Accent Olympics is a fun way to get the ball rolling on developing your accent skills. Now, we can’t pretend that training for the Accent Olympics will leave you as physically fit as the real competition, but it will certainly leave you tongue dextrous and your mind in a state of readiness. It will also encourage your ear to listen carefully and intensively to every moment and every sound that you deliver.
Here’s how it works:
List 5 or the accents you feel you can have a decent go at. Remember, this need not be a public exercise, so any ‘bad’ attempts need not offend those with a native version of an accent you are attempting.
Practice each one of these accents by listening hard and mouthing along with the speaker you are modelling your accent on.
Go from level 1 to level 10 in each accent. This allows for flexibility and a willingness of the tongue and the rest of the vocal tract to be flexible, and offers opportunities for transitions between accents. For example, although French and Liverpudlian don’t appear to share anything on the surface with regards to their accents, there is one notable shared feature, which is the velar fricative <x>. In French, this might be used to represent an /r/, while in Scouse, it could replace a /k/ in the majority of English accents. Moments such as these shared sounds are ideal times to seamlessly transition from one sound to another.
See if you can have a go, and get back to us with any challenges you found along the way!
The Accent Centre 