by the need for authenticity and inclusivity in the arts, addressing how linguistic diversity is represented and understood by both performers and audiences.

While the work of linguists and voice coaches have traditionally been very separate, the panel discussion brings the worlds of performance and academia together to explore the intersection of linguistics and dialect coaching. We will investigate perceptions of accents and dialects, and how collaboration between linguists and voice coaches can enhance authenticity and enrich performances.

Discussion will centre around the following three questions:

Question 1: Accents and authenticity: What does it mean to produce an ‘authentic’ accent/dialect as a performer? What could voice coaches learn from linguists about authenticity in accents and dialects?

Question 2: Accents and Audience: How are regional accents perceived? What can linguists tell us? What can (or should) voice coaches be doing about it?

Question 3: Is there a place for more collaboration between voice coaches and linguists? What would this look like in practice? (Final wrapping up question)

Chair

Louisa Morgan is a lecturer, voice teacher and researcher, with a special focus on spoken and sung emotion. Louisa lectures with Voice Study Centre (spoken voice lead) and teaches Musical Theatre students on the MA/MFA course at the Guildford School of Acting (GSA). Previously, Louisa taught technical singing at Italia Conti, and she was also a spoken and singing voice coach for the Acting students at the Cygnet Training Theatre.

Now based in London, Anne Whitaker's work as a voice coach spans professional coaching and conservatoire training programs including The Royal Central School for Speech and Drama, Mountview, and The Globe. As a voice coach she is always working to improve her practice through interdisciplinary research. Her specialism is in prosody, or the musicality of language.

Sterre Maier is a Dutch voice specialist with extensive experience in theatre, education and voice coaching, having taught and directed in South Korea, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, Romania, Bulgaria, Mexico and the UK. She gained a BMus in Musical Theatre in the Netherlands and has an MA in the Practice of Voice and Singing from the Guildford School of Acting. She specialises in voice and identity and has co-presented EAL Accent Coaching research at the VASTA conference in Leeds 2024 and for the BVA Talk Voice series. Sterre is Joint Head of Voice at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London. 

Beatrice Szczepek Reed is Professor of Linguistics at King’s College London, where she is the Co-Director of the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication. Beatrice studies spoken language, particularly the phonetics and phonology of natural conversation. For example, she has researched how speakers mirror each other prosodically in natural talk; how speakers of different accents of English use speech rhythm in conversation; and how ‘liaison’ exists not only in French but also in English and German

Ella Jeffries is a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Essex where she teaches on modules in the field of sociolinguistics. Ella’s main research focus is on children's developing awareness and attitudes towards different regional accents in the UK. She also works on topics of language and identity, language ideology and heritage language maintenance.

Nina Markl is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Analytics and Data Science and the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. She works at the intersection of sociolinguistics, speech technologies and AI ethics.  She is particularly interested in language variation and change and the impact of speech technologies on speech communities. More broadly, she is interested in understanding the socio-technical contexts and impacts of computing technologies, in particular machine learning and "artificial intelligence".

Presentations from students will be held between 2pm and 4:30pm leading up to the roundtable discussion from 5pm-7:30pm.

Deadline to submit an abstract for presentation: Friday 7^th October

Details: Title and brief description (maximum 400 words including references) in a Word document or PDF.

For VSC students, please send to:

research@voicestudycentre.com with the subject heading ‘dialect symposium’

For Essex students, please send to:

c.redmon@essex.ac.uk