Flightless Bird: American Accents

He was one of the best pizza guys ever in New York. Like, someone in New York sounds different to someone in Philadelphia. New York might say they have the best sub sandwiches here, or stuff like that. Subway, not to offend anybody, compared to the real Italian hoagies, it's not even close. And the Americans in New York and Philly definitely sound different to the Americans in, say, the Everglades.

Hell, I was seven, eight years old, I was off on my own, you know? Same with, like the fishing. I had a boat before, I had a driver's license. And that's different to how locals sound in a small town out of Oklahoma City that had just been hit by a tornado. Where are you from?

I'm from New Zealand. New Zealand? Oh, wow, man, you've been walking far, eh? Even up in the attic, where we make this show, everyone sounds wildly different. Throw up very loudly.

I mean, loudly, loudly, loudly. And the dough ferments longer than New York style. Oh my god! I'm going to be honest, half the time on this show, I don't know what anyone's really saying. My New Zealand ear's desperately trying to filter these strange, wonderful voices all around me.

I want to start trying to make sense of this weird mess, and try and find out what the hell everyone's saying. So get ready to figure out what your tongue's up to, and how you're moving those lips, because this is the Accent Episode.

Flightless, flightless, flightless. bird, touchdown in America.

I'm a flightless bird, touchdown in America.

We're always talking about my accent so much, I thought, why don't we turn the tables and listen to your weird, strange voices that often don't make sense to me. This is really fun. I'm very excited for this episode. What's your favorite accent? An American accent that just sounds the best to you?

Southern accents feel familiar to me, so I like them. But I'm always so fascinated by Midwest accents, when they're like. Wisconsin, is so specific. Or did anyone watch that show with Kate Winslet? Mayor of Easttown?

Yes! I think it's in Philly or something. Yeah, it's Pennsylvania. Okay, Pennsylvania is so specific. The ones that have these teeny, tiny variations.

Yeah, and I find some of them sound, I guess not coming from here, some of them just sound like I'm in a TV show. So whenever I hear a Boston accent, I can't think, oh, that's just a Boston accent. I feel like I'm in a show, because it's so distinct. And for some reason, I think there's just a lot of things based in Boston that I end up watching. Yeah.

And it doesn't seem real to me. Feel a little haunting. And I think I'm getting used to LA. I think LA feels sort of normal-ish to me now. And the other thing that's so interesting is that if any New Zealander leaves New Zealand and gets an American accent, New Zealand turns on them.

They hate it. Oh, really? They hate it. I think Lorde one time rolled an R on a word, and New Zealand was like, uh-oh. New Zealand needs a chill.

We do need to chill. Yeah, it's pretty funny. So yeah, there's that aspect to it as well that I find very funny. What would be the one American accent you wouldn't want to have? Oh, no.

I can't. That's really mean, and I'm not doing it. Good answer. You think LA has an accent? Yeah, it's sort of stone and slow.

And everyone says, I guess it's more dialect, but people say like a lot. Oh, like valley or surfer, I guess? Yeah, it's like I'm watching Point Break. Everyone's just like a bit like, yeah. Do you have the inclination to repeat an accent if you're hearing a really strong one?

Yeah. Actually, this is interesting. When I was watching a lot of Friends, I've talked about this a little bit, I started picking up a bit of their accents, I guess, which was a bit American. I really idolized Ross. I thought he was really cool, even though he was quite annoying.

I was going to say he doesn't really have an accent, but maybe it's a teeny bit New York. I don't even know what it is. I just remember I started to talk a little bit like his accent. Try it. Let's close our eyes.

Oh, no, no. I couldn't do it now. It was just something that happened at the time. If I could, I would. It was this weird thing where people called me out on it at school, like, why are you talking funny?

It was because I was watching so much Friends and I thought they were so cool. I had that cat called Chandler. Bing, started talking like them. They were so cool. They are so cool.

Ross says his real New York accent comes through once in a while in Friends. Doesn't say what he's actually trying to be in Friends. No one is trying. ... I think you're a little confused in that you think everyone has an accent.

They do. No. Oh, yeah. Every American has an accent. No.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have an American accent. Yeah. But we're not doing either Southern or Californian or Boston. There's also general ...

There's mixtures of things. Yeah. But no one's ... But generally, you'll have an accent from, where you're from, kind of, like where you grew up. That will absorb, right?

Yeah. But you're saying he's trying to do an accent. He's not. He's just being him. You want to know this?

I was just reading Twitter. It said an accent that comes through is New York. Right. But ... As if he's trying to talk it down slightly.

But you think that's just David Shrum's voice? Is Ross's voice the same? That's what I'm saying. All these actors, they're just talking the way they talk. In Friends, they are.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not doing character work. Yeah, they're not character work. Oh, no, no.

Totally. I don't know what the fuck that answer was saying. It was just like, oh, I don't even know. A lot of theater actors, which he is one, learn to give very standard American. Oh, so maybe that's what it was saying.

He's got more of a New York accent in real life, but in Friends, he maybe tries to make it a bit more standard. Is that what they maybe meant? Well, he probably speaks standardly at this point in life, but maybe in his early age, he had more of a New York accent because that's where he's from, so he's probably diluted that over time. And then certain words ... I have that.

I see. I mean, I'm from the South. Yeah. So your voice has changed? Your accents changed over the years, do you think?

Since you moved to LA? I mean, every now and then, I'll have a Southern pop-up, but it's not ... For me, I speak very standard American accent, I think. You sound ... Yeah, I guess it is?

standard. What do you think it is? I think you kind of talk like someone from LA. It feels like LA, but maybe I'm getting LA confused with standard American. It's got like a lilt to it or something.

I don't know. It's like a good accent. Hmm. I don't know. I don't think I have an LA accent because I didn't grow up here.

Yeah. Maybe you've absorbed bits of it as you've been here, do you think? Or do you think you've lost the Georgian, though? Because I grew up in the suburbs, I never really had a Southern accent, but there are words I'll give you up. I used to say y'all all the time.

I don't anymore. Bring that back. Please bring that back. I don't even know where it went. I don't know.

Oh my God. I didn't do it on purpose, but it did go away. Yeah, y'all is good. It's making a comeback, though, because of pronouns. Like, I use y'all now instead of you guys.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Oh, just as a, yeah, catch everything kind of a phrase. Yeah, y'all. Bring y'all back.

I miss it. Y'all's good. I like hearing it from an outsider that you think we have at, well, I do hear Rob's, but I obviously can't. Yeah, Rob doesn't sound like LA to me. You sound like LA, Rob sounds like, I guess, Chicago.

You do sound Chicago. Do you hear it, or can you not hear your own? Now I'm wondering. I can't really hear it. No.

Really? That's the other thing. None of us will even like listening back to our own voices. That's always a weird thing to do as well. And maybe that's just because we don't like hearing our odd little accents or something.

Do you think I sound LA? No, I don't think you sound Georgian though. No, I don't. I can hear it a lot in Canadians. There's like certain vowels that it's like, oh, you said, sorry.

Yep. Or a boot. A boot. Yeah. And Dax has words for sure that are very Midwestern.

Yeah. I mean, you all three of you sound so, so different to each other. It's great. I mean, it's distinctive and wonderful. It's a great thing.

My mom has a strong Southern accent. You talked to her. Yeah, I did. Yeah. She's got a great voice.

So yeah, I never sound like her. I've never sounded like her because suburbs dilute you. I hit the street as I like to do from time to time and I wanted to talk to a bunch of Americans about different accents and I went up to Griffith Observatory so you get a lot of different Americans coming from all over America to the one place. Yeah. Did you go to PB&J?

Not this time. No. It was shut. From Trails? Yeah.

From Trails. It was closed. I was just wondering what you think the best American accent is. The best? You couldn't even understand me.

The best American accent is just Southern. No, no, no. What are your accents? What are you? Yeah, I'm from LA.

I'm from the Bay Area. I'm from Chicago area. What do you think is the best American accent? If you were stuck on an island and you had to listen to one American accent for 10 years, what would it be? I like myself, you know, so mine.

Specifically my voice. No.

It's a little bit like that. It's got a little bit of an upturn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What's the best American accent? do you think? I like Brooklyn, a good New York, tough gangster style. That's quite funny. I'm a Canadian.

Sorry. Do you have a favorite American accent?

Not really, because I don't really, I don't really know. The best American accent. I'd probably say a Texan accent. What do you like about that? It establishes strength.

I don't know. It's just compared to like how we talk in LA with like, like, like, like them. It's just like, I don't know. It's very tough. What's your accent?

I'm a Californian accent, for sure. Like typical LA person. I say the in front of the freeway names. I say like, like 25 times, like. I actually quite enjoy New York accents.

I quite like the pronunciation of some of the vowels and stuff. So I would say New York. And where's your accent from? I'm actually from Iceland. I think the best American accent is something in the South.

It sounds very cultured. It sounds American. I would say LA is also good just because I live in LA and that's the accent I hear often. But I would say something in the South. You know, when you hear someone like Matthew McConaughey speak, it does something, you know.

It's the best. It's the best. What's your accent? Well, I'm from Chicago. Most people say they don't hear an accent when I talk.

Maybe the best one so far. I like South, like New Orleans. I like New Orleans accent. I think the best American accent is the New England, like the sort of the old New England, like Maine. Like, not Boston.

Boston's great. But that sort of like classic New England accent, I think, is the best one. It's great. Where's your accent from? So I'm originally from the North.

I'm from Montana. So people say that we have sort of a Midwestern meets Canadian accent. When I go around America, or even I live in the UK. now, people oftentimes think that I'm Canadian, with inflections and tone and things. But yeah, I think Montana is a bit different in that regard.

But we don't... It's a good accent. We don't say we have an accent. We just sound like we're from Montana. What do you think is the best American accent?

The best American accent? Southern, of course.

What's the worst? Probably Boston. Where do you think my accent's from? Don't know. And I hate to guess.

Can you pick where my accent's from out of curiosity? British. Where would you think my accent is from if you could guess? You can each guess.

Australian.

New Zealand? I was going to say Scottish, but that's wrong. Kiwi. Correct.

People found that really difficult to get my accent. I got two people out of maybe 20 said New Zealand. I'm really bad at accents too. I'll say, I find it so hard to know. It's hard to know.

They're hard to do. There must be some sort of fun thing online where you can listen to a bunch and pick. I think this could be a fun game.

Also, this is interesting to me. I think I'm learning something. I always thought the excessive likes, which I am. definitely. I do that as well.

It's a problem in New Zealand. It's a huge problem. I thought that was more age, like of an A. It is a generational thing. I thought.

I didn't think it was LA. In New Zealand, it's definitely a younger person thing, but I think that's been picked up off social media. Probably from America, because that's what we're plugged into. Right. How did it take off here?

I think it's generational. Is it? instead of saying, um, pretty much? Yes. We had Valerie Friedland, a linguist, on Armchair.

It was such an interesting episode talking about all of this and these, what I call vocal tics. Yes, she said, different generations have evolved. They've turned words into other words, basically.

Like, there's a word for it that I obviously forgot. You're waiting. Your brain is ticking over, and so your mouth blurts something out, right? Yes, it's sort of a transition word. I'm mortified sometimes when I listen back to this show, because I like to think that like was okay.

I like to think I'd eliminated it. I know. Then sometimes, especially if I get excited and animated, the likes just start coming out all the time. It's like, oh my God. If I'm interviewing out in the field and I'm a bit nervous, the likes are piling up.

Yes, but you know, we edit those out. If you're hearing them, that's just one random crop in. Oh God, it's constant. It is for me too, especially when I'm editing the fact checks. I find it very embarrassing for myself.

Yeah, I had a mentor in New Zealand in the newsroom, John Campbell, and whenever I would come up with a like, he'd grab my arm. I just did it again. It gets out of hand when you start overthinking it. And just tell me off for doing it. Okay, did you find the game?

Okay, guess my U.S. accent. It's a BuzzFeed one. Please call Stella. Southern.

Yeah, that's like Oklahoma or Texas. Six pounds of fresh snow peas. Five thick slabs of blue cheese. Sounds like that Bale Bonds guy you talk to in Oklahoma. You think that's Oklahoma?

I would say Georgia. Our options are Florida, South Carolina, Texas, or Arkansas. Oh, okay, South Carolina. No, that's wrong. I'm going Arkansas.

Arkansas is correct. Wow. Well, you already knew it wasn't South Carolina. That's too far east. Okay.

No. Okay, listen to this. Please call Stella. Ask her to bring those things with her from the store. So the question is, which regional food represents this woman's hometown?

A Brooklyn pizza? A Maine lobster roll? A Los Angeles taco? A Louisiana baguette? I don't know how to say that.

Baguette. Baguette, yeah. Okay, Brooklyn pizza. Yeah, that's easy. Correct.

She's from Brooklyn. Okay, here we go. Next one. Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store.

Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother, Bob. That's so standard to me. Is that Chicago? Okay, so your options are California, Colorado, Michigan, or North Carolina. California.

I'm going to go Michigan just because it sounds normal to me. Let me hear it one more time. Michigan is close to the Midwest for me. So if it sounds regular. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.

She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station. You still think North Carolina? No, Michigan. Michigan, okay. It is California.

Yeah, that sounds like me, I think. Yeah, it does sound a bit like you. Orange County. Orange County, very rich. Okay, here we go.

Okay, we'll do a couple more. Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store. Midwest. Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother, Bob.

Okay, options. Which of these baseball teams is from this woman's hometown? I got this. The Washington Nationals, the Philadelphia Phillies, the New York Yankees, or the L.A. Dodgers?

I'll play a bit more. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station. Can we get the teams again? The Washington Nationals, the Philly Phillies, the L.A.

Dodgers, or the New York Yankees? Philadelphia. You think Philly? I'm going Washington. Okay, it is Philadelphia.

Wow, good job, Rob. Yeah, Philly. It's just a process of elimination. That's kind of subtle. This is great.

Okay, now, how about this accent? Take this one in. Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store. Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her.

So the question is complicated. The question is, is this nice lady from Texas? Yes, or definitely not, but she's from a southern state, but definitely not Texas. Oh, let me hear it one more time. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.

She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station. Wednesday. I don't think it's Texas. Yeah, I don't think it's Texas either. I think it's southeast.

It's Texas. No. Yeah, I mean, look.

BuzzFeedNews.com, they're pretty good. Do? they say Wednesday? It says she's from Texas. I think they say that in Mississippi, Wednesday.

Okay, last one. She could be here all day. All right. Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store.

Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. The question, I do like how BuzzFeed does this. When this lady walks her dog, what does she see? Does she see a barn in Oklahoma, these train tracks from Indiana, this boat in Mississippi, or this tree in South Carolina? Let me hear it one more time.

We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags. Okay, so you think train tracks in Indiana is what she sees when she goes on a walk? What are the other options? There's a big red barn in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma, maybe. There's a tree in South Carolina, or there's a boat in Mississippi. It's not Mississippi. I don't know South Carolina well enough. I need to hear it one more time.

I'm sorry. No, it's all right. I mean, I have no clue, so this is fascinating for me. Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store.

Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, five thick slabs. that doesn't sound southern. The old age is throwing this off, I think, too. Yeah, that makes me think it is a southern. I'm going to go Indiana still.

All right. Okay, the correct answer is Mississippi. It was the boat in Mississippi, apparently. This is not true. Wednesday was Mississippi.

This is not. It says, this dear lady's, southern twang is from Mississippi, which also falls under the umbrella of southern American English, according to linguists. Wow. Yeah. Well, then, I wonder what the difference between South Carolina and Mississippi.

To me, Mississippi is extremely southern. Right. That's why this doesn't seem right. It didn't seem that intense. Yeah.

Maybe the oldness was throwing us. I think that's it. Ages. When you get old, your voice does do different things. Why did they do that?

They should have had the same lady do all of them. It's all the accents. Well, what a journey. That was fun. I love games.

All right. I put together a little documentary trying to understand the accent. Would you like to listen? Yes. To it?

Okay.

I did some Googling, and experts say when it comes to speaking English, in America, there are roughly 30 different dialects. That's a lot, considering there are about 160 English dialects on planet Earth total, meaning that about 20% of them are found in America. Dialects are a combination of accents, how words are said, along with vocab and grammar, like how some Americans say pop and others say soda. I don't want to get into the weeds of vocab. That's a different episode.

In this episode, I want to explore how Americans say things, accents. Not only do I want to understand what Americans are saying, I want to better understand myself. I'd love to just know your name and what it is that you do. I'm Joel Goldies, and I'm a dialect coach. I principally work with actors in the entertainment industry, and I'll also often work with people who are in the corporate world or have some highly motivated reason to change their accent, whether they're not being well understood at work or they do.

a lot of public speaking, attorneys, doctors, sometimes. I had one guy who found he was not making himself easily understood in emergent situations. He's an OBGYN. So it's a real spectrum of folks that I work with. Folks.

Such an American word to use when talking about people. And, as he just said, I'm speaking to Joel Golds, a man whose entire job is to help people take on other accents, including the American accent, which is why I wanted to have him on this episode, to break down what makes up an American accent. The American accent is very peculiar in that we treat sounds in certain ways that don't happen in lots of other accents around the world. But one sort of cliche is that the American accent tends to be expressive on vowels and diphthongs, the two vowels together. Whereas you might say an English accent is much more reliant on consonant sounds.

Where's your accent from? What is your accent? What part of America is this? I grew up in Northern California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, just north of that, in Sonoma County, a little town called Sebastopol. When I went to grad school, all the seven members of my class and I had to read and record this story that I now use to collect accents.

So it's got all the sounds of spoken English. There's several of these stories out there, sounds and sound combinations. And my professor said, OK, you've got a little bit of this. It's typically California, and you're dropping consonants at the ends of words. I think I did a thing that I actually heard in a clip of Rob speaking that you sent me.

Instead of saying running with an N on the back of the tongue, going up, I would say runny and make an EEN kind of sound. I found that's very typical of sort of the Southwest U.S., the Bay Area, certainly Southern California, Arizona. But it's with accent stuff, a lot of it gets shipped out because of the media. So there are things that people do all over the country that they may be learning from TV, film, TikTok, YouTube, this kind of thing. Giant networks like Netflix, alongside social media, are changing how the American accent moves and shifts.

Traditionally, accents follow geographical boundaries like hills and mountains, much more so than actual state boundaries. In America, they're being dictated the most by settlement patterns. That's why there's more accent diversity. on the East Coast. It was settled first.

People have been there longer and there are more people packed in, and accents have had time to form and change. In the middle of America, you get similar accents across multiple states. And by the time you hit the West Coast, there are far less accents. You might say the Pacific Northwest, maybe Seattle or Portland, where there's not a lot of discernible differences. It used to be called General American.

Then a bunch of speech people realized that you can't say general. So it's now called so-called General American. Region-free, you could call it a broadcast accent. So that's fairly middle of the road. And then accents, maybe of the barrier islands in the Carolinas, very strong accents that were influenced by English sailors that came over and then have been isolated from the mainland for centuries.

These accents have been allowed to develop there without a lot of influence from outside. But typical phrases. people from there are supposed to say, hoitoiters. I think it's somebody who comes from outside as a hoitoiter, a high titer, I would say. Before I talked more to Joel about the American accent, I wanted to double-check his qualifications when it came to accents in general.

So the biggest thing I've worked on recently is The Woman King with Viola Davis, who took me with her to South Africa. I had coached her as Michelle Obama in the Michelle Obama section of The First Lady, which was a series on Showtime, and ended up coaching the whole cast of that and then ended up coaching almost the whole cast of The Woman King. And that was a very exciting thing to do. Very wonderful to be in South Africa. I'd never thought about this before, the idea of someone on set helping actors prepare to sound a certain way, to speak in a certain accent.

I went back and watched some clips on YouTube, and listened a bit harder to Viola Davis in Woman King. Train. hard, fight, harder.

We fear no one. And then, Viola, as Michelle Obama. I want you to punch this pillow as hard as you can. Obviously, you're mad. Trust me, I understand.

To my untrained ear, at least, the accent sounded solid. Joel knew his stuff. The other big thing I've done recently was a musical called Come From Away, which is set in Gander, Newfoundland, this tiny town on the big island in the northeast of Canada, to which 38 jet planes were grounded on 9-11, when the U.S. airspace was closed. There were these 7,000 passengers and crew.

that sort of invaded Gander and these towns around it, and has 12 actors playing about 80-some characters. So it tells passenger stories and stories of the folks who took them in. So everybody in the cast had to learn a Newfoundland accent, which is a funny mix of Irish and a bit of French and a bit of mainland Canada. And then also there's a couple of English characters, a guy from Uganda, New Yorkers, Texans. So it's a real gamut, 12 or 14 or 15 accents.

All jobs have different levels of stress, right? I feel like some jobs you do would be one accent you're dealing with. The musical you just described sounds incredibly stressful because you're just dealing with a lot of different accents and dialects. Is that how it works with the jobs you do? Some are just like a nightmare and some are so easy?

I wouldn't use the term easy, because it's always stressful to be on set, and that's always quite pressure-filled, because time is very short and there are a lot of variables involved. But sometimes, if I'm working with someone on an American accent, the project I've just finished involved several actors from the UK and from South Asia. That's easier, we do some prep when we can, but then we run it before they shoot and then I step in and give them little notes while they shoot. I wondered what his main challenge is in teaching people various American accents. And essentially it comes down to the challenge of what accent you use in your own life.

The brain tends to filter what we hear through the sounds of our original accent. So I'm going to try to make this fit, something that you've said on a podcast that I listen to. When you say litter box, which Monica interpreted as a trash bin, and you were thinking of a letter box, your brain had blocked you from hearing that. Americans don't say i for litter, we say e like dress. We don't say e like kid, we say e like dress for letter.

So that led to some confusion. And that's often. what I work with professional people on, is helping them speak in a way that Americans will understand them, because we're quite lazy as listeners. So we have to have things given to us in a very specific way in order to understand them. So I found that what I have to do is teach someone how to make a new sound.

And I use this vowel chart. that's on my website. It's a simple chart that I've adapted for my own purposes. It shows where the tongue moves in the mouth to make various vowel sounds. And that's principally what we do to change vowels.

as we move our tongue around. The jaw and lips come into play a bit. But once they start to make the new sound, then their brain forms new neural pathways, which it turns out we're all generating hundreds of every day. And that learning new language, and I'm going to extend that to accents, turns out to be one of the most efficient ways to learn them. So once these new neurons get into place, they start to hear differences.

I just had this experience yesterday with a client who grew up in Georgia. A lot of Americans from the South, and it's traveled all over the country, but instead of using the vowel sounding dress to say pen or men or remember, that middle syllable of remember, or strength, they'll use an I sound and say pen, men, remember, remember, and strength. Americans only tend to do that when there's a word that has that S sound, followed by a sound that goes through your nose, like an N or an M, or the sound mm, all right? So we do it less than you might in a Kiwi accent. So we've been working on this.

I've worked with this guy for a while, and then things happen. He's come back. Time in between is a huge benefit sometimes, because people can go off and play with his stuff on their own, and their ears are learning to hear new sounds that they may never have heard before. So it gets easier. So we worked on this a while back, but now he's really starting to distinguish between pen and pin.

And so one has to practice this stuff in a very conscious way every day for a few minutes, a couple of minutes at a time. Time in between is important. And then try it out, listening to people who have the target accent, trying to imitate not what he might think he hears, but what's actually there.

Stay tuned for more Flightless Bird. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

Flightless Bird is sponsored by BetterHelp. Now, shortly after this episode goes to air, I'm heading back to New Zealand to spend time with my family over Christmas. It's going to be intense. I want to see them, but my parents and I can last about two days before things get tense. Hairy.

Stressful. I know this dynamic well, but I do, I will say, I always schedule therapy for before I leave, for one during my time and then right when I'm back, because I need to process this shit. Yeah. Well, I know, at Christmas time, I'm never going to get my birthday gift and my Christmas gift because it's combined. I literally have talked about that with my therapist before.

No, because it's like presents of love, right? And suddenly one of these is being revoked. And, like your birthday becomes part of Jesus's thing. And it's one gift. It's like, who do you love more, Jesus or me?

Oh, this is serious. Anyway, everything's fine. It's fine. But it's good. You're working it out.

If you're thinking of starting therapy over this crazy holiday time, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to whatever your schedule is. You fill out a really quick questionnaire and you get matched with a therapist. And you can just switch therapists if you want to, for no additional charge. In the season of giving, give yourself what you need with BetterHelp.

Visit BetterHelp.com slash bird today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. slash bird. Flightless Bird is brought to you by Aura. Now, holidays are hectic and not everything goes as planned.

But one thing that I'm planning, that I know is going to go well, I'm giving my mom and dad an Aura frame. And that way, when I go back to L.A. and they remain in New Zealand, I can just send them fun photos to their frame. That's the coolest part. That will be magically updated.

You can update it over time, which is really cool. Yeah, yeah. It's a really good gift for any occasion. Yeah, I've handed out quite a few Aura frames. now.

It is sort of your thing. Honestly, if you go to a party and you give someone an Aura frame and they plug it in and you're all there and the photos start playing, it's a good party trick. And it's very thoughtful because you do take the time to put in lovely images. You take the time. One time I messed it up and put the wrong photos on the wrong frame.

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Learning an accent sounds like learning a new language, practice, and letting those new neural pathways connect. What's the most difficult American accent to teach people? Well, Boston springs to mind very quickly. Well, Boston almost sounds like a cartoon. I feel like when people are doing a Boston accent, it doesn't sound real.

Well, the show that I just finished working on was set not that far from there. So I had a lot of people from the crew, when they found out I was dialect coaching, oh, are you going to make us look bad? Somebody posted on a message board that I'm on some years ago, they said, sometimes the best Boston accent is no Boston accent, signed the people of Boston. So we endeavored to keep it very localized to where we were. And if you watch a movie like Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams does a Boston accent, but it's quite light.

He's not hitting us on the head with it. For me, I also struggle a bit with the speed at which people talk. Slower American accents I can understand better. How much is speed a part of an accent? Because what I love about the South and when I've been there, it's just such a slow delivery and other areas, I think New York feels very fast.

How much. is speed a part of an accent? Or are they separate things? No, definitely related. And I used to sort of ignore speed and pitch change, which is often grouped together as prosody.

Very important aspects of an accent. The stereotype of the South is that it's hot and it's humid. So one doesn't want to expend a lot of energy doing anything, much less talking. So we hear the tongue move from its relaxed place to the target vowel, like saying you, not you and me, but you and me, you and me. And it took me years to look at the word draw, but that actually just means lengthening.

So sounds do get drawn out in Southern accents, and that might be an aspect of the environment. All Joel thinks about is accents. He tells me he's been listening to Flightless Bird a lot while the writer's strike was on. Work for him was slower. And he's even been breaking down our accents.

I did find myself wondering, does his job as a dialect coach and his obsession with accents ruin entertainment for him? Can he watch or listen to anything ever again in peace? Are you watching shows and the accents are just taking you in and out of it so much more than it would for a typical viewer like me? Absolutely. I'd rather not know, quite frankly.

I'd rather not know if someone's an English actor doing an American accent or something. But when it's bad, it must really grate you. I can't watch it lots of times. It's a huge turnoff. Years ago, when the series True Blood premiered on HBO, I heard about it and thought, oh, I'll check this out.

And that show was set in a fictional town in Louisiana, and the accents were just all over the map. And I couldn't take it. What are they going for? Why isn't it unified, I thought. So I watched about 10 minutes and turned it up.

Of course, years later, I was hired to work on that show a few times and realized, I mean, there were hundreds of actors on that show because it ran for so long. And they came from all over the world. The lead, Anna Paquin, I think one of the leads was a Kiwi. Absolutely. Right.

Yeah. And they would only have a coach in when an actor was having particular difficulty. I went in to work with one, and we did the southern accent, Louisiana accent, that was sort of the target. And after a few episodes, I guess, they tried it without having a coach on set. And then they just changed the accent of the character to be the actor's natural accent.

So they were like, OK, we don't want to spend the money, which is often the case.

I remembered watching True Blood at the time, Monica, and I thought the accents, everyone just sounded so wildly different. I sort of remember thinking that at the time, weirdly. Really? I never saw it. It's a good show.

I can't watch too much of it because it's got scary characters with big animal heads on, which is my main fear in life. Oh, yeah. So I got really scared of that show. Ding, ding, ding, Halloween episode. Halloween.

But yeah, the accents were kind of nutty. Wow. This guy is fascinating. I love him. Yeah, he's great.

So I did this over Zoom talking to him, and he did have charts that I was kind of following along. Because what's so difficult, at least how I find when you're listening to him, it's hard to follow because he's talking about these really specific noises. But when he's talking through it with me, he had charts up showing me what he was doing with vowels and sounds. It's so complicated. It is so complicated.

I have heard that the tongue placement is a huge part of accents, but I'm never aware of where my tongue is hitting. No, neither. And in the next part of the doc, we talk a little bit about tongue formation, and I found it really hard. And a lot of the conversation was just me on Zoom looking at my tongue. Did you learn some?

Oh, slowly. But I'm also an incredibly slow learner with this stuff. I found it so frustrating. Moving and changing the way you naturally do things is so, so hard. Yeah.

I feel like my tongue is invisible. I don't feel it ever. I don't feel it right now, even being aware of it. You never think about it, right? No.

Does your tongue sometimes get itchy? No. Do you get itchy tongue? No. I sometimes get the itchiest tongue in the world, and I have to scratch it on my teeth.

Yeah, really itchy. So itchy. Maybe like once a month. Ew. It'll get really itchy, and I need to scrape it on my teeth, and it's the best feeling in the world.

It's like getting a head scratch, but for your tongue. That's an oral allergy. It usually causes that. Oh, shit. That makes sense.

Something's going on. Inhaling pollen or eating raw fruits, vegetables, or certain tree nuts. Wow. I love eating nuts, and I love eating fruit. But maybe you're allergic to them.

Wow. Could be. That's crazy. So you're more aware of your tongue then if you're having to scratch it. Otherwise, I don't think about it at all.

Huh. All right. Yeah, but you never think about it. But it's so important, isn't it? You lose the tongue.

None of us are podcasting again, are we? Be the end? for us. It's the most important tool we have. Yeah, and we take it for granted.

We do. We never look after it. Do you brush your tongue? Yes. You brush it.

I never brush my tongue. David! No, I don't. It's not a thing we were taught to do. Don't make that a New Zealand thing.

I better not, actually. No, it's a barrier thing. How often are you brushing? I brush my tongue every time I brush my teeth, which is two times a day. Seriously?

Yes, and I also brush the palate. I learned that recently. That's good. My dentist said you're supposed to. So you're brushing the roof of the mouth.

That's where a lot of bacteria lives, in your palate. Get out of town. I've never brushed the roof of my mouth in 40 years. Try it. I will.

I'll go home and give it a brush. It actually feels really weird. It does not feel good. But, yeah, the dentist said that a lot of bacteria lives in the palate. Do you use the same brush as the one you're using for the teeth, or a different brush?

Same one? I use the same, yeah. So same soft bristle, hard bristle, medium bristle? What are you using? Electric?

No, mine's not electric. I use a manual brush. You've got a manual toothbrush? I do. That's unusual in Los Angeles.

It is. I've tried the electric, I've had many. They're good. For some reason, I think it's because I'm always skeptical of how clean they are. Where the head meets the base.

It gets gunky. Yes, and I hate that. Yeah, I completely agree. It gets gunky. And it's close to your mouth.

I just don't like that. Right, so you're manually, you're doing manual. The whole thing. The teeth, and the whole mouth, and the tongue. Yeah, whole thing.

My grandmother used to have a tongue scraper. It was a tool for cleaning. Like a metal thing? Yeah. Right, and you'd scrape off a layer of gunge.

Yeah, I guess. so. Tongue gunge. I haven't thought about it, really. But maybe with this itchiness, I should be.

Yeah. My tongue's probably riddled with disease. Horrible. Why are we talking about that? Tongues.

Tongues, and the placement. The placement of tongues. I did have a lot of dialect stuff in acting school, in theatre. And I was always so bad at it. And so I'm a little triggered.

The tongue, and the placement. I remember trying to learn that. And I was so bad at it. It's hard. Yeah.

Actually, I'll get into things with the doc, because he tried to teach me. And I found it near impossible. Rethinking those things that you know how to do innately. It's so difficult. I talked a bit about this earlier.

But there are these moments in Flightless Bird when I can't understand Monica and Rob. With a dialect coach on the line. I thought it would be a good opportunity to see what's going on with my co-host's strange voices. First up, I played Joel a clip of Monica talking. Oh, my God.

Dex, you're going to get me arrested. Maybe we can talk about Monica's voice. What you take from that. What that voice is doing. Yeah.

Well, I don't hear much difference in what I would call a fairly typical American accent. I mean, she sounds like a younger woman. There's a little bit of what the outgrowth of what used to be called a valley accent in the 80s. And she demonstrated this speech. Oh, gag me with a spoon.

All this kind of. Oh, totally. It's sort of evolved into surfer speak. And then it's mellowed out over the years. So Monica's got a bit of the valley girl in her.

It's even a throwback to call it a valley girl. It's just sort of a California accent, I would say. Or Southern California accent. But I know she's from Georgia. I know she grew up there.

I don't hear anything except in one episode might have been the second health care episode. She said insurance. And then in the same sentence, I think she said insurance. So in the first instance, she stressed the first syllable, which is a very Southern thing to do. I have a longtime client in North Carolina.

He's Russian. But he says, when he apes a Southern accent, he says, oh, I'm going to get my insurance. And there are several words like that that are just pronounced or stressed differently. Stress being a change of pitch on a particular syllable. So she might occasionally be flip flopping between where she grew up and where she's been living for some time.

Right. But there may be an awareness of that because she changed it. as she said it again. I played him a clip of Rob talking. He pretty much thought it was a bog standard.

Chicago meets L.A. mix. Next up, I played him a clip from Dax. And I'm talking to the clerk. OK, so here's the paperwork.

Excuse me. And I walk six feet to the bathroom. That's so close to the clerk. Go inside. And he picked up on that last bit.

So close, and got stuck on that. I'm really reaching here, but I found this one thing in that little clip you sent me. I'm going to play you this phrase where he says, I think it's so close. Yeah, so close. So he does so close, so close.

Most Americans would use two vowels for each of those spelled O's or those O sounds. We would go so close. That's called a diphthong, or two vowels, two vowels that are sounded as one syllable. So he uses I'm going to listen again. So close.

He uses a bit of a diphthong for so, but a short one. And then I think he's only using the vowel O for close. So that may be from his mom. It may be from Germans and folks from Ontario, Canada, immigrating into Detroit and into Michigan generally. There's lots of Germans, apparently, who came in there.

You know, any accent is a reflection of the sounds around a person. And we all want to fit into what's around us. I've found that this is much easier to do when we're younger. We get into much firmer habits of listening as we get older. And I've oddly found that the age 24 is kind of a cutoff for people.

That it gets much more difficult to change one's accent on one's own if you wait till age 24.. That was going to be a big question, because I feel I'm not naturally changing my voice. I'm not coming back to New Zealand with an American accent. I think I'm set like this for life. Do you think that's fair?

Do you think if I stay here long enough, I'm going to start sounding like an American without even realizing it? Do New Zealanders comment on your accent when you've come back to New Zealand since you've been here? We get very judgmental. So, we have a famous singer, Lorde. And when she started talking in a bit of an American accent, New Zealand was like, oh, you've sold out.

So, New Zealanders are really quick to hear. when a New Zealander starts getting an American accent. New Zealanders get very angry. And so far, people haven't gotten angry at me. So, I assume it's not happening.

Okay, right. So, that would be one clue. I think you're right. When you get to a certain age, I don't think you absorb an accent. I don't think I'm going to start talking like an American unless I really try.

Well, in those instances in which you find you're being misunderstood, you've made a shift. You've gone to some version of an American accent. I have. I can snap into it, but I've really got to concentrate. It's not like it's suddenly just happening to me.

No, but you could learn to go back and forth. Once you start breaking it down, this accent stuff is so complicated. And as we talked about what made Monica sound like Monica and Rob sound like Rob and Dax sound like Dax, I also realized they all struggle to understand me. And something Joel had said earlier came back to me. I'll also often work with people who are in the corporate world or have some highly motivated reason to change their accent.

Whether they're not being well understood at work. Not being well understood at work? I realized Joel was talking about me. I'm not understood at work, here on this podcast. It's like you're working into a porn store and the people behind the counter look like they work in porn.

Whoa, I want to be so clear. Okay, I think it feels just like a pawn shop. And the way you say porn, I thought you were saying ponch. I was saying porn. Pornography.

Maybe Joel could help me. I mean, I've tried an American accent before and it didn't go. well. Hi, it's David Farrier calling. Could I please book my driver's test for Friday at 1049 p.m.?

Do you realize this is what Americans sound like? This is how they talk all the time. Hi, Monica, my name's David Farrier. Monica wasn't impressed at the time. And neither is Joel.

So it sounds to me like you're over curling your tongue. So you're relating to the fact that in your own accent, you'd say work, maybe. With no R sound, that Americans would use an R sound there. But you're what might be called hyper-correcting, so you're overdoing it. So if I can have you hold your hand out with your palm up, you can model the tongue, the shape of the tongue, with no R.

Your tongue is flat, like you might say fa. Can you say fa? Fa. And realize that your tongue tip is down at your lower teeth. Yeah.

But if you curl your fingertips up about 45 degrees, not quite so much, so don't curl your hand so much, but halfway between straight up and flat. So about 45 degrees, sort of pointing a bit toward the joint of the wall, where the wall meets the ceiling. You get a moderate sort of R, like far. Far. Yeah, that's maybe a little over curled.

Yeah, far. Far. But if you really invest some energy in your tongue, tense it right up, and curl it a lot. with your fingertips pointing to the ceiling, you get far. Right.

You might hear that in certain Irish accents, or accents of the American South that were settled by the Irish and the Scots, where you get like work, you know, a lot of R. So we're going for this moderate one, so it seems to me that your tongue is curling a little more, rolling, as you said. Yeah, I'm rolling too much. I would use the term rolling to have the tip of the tongue touch the gum ridge, the bony ridge above the teeth. So, like a R, that would be a tap, I would call that.

Or a R, R, R, that would be a roll, like in Spanish, a burrito or something like that. So just a difference of nomenclature there. The more we talked, the more odd little things he noticed about my accent. You were bitten by this mammal, which you call a... A squirrel.

Yes, could you say it again? for me? I say squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. No, because people accuse me of saying squirrel. I say I got bitten by a squirrel.

That squirrel has rabies. I hate squirrels. Yes, now you've evolved. Over the three times you just said it, you evolved to how. I've heard you say it on the podcast.

I was self-conscious. when I said it, I thought it was a trap. No, sorry, it's not a trap. There are no wrong answers. What you did when you said, I say, you're a bit indignant, and you said, I say, squa, with a W sound, which we always use with a Q, U, like square or squire.

But what I've heard you say, which is what you got to at the end of those three repetitions, you said, squirrel, that's what I heard, with no W, glide. So, a squirrel. So I thought, oh, that's very interesting. Oh, that reminds me, I'll mention this sound, but when you say the word K-N-O-W-N... No-un.

Right, so you add essentially an extra syllable. What am I, no, no, no, I'm saying no-an. Or no-un. No-un. Yeah, what am I meant to say?

You can say whatever you like, but most Americans will say no-un. So it's a diphthong, O-U, but it's one syllable. We talked on and on, beginning to figure out how to make me more American. I-N-E-R.

He opened up some worksheets on Zoom and got me to slowly start changing the way I said certain sounds. Hi, it's David Farrier calling. Calling, don't round your lips. Calling. I've gone back to that.

Calling. Could I please book my driver's test? Honestly, I can't, reading this, it's going to take a lot of work. I feel self-conscious already. You thought it was strange, but it sounded quite American when you cut yourself off.

So that's a thing, too, is you have to get your own brain accustomed to hearing this new accent. I've also done another New Zealand thing where I automatically assume I'm a failure instantly when I start a new task. That's also like a New Zealand problem. All right, I understand. It's more of a psychological, I need to talk to my therapist about this, not you.

But people do this a lot anyway. They try it and they think, oh, that can't be right, it sounds so wrong. But it was right. So you have to make this reckoning between what you think it sounds like and what it actually sounded like on the outside, which was pretty close. I won't play out any more of this, as it will make you feel truly insane.

But I was making small, good steps in sounding American. Tiny steps. I'm going to keep working away at it, and slowly I might be more understood here in America. Or maybe I don't need to change. Maybe this Kiwi accent is part of what makes me me.

And maybe, just maybe, that's OK. If you could choose one person to listen to from our show, Monica, Rob, Dax and myself, who do you think has the most pleasant accent? You know, if you were destined to a hell of listening to one of us on one podcast for the rest of your life, what voice are you picking? I won't be offended if it's not me. All right, well, I mean, I just love the New Zealand accent.

So probably it would be you, because those guys, they've got a fairly typical American sound. I might hear little anomalies here and there. Listening to you, I've heard things that, again, I didn't know existed in a New Zealand accent. Look, it's good to know I've taught him something, too. I can't wait to go and find some more squirrels.

That was my journey. Wow. OK, first of all, big fishing for a compliment there at the end. What in the world did you think he was going to say? You, Dax, me, the person he's currently talking to.

He's not going to say. For some reason, he picked me. I wonder why. I wonder why. I was staring at him.

Also, I love him. I love him. I love this episode. This was so fun. I was mouthing stuff to myself.

You know, I was trying tongue stuff.

Insurance.

Just checking how you say it. That's so funny that he brought that one up specifically because I did a progressive commercial. Oh, no way. And I said insurance. That's how I say it.

Insurance. And it's insurance. So, they stopped me. And so, you have to say it like this, obviously, because it's a commercial. And it took me so many takes.

You were just stuck. Yeah, it's so hard. Because of even what's happening right now, where I don't even know what's right and wrong. No, and it's what he said. You're so used to hearing yourself.

in a certain way. The idea of changing it just seems crazy. And it's so hard to do because you don't even know how you're saying it. So, how can you change it if you don't even understand what you're doing, right? Yeah.

You got it eventually and got the word out. We got one taken, I guess. And you're just looking incredibly stressed and worried. Wait, can you look up how to say it? Insurance.

That's so funny. He just had such a detailed ear. Yes. And he just zoned in on things you'd never think about otherwise. And, yeah, he'd been listening to it because of the writer's strike.

I guess he wasn't teaching any clients because no one was acting. So, he was listening to our show. So, he actually, and I randomly reached out to him. And he had thought about it a lot already, which is kind of wild. I love that.

He really put in the time. Did you find it? Yeah.

Insurance. Insurance. So, I say insurance. Yeah, insurance. Yeah, right.

I say insurance, and it's insurance. Okay, try saying this, okay? Because I just said, it's so flattering. So, you say, it's so flattering. It's so flattering.

It's so flattering. Try to say it as an American. Oh, I just say, it's so flattering. That was better than your normal, weird thing that you normally do when you're a psychopath. I lean too hard in.

Yeah, you're like a seven instead of a ten. Yeah, that was better. Yeah, I was curling the tongue too much in the olden days. Do it again. That was so flattering.

That was good. Yeah, I'm going down to a five. That was really good. Yeah, great. See, I'm, yeah.

Wow. It's all about the tongue placement in the mouth. Yes. Thedialetcoach.com is where he's got his material. I'm going.

If you want to go and play with that a little bit. And he's taught Best of the Best, Joel Goldies. He's a good guy. I really enjoyed meeting him through this. Yeah, he's solid.

I found this to be one of the best episodes. Great. I'm glad you liked it. We've all learned about ourselves a little bit. I just took away a lot.

Yeah, great. And we can all go and work on our tongues. Definitely more American. Monica, that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me. Thank you.

I mean it. I've gotten multiple percentage points. You really have. Yes. I couldn't speak a Kiwi accent.

He could probably teach you how. If you spent time with Joel, he'd probably get you talking like I talk, which nobody wants or needs. But you could do it. Wow. If we do end up doing what you might do, Easter egg, a reverse flightless bird, maybe I'll learn.

Imagine if you could just never snap out of it. Call up Joel. Oh, man. All right. Well, this was lovely.

Thank you. Happy Accent Day.